I move the adjournment to 3 o'clock on Wednesday, 26th October.
ADJOURNMENT DEBATE. - ADMINISTRATION OF HOME ASSISTANCE.
I wish to draw the attention of the House to the question of the administration of poor law relief in the City of Dublin. I will not delay the House very long, but what I have to complain of is not in any way due to the Commissioners, and I do not want to blame them in any way for what is going on. I find that in all the cases that a Deputy sends to the Commissioners of the Dublin Union for attention, the latter inform them that there are no powers to relieve healthy unemployed persons outside the workhouse. I have here in front of me a relief sheet which the Home Assistance Officers are asked to fill up. It is Form 40, and in column 18 the officer is asked to state the number of cases of adult males, married or single, relieved on account of want of work. I want to know what is the meaning of that column if it is not within the discretionary powers of the Home Assistance Officer or the Commissioners to grant assistance to persons whose destitution is due to unemployment. In Section 13 of the Act I understood that those who administer the home assistance have discretionary powers to grant assistance where they think it necessary and when they find children or the wives of unemployed persons practically hungry. Whilst I am satisfied that every effort has been made by the Commissioners of the Dublin Union to grant relief, I do complain about the treatment of certain cases whose claims I have brought to the notice of the Commissioners. I will just take one case, and I will give only the initials of the person. I have here an official report from a supervising officer of the Union. It states:—
"Referring to the attached notice from Mr. A. Byrne, T.D., submitting the names and addresses of a number of cases of unemployed and requesting to be furnished with the results of the investigations, I beg to report the following has been the result of my inquiry."
And this is a typical case, typical of the tenements in the City of Dublin, where the poor are helping the poor, where they are practically living by helping one another. If one man chanced to get a day's work in the week, the one day's pay would be distributed over the whole tenement by way of a little grain of tea and a little plain, dry bread. You will find that happening in many parts of Dublin at the present moment.
The initials of the case I have in mind are W.R. That man is aged 40 years, and he has a wife and seven in a family. The eldest boy is 16 years, and the youngest child is a baby of nine months. He is an ex-service man, and he served two years in the National Army. Except for occasional short terms of work, he has been unemployed since he was discharged from the National Army some two years ago. The family are at present living on the occasional earnings of Mrs. Reilly—the name is out now—as a charwoman. The eldest boy earns some money selling papers. They get some help from the house of Mrs. Reilly's brother, and from the Convent of the Sisters of Charity, where, in addition, the children get schooling. The report on the case mentions: "I would recommend this case for work, for outdoor relief is not within the statutory regulations." During the week in which the report was made, the mother earned 2/- washing a shop; her son, the newsboy, earned 8d. a night—4/—and the brother assisted her by giving 2/6. That amounted to 8/6 for the support of the father, mother and 7 children. Of that amount 4/- is claimed by the landlord for the rent of the house, and I am sorry to say that landlords, both private owners and public authorities in the City of Dublin, do not hesitate to demand their rent from those people, whether they are employed or not, and if they do not pay, out they get.
If that is not a case for assistance from the Poor Law Authorities, I do not know the meaning of this paragraph in the official relief list which asks the officer to make a report on the number of adult males, married or single, relieved on account of want of work. I hold there is power within the regulations for the authorities to grant relief to that man until such time as he is provided with work. The Minister will probably point to the latter portion of the report, which states: "I would recommend his case for work, for outdoor relief is not within the statutory regulations." The supervisor states there is not power to relieve healthy unemployed persons outside the work-house. The report mentions: "As the majority of the cases forwarded by you have been previously investigated and recommended to the Commissioners for relief, it would, they believe, expedite the claims of the people if you sent the names to the City Commissioners direct." That is throwing the onus on them to send the cases to the Commissioners. The supervisor has power to recommend for work, but he has failed. He writes on the 3rd September that these cases have been previously reported upon. After a month or two months they will tell you: "We have reported on these cases, recommending them for relief work," but in the meantime the people concerned have got nothing; the people still find themselves in the same position; they are still hungry and are still under notice to quit, and the landlord is still waiting for his money.
I ask the Minister and his advisers to go into these forms. They are at his disposal. I ask him to see if he can give relief to these people. I am satisfied that the efforts of the Government to deal with unemployment represent a reasonable attempt, but no matter what they spend on relief schemes within the next three months in Dublin city, it will only touch the fringe of the unemployed problem, and you will have only one or two out of every half-dozen unemployed men getting employment. What are the other four going to do? I say the day is fast approaching when something will have to be done. This is a relief I do not recommend. It is a relief hateful to anybody to have to take. It is hateful to suggest Poor Law relief for unemployed workmen and their children, but I know of very many sad cases in which even this relief would be very welcome, no matter how small the sum is. Something will have to be done quickly.
I had one case recently of a man with a family of five children. I asked him how long ago it was since he was working and he mentioned it was two years. I asked him "When did you last get relief?" and he said that the St. Vincent de Paul Society gave him 3/6 last Wednesday week. "Where did you get your breakfast this morning?" I asked him, and he said that his wife got a free loaf from Mrs. Kennedy, the baker in Parnell Street, and a can of tea from Sister Paul. I do not know Sister Paul or to what Convent she is attached, but that free loaf and the can of tea fed a family for one day. That is what is going on in the poorer quarters of Dublin, and in some of the very respectable quarters, too. Unemployed benefits are exhausted and men cannot get a chance of any relief work. They have to look after their wives and children and they dread the time when the landlords will call on them. I make a special appeal to the Minister to see if something cannot be done to deal with these cases. I am told there is a queue every morning in the week at Mr. Kennedy's waiting for the free loaf, and the Convents are visited in the same way. I am told that in many instances in Dublin children are sent hungry to the schools, and in some of the schools there are not even the free meals that are so often spoken about. I put probably 30 or 40 cases in the hands of the authorities within the past week or two and I sincerely hope that something will be done to alleviate the distress existing in those cases. I am going to give every one of them the names and addresses of the members for Dublin City and County and I am going to ask them whether they are going to help me in my efforts to assist these people. There is valuable work to be done, and I think that the time has arrived when everyone should help in an endeavour to relieve the situation.
I would like to support the appeal that something should be done for the unemployed and deserving poor of Dublin, and while Deputy Byrne has not exaggerated the cases which he has brought under our notice, I would suggest to him that there is only one way in which this problem can be solved and that is by the creation of more employment. Some efforts must be made in that direction, as what is true of Dublin is largely true of Cork. There are a number of people unemployed and on the verge of starvation. I do not want to put the plea that this abnormal condition of things is to be met by huge schemes of relief, as I would much prefer, and I am sure Deputy Byrne would also prefer, to have a national scheme of employment by which men could be put to work. I believe that a further extension of relief is demoralising. I am sure that the persons for whom Deputy Byrne speaks would much prefer employment to any other form of relief. I hold with him that there is an urgent necessity to do something to relieve distress caused by unemployment. It would be a generous gesture on the part of the Government if they could open up, even in a temporary way, relief works which would provide employment for those people whose cases have been presented by Deputy Byrne.
I would like to join in the plea put forward by Deputy Byrne. In North City my experience has been identical with his. We send recommendations for relief to the Commissioners and we receive acknowledgments to the effect that they will endeavour to give relief when that relief is available. The problem is exceedingly serious, and I am sure that the Minister will do his best to deal with it as sympathetically as possible.
The problem is, no doubt, a very serious one. As regards the Dublin Commissioners, they have certain statutory duties and, while outside Dublin county the restrictions regarding home assistance and outdoor relief to able-bodied persons and their dependants have been removed, they were not removed, because of special circumstances, in Dublin city and county. So far as the Commissioners are concerned they can only carry out their statutory duties, and they are debarred from giving assistance to able-bodied persons and their dependants. There are powers under the Act of 1898—Section 13—by which for a period of two months relief can be given in special circumstances. The particular state of affairs with regard to Dublin was one of the matters which were gone into by the Poor Law Commission which sat for two years and only recently reported. While that Commission was still sitting, in 1926, the then Minister for Local Government issued an order under which relief of this particular kind was given in Dublin for a period of four weeks. £11,000 was spent during that period and, approximately, 8,000 people benefited by the work that was done then. The whole experience, however, of the people engaged in the distribution and supervision of the relief was such that they were able to say after the month had expired that they had to recommend that it be stopped. They reported that this particular form of relief in Dublin, whether in money or in kind, administered through poor law resources, was not to be recommended, that it was to a great extent demoralising, and that it failed in its object.
Thus the people upon whom I can best rely for advice advised in strong terms against the administration of relief in the way in which Deputy A. Byrne would like. It appears to be a very simple and reasonable demand, but these people know the city through and through, and their experience led them to advise very strongly against it. The Commissioners are not even attempting to look in that particular direction at present. It can hardly be said that there are abnormal conditions in Dublin generally, but there are abnormal conditions in the worst parts of the city. The Commissioners have not confined themselves to a purely statutory and official outlook in the matter. They are looking around to see what works of development could be undertaken. At present the conditions of housing contribute materially to the situation. The Commissioners would be prepared to go on with the £500,000 housing scheme in Dublin, and would be particularly keen that some of that housing scheme would be so arranged as to result in the wiping out of some portion of the tenement area as a complement to it. The fact that they are entertaining this scheme, and that they have their eyes on the tenements, to some extent, shows the spirit by which they are animated, and the way in which they regard their responsibilities to the poor in general. They have formed quite a number of the men about whom Deputy Byrne speaks, able-bodied men, into a kind of special group of road workers or casual workers, and have put them on particular kinds of work. They take them on for a short time, pay them off, and then take on others. They try to provide employment in rotation in that way.
Is that £500,000 available at present?
It is not. The Commissioners are trying to borrow it and to get it on such terms as will make their work as economic as possible. They are going outside their statutory duties in the matter of relief with a view to seeing in what way they can organise work in the city, how they can relieve distress amongst the able-bodied unemployed and take some of those who have been a long time unemployed and get them into an employable condition mentally and physically. In the discharge of their purely statutory duties I believe that the Commissioners have been very broadminded in their work of relief, and that where people are really genuinely on the borders of sickness, or where they can be shown to be even run down, they accept them as being of the sick poor and deal with them as thoroughly as they can. The Deputy has referred a big number of cases from time to time to the Commissioners. I understand from the Deputy that in some cases his communications to the Commissioners have not been actually replied to, but I have the assurance of the Commissioners that they are not able to reply to the large number of letters of that particular kind they get, but they assure me that every case put before them is visited by a relieving officer or some other official, so that the cases actually do come under the visible survey of the officers responsible for relief in the city. In that way, while perhaps they cannot be given the particular type of relief they would require, they are not lost sight of, or the particular problem lost sight of.
There have been names on the lists for six months.
I am aware there are persons on the lists looking for employment for even two years. I can say to the Deputy, though it may not be any comfort to him, there is no case that will be referred to the Commissioners that will not be visited, and in so far as they can do anything for that case they will do it. On the general question, the Poor Law report has been only just received, and in so far as the recommendations of the Commission are going to bring the solution of this problem nearer to us, they will get the most thorough and sympathetic consideration. The problem is really, as Deputy Anthony says, one of unemployment. We can only deal with that problem in a hard-headed and thoroughly systematic way. I hope the Deputy will not carry out the threat he has made as to sending the people who come to him looking for assistance to the other Deputies for the county and city of Dublin, for he must know that the other Deputies are up against the same problems, and have more than they can do to give any comfort or assistance to those who come to them. I think it would be a hardship to the distressed to be sent from one Deputy to another. The Commissioners of Dublin Union are, from one point of view, the best people to whom they could be sent if they come within statutory conditions of relief, and the Dublin Commissioners are the best people to whom they could be sent in other circumstances, for they have a certain amount of employment at their disposal.
Were the restrictions in the Poor Law Act, under which the O'Sullivans were allowed to starve to death, removed?
There were never any restrictions in the Poor Law Act under which people could be allowed to starve to death. As the President pointed out recently, you will always have a weakness here and there in administration. If there was some general understanding amongst all classes as to what help the State as a whole can bring to the relief of distress, such a case as the O'Sullivan case in Cork would not have happened.
If the Deputy knew anything about that case he would not have asked the question.
Have there not been cases where, with a view to relief of distress amongst unemployed, requests to put into operation Section 13 of the Local Government Act were refused?
The O'Sullivans were refused relief because they had more than a quarter of an acre of land.
Is it not the case that they were not refused relief by the County Home, but by the Commissioner appointed by the Department of Local Government?
The O'Sullivan case has a long background behind it, and it is not at all as simple as Deputies think.
The Dáil adjourned at 6.50, till 3 o'clock on Wednesday, 26th October.