I beg to ask the Dáil to grant a Second Reading to what is known as the Town Tenants Bill. It is with a considerable amount of diffidence that I, as a private member, venture to bring a Private Member's Bill before this House. I have seen in other places private members endeavouring to effect public reforms by means of Private Members Bills, and we here have had the experience already of seeing a similar procedure in regard to a Bill that was introduced last Session. But we have seen also the fate that was bestowed upon it. But, at the same time, that does not prevent me, as a private member, from doing what I consider to be my duty as a public representative. The Bill, which I venture to ask the Dáil to give a Second Reading to, is a measure which undoubtedly affects the daily life and welfare of a great bulk of the people in this country. At the very outset, I would desire, if it is in my power, to disabuse the minds and, perhaps, dissipate the fears of both Deputies and the general public as to the objects and also the contents of this Bill. It is a Bill, as it is entitled, to improve the position of certain tenants of certain houses, shops and other buildings in Saorstát Eireann. If I may be permitted to say so, I think that is a very candid explanation of the objects of the Bill. But it is not, as in certain quarters it would seem to be presumed, a compulsory-purchase Bill. Neither is it a State-purchase Bill. In fact, there is only one compulsory feature about this Bill: that is, that so long as the tenant pays his rent and behaves himself in a proper manner as a citizen of Saorstát Eireann he shall not be disturbed from his tenancy. The Bill does not go so far as to tear up existing contracts or interfere with existing leases. It is expressly provided that not until the expiration of all existing leases will this Bill affect the leaseholders.
Furthermore, it in no way provides that anyone who in the past or in the future—certainly not in the past—has refused to perform his part of a contract of tenancy by paying his rent, whether from political or from merely private motives, shall in any way be indemnified by this Bill. In other words, there is no Compounded Arrears Section in this measure. What I do desire to plead for the Bill is that it will give the tenants that sense of security which is sadly lacking at the moment, and which must make for peace and prosperity in the country. The present conditions in the towns and urban areas in Ireland are known to all of us, and call for legislative action. As in the past, with country landlords, so to-day with town ones. The cruel and the rapacious, the grabbing and the profiteering landlord of the town is, I am glad to say, in a minority. But the fact remains that he is there. I would like to add that the class I have mentioned do not by any means belong to what used to be styled the landlord class in Ireland. It is protection against that sort of man that I am seeking for the Irish town-dweller in introducing this Bill. Everyone knows the powers of the town landlord of to-day—notwithstanding the various Acts that are in force—and how those powers can be and have been abused. There are innumerable cases occurring daily of strictly legal, though thoroughly inequitable blackmail on the part of certain landlords. I only discovered quite recently that the ground landlords in many districts were of the class that I have described. The question I want answered, if an answer is put forward to my plea, is this: Why should this state of affairs be allowed to continue in the Saorstát? We know what is called the short lease system. We ought to know it at any rate in Dublin and its suburbs. We know that it is a by-word in profiteering. This Bill, therefore, is not proposed in any way to deal with landlords who up to this have not abused their powers. It will not inflict hardships on reasonable landlords, but it will afford protection against unreasonable ones. Therefore, I would describe this Bill in one sentence, as an anti-house profiteering Bill.
I do not like to have to weary the Dáil, but as I am afraid, judging from the comments that have appeared upon this Bill both in the Press and elsewhere, that very few people have read it, I think it might be well to explain, as briefly as possible, without going into very great detail, what is proposed in the measure. Before doing that, I think it will be necessary for me to recall to the Deputies minds the position of affairs in regard to dwellers in Irish towns previous to the present date and at the present moment. An Act was passed in the year 1860, known as Deasy's Act, which provided that in future all tenancies in Ireland were to be founded upon contract. That Act applied to all tenancies. It was found in a very short time that in regard to agricultural holdings landlords evaded that Act and that grave grievances grew up on the part of tenants. The result was that another Act was passed in the year 1870 to deal with these conditions. That Act applied only to agricultural holdings and was the first of a series of what are commonly called the Irish Land Acts. It was only after vigorous opposition and fierce agitation that that Act was passed. What did that Act provide? It provided that tenants should be given compensation for improvements and for disturbance, but, mark you, only in regard to agricultural holdings.
I happened the other day to be looking up a well known treatise on this matter, and I discovered there a couple of phrases so trite and so expressive that I would like to repeat them here as indicating the conditions which obtained before the Act of 1870, and which the Act of 1870 was brought in and passed to remedy. The first condition was: "That enterprise was repressed and its fruits fell a windfall into others' laps." Therefore, compensation was given for improvements. The second expression was: "That a condition existed of capricious eviction or malevolent refusal to renew leases." That was provided for by compensation for disturbance. That was all in regard to the land. Nothing was done in regard to the dwellers in the town until the year 1906, when a Town Tenants Act was passed in the British Parliament, fiercely opposed at the time and after a considerable agitation in this country. That Town Tenants Act of 1906 purported to do precisely for the town tenants what the Act of 1870 purported to do for the tenants on the land. The position in regard to the agricultural tenants has not remained where it was in 1870. On the contrary, several Land Acts and Purchase Acts have since been passed culminating in the Act of 1923, which the Dáil passed last year. But nothing has been done since the corresponding Act of 1906 in regard to the tenants in the towns.
What I propose to do in this Bill is to apply the Land Act of 1881 to the Town Tenants Act of 1906, and thus place the town tenants in, at least, as fair a position as the agricultural tenants were placed in by the Act of 1881. It really comes to this, that the same principles have been embodied in the legislation in regard to the two classes of tenants, but the agricultural tenants have precedence in time. They were larger in numbers and their case perhaps was more pressing. I bring out these facts to show that there is nothing novel in the principle of applying the Land Acts to towns. The Act of 1906, corresponding to the Land Act of 1870, had many, and has many shortcomings, and they soon became apparent and were availed of by certain landlords. There were exclusions from that Act. In the first place, the Act itself only applied to tenancies for a year. Immediately various landlords who had previously let from year to year, when the time came for renewal of tenancies, insisted that they must be for less than that period. In that way they evaded the Act. The various compensations that were given both for improvements and for disturbance, especially for disturbance, applied only to certain classes of business houses. There was one thing that was not provided for in the Act of 1906 and that was fixity of tenure. The Act of 1906 is not the last of the Acts applying to Irish towns. In the year 1915, during the period of the great war, a Bill was introduced, and afterwards became an Act, in the Imperial Parliament which is since known as the Rent Restrictions Act. That Act was originally passed as a British war measure. It was proposed as such, and was meant merely to provide for certain profiteering that it was feared would take place in large industrial centres in England, by the inrush of munition workers there during the war. That Act provided to a certain extent for fixity of tenure. At the time of its passage that Act was also applied to Ireland, where no such conditions existed. Though regarded originally as a war measure that Act has subsequently been renewed with certain slight modifications and is still in existence in England. It has been renewed here, and only last year the Dáil, during a time of peace, at any rate, not during a time of international war, proposed and passed, and there is now on our Statute Book the Rent Restrictions Act. As it applies to-day in Ireland that Act provides for a sort of fixity of tenure for certain classes of tenants.
It would probably be useless and unprofitable for me to go into the details of what the classes are to which that Act applies. At any rate, it is distinctly limited in scope. It is limited to the dwellinghouses it applies to, and also to the business houses. Its application is limited both in regard to increasing the rent which is permitted in certain cases, and also in regard to improvements and repairs. The great outstanding fact remains that that Act which we passed here last year does set up the principle of fixity of tenure. Of course, it is perfectly true that when the tenant gets notice to quit he is no longer the absolute tenant. He is what is known as a statutory tenant. It is that very position of statutory tenancy I want to avoid and do away with, and which I propose to abolish by this Bill. The principles embodied in this Bill are plain and simple. They are the principles of fixity of tenure, free sale, and fair rent. I think I may claim that I have shown that these principles, even including fair rent, to a certain extent have been recognised in the existing legislation and law, not only that which was inherited and taken from the Imperial Parliament, but which we ourselves here have brought about by fresh enactments. In effect, therefore, what this Bill proposes is, to apply to all holdings situate in the urban districts, towns or villages of Ireland the principles I have mentioned. It is really an extension of the application of existing principles rather than an application of new ones. I come now to the actual proposals in the Bill. The Bill is divided into three parts. The first part deals with fixity of tenure, free sale, and fair rent. In Section 1 the tenant is given fixity of tenure, but that fixity of tenure is not absolute. It is conditional on the tenant paying his rent at the appointed time, and upon observing the various other rules and regulations which every decent Irish citizen should observe.
That is not a very far-fetched proposal in regard to the existing law. It means, it is true, that under no circumstances, except those which appear later in the Bill, such as repairs done by the landlord, can there be an increase of rent. Above all things, it means that the landlord cannot at his own caprice turn out a tenant, provided the tenant has paid his rent and behaved himself properly. The second section deals with the right of a tenant to sell his interest, and the landlord to purchase it.
Certain people will say tenants have not, and should not be allowed to have any interest. I think the time has gone for arguing against such people. The proposal I put forward in this section is in no way compulsory. The landlord need never sell his interest if he does not choose to do so, nor need the tenant sell his interest. The same thing applies to purchase on both sides, but I would like to make an explanation in regard to sub-section 4. As this sub-section reads, I must candidly admit the conclusion one would draw from it would be bordering on the grotesque. It would seem from the text of the Bill that it was proposed where the landlord desired, and was empowered to purchase the tenant's interest, and where the tenant desired to sell, and they failed to come to an agreement as regards price, that then either party could go to the court, which is to be set up by this Bill, and that the price to be fixed by that court would be not less than 10, nor more than 15 years' purchase of the rent which is lawfully paid by the tenant. I must confess that such a proposal was never my intention, and if the Bill passes the Second Reading Stage, I certainly intend to propose an amendment to that sub-section, which shall determine that the price to be paid by the landlord to the tenant for the tenant's interest shall not be figures such as appeared in the sub-section, but shall be entirely at the discretion of the court and, as the remaining portion of the section says: "The court, in fixing the price shall have regard to the state of the holding, the interest of both landlord and tenant in the premises, and all the circumstances of the case." If the court is to have regard to all the circumstances, no court in any country would dream of giving from 10 to 15 years' purchase of the rent of a tenant who had been in occupation for only, say, three months, or perhaps even three years. Therefore, I want to make it perfectly clear that in the Bill that I hope may eventually emanate from the Dáil, as far as I am concerned, the clause as it stands will not appear.
Section 3 provides that where the tenant desires to purchase, and the landlord desires to sell, then the price to be fixed, if they fail to come to an agreement, is to be within the figures I have mentioned. That is a horse of a different colour, because undoubtedly the landlord has, and had, a previous and probably a greater interest in the holding than the tenant ever would have or ever had. I am in no way tied down to these figures. I had to place some figures for discussion, and if it is decided in Committee that these figures are not right, well, then it is for the Dáil to mend them, but as regards the principle therein expressed, I think that it is a fair and just one. As far as the figures are concerned, I arrived at the figure 15 because I took it from the Land Act which was passed last year. One point I would like to stress is that purchase in any shape or form is entirely optional, and in no sense compulsory. Section 4 deals with the fixing of fair rents, and these fair rents can be fixed according to the Bill in regard to all holdings with certain exceptions, and exceptions of very great importance. The first exception is, as I have already mentioned, the existing lease-holders. The second is where the landlord has let for merely "temporary convenience"—which is a legal term pretty well defined; the third, where there was someone in possession, who is in the landlord's employment; the 4th in the matter of a caretaker's agreement; and the fifth applies to such Acts as the Labourers' Acts, etc. So much, roughly speaking, for the actual proposals of the Bill.
Part 2 deals with the machinery whereby the Bill is to be put into operation. I have seen it stated that the cost of this Commission would be very large. Well, of course, I am not in the position to set up this Commission. If the Government do not decide to adopt this Bill, or a similar one, I cannot, as a private member, be the means of raising any money out of public funds to provide for this Commission. A criticism has been passed as to the necessity for this Commission, and it has been asked why could not the existing judges have done it. That occurred to me at the time, but I must confess, from my little knowledge, that I think the future judges under our judiciary will have their time pretty fully occupied, and I do not think myself that it would be feasible to expect them to be able to do this work. At any rate, that whole question is entirely a matter of machinery detail for the Committee. If it was decided to throw this burden of work on to the existing judges. I certainly would have no objection, and, therefore, this whole Part 2 is merely a tentative suggestion on my part as to how the machinery of this Bill could be brought about. I think it is well that we should keep clearly before our minds that this Bill proposes to apply to all holdings, and, therefore, does away with the extraordinary position we are in to-day of finding it very difficult to determine whether this Act or that Act does apply to this holding or that holding.
It will simplify the administration of the law, and it will, in every respect, be more practicable and more suitable for the ordinary man in the street. Now, there have been many apprehensions in regard to the Bill, and some of them have been natural ones; some of them have been legitimate ones; but a good many of them, I fear, have been otherwise. To one like myself proposing such a measure as this, I must confess I was not surprised at either the legitimate or illegitimate apprehensions. In the first place, in regard to what I term the unfair or illegitimate ones, I have seen it stated that this is a Bolshevist proposal. I have been dubbed a Bolshevist.
