Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Thursday, 11 Apr 1940

Vol. 79 No. 11

Committee on Finance. - Vote 41—Local Government and Public Health.

Minister for Local Government and Public Health (Mr. Ruttledge)

I move:—

Go ndeontar suim ná raghaidh thar £808,322 chun slánuithe na suime is gá chun íoctha an Mhuirir a thiocfaidh chun bheith iníoctha i rith na bliana dar críoch an 31adh lá de Mhárta, 1941, chun Tuarastail agus Costaisí Oifig an Aire Riaghaltais Aiteamhail agus Sláinte Poiblidhe, maraon le Deontaisí agus Costaisí eile a bhaineann le Tógáil Tithe Deontaisí d'Udaráis Aitiúla, Ildeontaisí Ilghnéitheacha agus Ildeontaisí i gCabhair, agus muirearacha áirithe mar gheall ar Ospidéil.

That a sum not exceeding £808,322 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1941, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Local Government and Public Health, including Grants and other Expenses in connection with Housing, Grants to Local Authorities, Sundry Miscellaneous Grants and Grants-in-Aid, and certain charges connected with Hospitals.

The Estimate makes provision for a net expenditure of £1,211,322. Grants for housing amount to £702,380 and for health services to £364,905 making a total sum of £1,067,285 for the social services included in this Vote. There is a net decrease of £138,522 in the Vote as compared with the previous year. This reduction mainly arises from the reduced provision for housing grants. A Housing Bill dealing with grants to private persons has been introduced under which a further supplementary estimate for housing may become necessary.

It may be said that the year 1939 was unfavourable to progress in constructional works. Since 1937 building costs were increasing and in many cases tenders were submitted on the basis of an increase in the amount corresponding to increases in the costs of materials or of labour during the currency of the contract. The position, therefore, did not tend to facilitate the carrying out of constructional works. Further, in the case of Dublin the conditions in the financial market were unfavourable to the raising of housing loans. With the outbreak of the European War in September the position became more difficult. It seemed doubtful at first if essential supplies would be obtainable while the difficulties in securing firm tenders for works increased.

Due mainly to the efforts made in previous years to organise our industries and to the measures taken to safeguard a continuance of such supplies from abroad as were essential to the carrying on of public works, the position became much easier towards the end of 1939.

The number of houses built during the financial year ended on the 31st ultimo was approximately 5,300 as compared with 6,932 in the previous financial year, 4,890 in the year ended 31st March, 1938, and 6,094 in the year ended 31st March, 1937. Of the 5,300 houses built last year, 3,060 were erected in urban areas and 2,240 in rural districts. The reduction in the number of houses erected was mainly in Dublin City. The actual number of houses erected by the Corporation of Dublin in the past year was 1,341 as against 2,336 in the previous financial year. The year 1938 was a record year for house production in the City of Dublin.

If the number of houses built in Dublin in 1939 happens to be smaller, there need to be no pessimism. Even under adverse conditions we must endeavour to maintain the enterprise and effort which characterised the year 1938. The problem is too great to be allowed to assume a passive form. The committee appointed to investigate all aspects of the housing problem is likely to make a report within the next few months and with the information which will then be available the local authority should be in a position to formulate a definite financial and building policy which in turn should facilitate the building and allied industries in organising production in a manner that will secure the most economical execution of future housing schemes.

Since September last 750 new houses in Dublin have been placed under contract at prices that compare favourably with costs prevailing in 1937. Recent tenders received for the erection of flats at Railway Street also show a reduction on both 1937 and 1938 costs. There are at present 1,145 houses in progress.

In the County Boroughs of Cork, Limerick and Waterford progress in housing is satisfactory. The Cork Corporation recently completed 206 houses. There are 242 houses in course of erection, of which about one-half will be used for the rehousing of persons residing in unfit houses. Proposals for the erection of 240 houses are being considered. In Limerick contracts have recently been entered into for 366 houses. In Waterford the number of houses under construction is 96.

Up to the 1st of March, 1940, the amount of money advanced to local authorities for the provision of houses subsidisable under the Act of 1932 was £17,704,808. Of this amount £9,941,996 was advanced from the Local Loans Fund and the balance £7,762,812 was raised by the issue of local stock or borrowed from insurance companies and banks.

The preliminary statistics of the housing conditions of the people have recently been published in the Irish Trade Journal and Statistical Bulletin. They indicate a great improvement in housing throughout the country. A remarkable change is observable in the percentage of persons in families living more than two persons per room in 1936 as compared with 1926. In Kerry County the percentage of persons in families having more than two persons per room fell from 36.5 to 25.8 and in Mayo from 41.7 to 29.7. In the review of general housing conditions in the Trade Journal it is pointed out that since 1926 there has been a marked decrease in the number of persons in private dwellings with less than four rooms and a corresponding increase in the number living in dwellings with four or more rooms. There is nothing so detrimental to health as overcrowding and the change in conditions over the period 1926 to 1936 is very encouraging.

Another remarkable feature of the statistics is the increase in the numbers of private families of one, two, three, four and five persons and the decrease in the numbers of families of six persons and over for the whole of the country. The highest increase in the number of families took place in families of two persons throughout the country, but in Dublin City and County for which separate statistics are given there was an increase in the number of families of all sizes. The number of families increased by 24,694 in the whole of the country, and of that number 18,702 were families in Dublin City and County.

Housing conditions as they existed during the period 1926-1936, have been improved still further since the census was taken. During the ten years ended 31st March, 1936, there were 50,756 new houses built and 5,952 houses reconstructed. In the four subsequent years there were 38,329 new houses built and 18,613 houses reconstructed, reflecting an improvement in conditions of the same extent as took place between the years 1926 and 1936.

There was a decline in the average size of the family. The decline was greater on the average for the whole of the country than for Dublin City and County. For the whole of the country the percentage decline was 3.8 as compared with 0.7 for Dublin City and County. The marriage rate in 1939 was 5.18 per 1,000 of estimated population as compared with 4.48 for the year 1930.

The evidence shows that generally in the rural areas there has been a very great improvement made in housing conditions, and in present circumstances local bodies would be well advised to examine very closely any future schemes for additional cottages, and only adopt proposals that are of an urgent nature and intended to remedy housing conditions that cannot otherwise be improved.

It would not be inopportune on this occasion to remind urban authorities of their powers to secure the reconditioning of houses which are structurally sound but lacking proper sanitary accommodation. Sometimes I am inclined to think the provision of new houses has been allowed to overshadow the need that exists for keeping houses that are still habitable in proper repair. Unless proper attention is given to this matter the rapid deterioration of existing houses quickly brings them into the category of houses unfit for human habitation, thereby casting upon the local authority an extended liability for their replacement by new dwellings. Legislative provision was enacted in 1937 dealing with this aspect of the housing problem and grants up to a maximum of £40 are obtainable from the Government. Practically no action has been taken so far by any local authority to avail of the powers conferred by the Act of 1937. It would repay urban authorities to examine the position in their area and see how far houses that are defective by absence of proper ventilation, sanitary accommodation or sufficient light can be reconditioned and made fit for habitation within reasonable expenditure. By doing so it should be possible to postpone for several years the heavy expenditure that the provision of new houses entails.

Many complaints reach the Department from time to time regarding the letting of new houses by local authorities. These complaints usually allege that houses, particularly in the case of labourers cottages, are not given to those most in need of housing accommodation. The Regulations under the Act are intended to secure that preference in lettings will be given to families living in condemned houses and families where some of the members are suffering from tuberculosis. Local authorities must see that these Regulations are strictly complied with.

The purchase schemes in force under the Labourers Act, 1936, relate to 51,680 cottages and applications for purchase have been received by the boards of health and public assistance from the tenants of over 6,000 cottages. One board have vested their cottages in the qualified applicants and many others are almost in a position to vest.

The delay in vesting was due to the difficulties encountered by the boards owing mainly to the loss of local records in tracing their title or the title of their predecessors, the former Rural District Councils, to the site on which the cottages were erected. Following representations made by the Department, the Registrar of Titles made the minimum demands as to the evidence required by him to enable registration of title of plots which were previously unregistered. To facilitate the Registrar in identifying these plots the boards were instructed to prepare duplicate sets of maps of their cottages and plots marked with the identifying particulars of each cottage included in the scheme in force.

Purchase schemes have been prepared and submitted by 20 boards in relation to 4,297 cottages which were provided and occupied subsequent to the preparation of the scheme in force. In addition to these schemes, amending schemes have been prepared and submitted in relation to 612 cottages which had not been purchased on the terms of the schemes in force. Of these schemes 597 related to cottages to which, following representations received from the boards, as to alterations in rentals, etc., the consent of the Minister was obtained to the making of new schemes. In the remaining 15 cases the boards concerned were directed to prepare and submit new schemes owing to alterations in the rents following changes in the tenancies of the cottages.

I will deal with the position in regard to houses erected by private persons when the new Housing Bill is under consideration. Closely connected with the improvement in housing throughout the country is the state of the public health. The public health services are developing gradually each year and considerable progress has been made in their reorganisation throughout the country. Sanitary services such as water supplies, sewerage systems and disposal of house refuse are being improved and extended and a higher standard of public sanitation is being attained.

Definite progress has been made in combating infectious disease. It is permissible to judge the general improvement in sanitation which has been achieved by the effect on the incidence of infectious diseases so far as these are preventable. The vital statistics for the year 1939 are at present only provisional and may be subject to slight modifications, but they are on the whole of an encouraging nature. In this connection it is to be noted that the incidence of influenza is a disturbing factor. The numbers of deaths from that cause for the last four years have varied considerably. In 1936, the number of deaths was 683; in 1937, 2,772; in 1938, 702; and in 1939, 1,045; while the average for the ten years 1929 to 1938 was 1,300. In 1938 there were 343 more deaths attributed to that cause than in 1939. If deaths from influenza are excluded the total number of deaths from the principal infectious diseases in the year 1939 would be 454 as compared with 589 in 1938, and 668 in 1937. It may be claimed that the lowest mortality on record from these diseases was registered in 1939.

As regards the individual infectious diseases the year 1938 was the first year in which there had been no death from or outbreak of typhus fever in this country since the Infectious Disease (Notification) Act, 1889, came into operation. As far as the districts in which typhus had been endemic for a considerable number of years are concerned the same record continued in 1939, but in one of the eastern urban areas an outbreak of the disease occurred involving five cases in two families. The virulence of the outbreak is indicated by the fact that of five patients attacked three succumbed. The source of the outbreak is doubtful, but it is a tribute to the energy and efficiency of the local medical service that the disease was so promptly diagnosed and dealt with that it did not extend beyond the two families immediately attacked.

As regards typhoid fever there was a slight increase in the mortality in 1939, when 54 deaths were registered as due to that cause as compared with 46 in 1938. The latter figure was the lowest on record and the increased mortality in 1939 was due to a serious outbreak of the disease in Kerry County, which resulted in nine deaths. The number of cases notified in 1939 showed a considerable increase mainly due to the same outbreak being 398 as compared with 268 in 1938. There were, however, 37 urban districts and 93 rural districts in which no cases were reported.

The number of deaths from diphtheria showed a definite decline being only 241 in 1939 as compared with 314 in 1938, and is the lowest number recorded since 1928. The number of cases notified was 2,097 as compared with 2,983 in 1938, and is the lowest number recorded since 1930, from which year notification of infectious diseases has been more efficiently organised. There were 13 urban districts and 46 rural districts in which no cases were reported. Approved schemes of immunisation against diphtheria have doubtless had an effect in bringing about this satisfactory reduction in the incidence of the disease. The number of children immunised in 1938 was 31,393, being a substantial increase on the number immunised in 1937, viz., 18,545. Approved schemes of immunisation operated to some extent during 1938 in the four county boroughs, in 15 county health districts and in 13 urban districts. The total number of children who received immunising injections from 1st January, 1931, to 31st December, 1938, totalled 254,153. The remuneration to be paid to medical officers of health for work under immunisation schemes has not yet been agreed, but negotiations on the subject are proceeding with the Irish Medical Union.

The decline in the incidence of scarlet fever still continues. The number of notifications for 1939 (2,779) shows a decrease of 1,213 cases as compared with the figure for the previous year. There were 42 deaths from the disease in 1939 as compared with 81 in 1938, a decrease of 39 deaths.

The incidence of scarlet fever, although gradually declining, is still high, the number of cases of the disease notified during the period under review being 797 above the number notified in 1930, but due account must be paid to the more efficient organisation of notifications since that date. The number of cases which occurred in rural areas in 1939 was 1,256, whilst the urban incidence was 1,523. Notwithstanding the comparatively high prevalence of the disease, its fatality remains low. Its mortality has not varied very widely in recent years but reached in 1939 the lowest figure since 1930 in which year the number of deaths registered was one less than in 1939. The fatality rate of the different communicable diseases varies from time to time, and the position that any one disease occupies as a destroyer of life at a particular time or place may vary considerably from that which it previously occupied, or may occupy at some future period.

Measles being compulsorily notifiable in only a few urban areas, it is not possible to give an accurate return of its incidence, but it is pleasing to be in a position to record a very distinct drop in the mortality figures for 1939 from those for 1938. The number of deaths from measles during 1939 was 83, compared with 102 in 1938. The average number of deaths from this disease during the five years preceding 1939 was 165, and the figure for the period now under review is almost half of that average. This reduction in mortality is most encouraging, when it is realised, that next to whooping cough, measles is one of the most fatal of all infectious diseases of infancy. The mortality from measles has always been regarded as being influenced by overcrowding, and to the admittedly improved housing conditions, now met with in our towns and rural districts, must to a certain extent be ascribed the reduction in the death rate from this disease.

Deaths from cancer, which had been steadily increasing in recent years, showed a welcome reduction in 1939, when 3,579 deaths were registered from the disease as compared with 3,703 in 1938. The average for the five years 1934 to 1938 was 3,582. The investigations of the Provisional Cancer Council which was set up to investigate and report on certain aspects of the causes and incidence of this disease have been very much curtailed owing to the international situation.

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the question of removing as far as possible the preventable dangers attendant on childbearing, and of safeguarding the health of mothers during their period of pregnancy and confinement. The object aimed at is to reduce the incidence of puerperal diseases and to obviate accidents of pregnancy and childbirth which levy so great a toll on maternal life or result in long periods of illness and incapacitation. It is encouraging to note that a gradual improvement in this respect has already been achieved, and that with occasional variations the maternal death rates have shown a downward tendency during the past 10 years. In 1939 the mortality attributed to puerperal sepsis reached a new low record in 31 deaths as compared with 46 in 1938, and an average of 78 for the decennial period 1929 to 1938.

There was a further reduction in infantile mortality in 1939. The rate was 65 per 1,000 births registered as compared with 67 in 1938; 73 in 1937; and 74 in 1936. The lowest record hitherto attained was in 1934, when a rate of 63 per 1,000 births was regisfered. In the County Boroughs of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford the latest figures available for infant mortality are those for 1938, and these show an improvement on the figures recorded for 1937, in the two largest county boroughs as follows:—

	1937	1938
Dublin C.B.	102	96
Cork C.B.	103	71
Limerick C.B.	68	70
Waterford C.B.	97	99

With the development of maternity and child welfare schemes and improved housing conditions it is hoped to reduce infant mortality progressively in these areas.

The school medical inspection schemes, which are in operation in every county and county borough, continue to progress. They have been found to be invaluable in the matter of the detection of defects in children at an early stage which if left untreated would, in many cases, undoubtedly develop into permanent incapacity. The expenditure per child is inconsiderable and ensures an improvement in health, happiness and efficiency for the individual and cumulatively for the community in general.

The ailments found in children after examination by the school medical officer, and for which the necessary treatment is provided, are usually ordinary ailments of the teeth, eyes, ear, nose and throat and defective tonsils and adenoids. In some cases exceptional ailments or defects are found, treatment for which, if not within the scope of the school medical service schemes, is provided in the case of necessitous persons in the county and general hospitals. In other cases the parents are referred to their private practitioners.

School children are instructed by the school medical officer and nurse to look after their bodily health, and "follow-up" inspections are made by the nurse and in special cases by the school medical officer. Literature on various subjects pertaining to the children's health is distributed in many districts and tonic medicines are issued on the instructions of the school medical officer, especially in cases of malnutrition.

Generally speaking, there are no distinguishing features in the matter of defects in the health of the children as between one district and another except that there is a prevalence of goitre amongst children in one district which is stated to be due to the water supply. The matter is the subject of investigation by the county medical officer of health.

As evidence of the gradual extension of the schemes it is of interest to note that whilst in 1929 there were 147,300 children on the rolls of elementary schools in districts in which approved schemes were in operation, the corresponding number for 1938 was 469,925. There were 130,500 children examined in 1938. The numbers of defects ascertained were as follows: Dental, 56,759; diseased tonsils, etc., nose and throat, 25,118; eye defects, 17,812. The numbers treated were: Dental, 42,473; diseased tonsils, etc., nose and throat, 7,591; eye defects, 16,179.

Under the school medical service it has been possible to a certain extent to investigate the prevalence of malnutrition amongst school children. The following extracts from reports of two county medical officers of health indicate the result of their investigations:—

1. "..... there were 534 malnourished children out of a total of 4,481 examined, i.e., 11.9 per cent. This is a slight increase on last year's figure (10.9 per cent.) Of the above 534 cases of malnutrition, there were only 67 of marked degree requiring treatment. The remaining 467 were classed as moderately undernourished or for observation. Thus the actual percentage figure for severe malnutrition is 1.5 per cent., practically the same as last year's figure (1.6 per cent.). As already remarked, the majority of the children classified as undernourished are kept under observation for some months and cod liver oil and malt are generally prescribed. The value of clean milk as an addition to the child's dietary is always stressed in the talks to parents at the school examination."

2. "Malnutrition does not necessarily imply insufficient feeding; more common factors in its production are unsuitable food and general unhygienic methods of living, such as overcrowding. There can be no doubt that the institution of school meals, as already discussed, is of enormous benefit in connection with the prevention of this condition.

"Printed advice is conveyed to the parents of all children noted at school medical inspection as suffering from malnutrition. Needless to remark, it is only too often one sees that tea and white bread form a large part of the dietary of the rural community. At the moment, however, effort is being made to teach the people to appreciate food values, and the value of good cooking. The Government is very much alive to the situation, and throughout the country numerous vocational schools are provided. In there schools domestic economy and cookery are taught, and girls are trained in the art of cooking. As time marches on, and as the children of to-day are the men and women of to-morrow, it is obvious that the training our girls receive under vocational education schemes will have a very far-reaching effect in the future. The homes will be better, the dietary will be better, the cookery will be better and, in general, we may look forward to a brighter era as far as nutrition is concerned."

School meals are provided in four county boroughs, 41 urban districts and seven towns under town commissioners. The meals are provided in 214 national schools. For the year ended 31st March, 1939, the average weekly number of children in receipt of meals was about 29,000. The total number of meals provided was approximately 5,000,000. School meals are also provided in rural areas of the Gaeltacht by the board of health for West Cork and by the boards of health for the counties of Galway, Donegal, Kerry and Mayo. The total number of meals provided in the last financial year was approximately 2,600,000. In the majority of districts the school meal consists of milk or cocoa with buns or bread and butter or jam. Local authorities have been advised from time to time to make milk of a special designation, so far as it is available at a reasonable price, the basis of the school meal. The importance of milk as an article of food cannot be too strongly stressed. For young children especially it is an essential part of diet.

The arrangements for the supply of free milk, for which a sum of £90,000 is provided in this Estimate, were continued during the year in urban and rural areas with the exception of two urban districts in which the councils again declined to co-operate on the grounds that the amount allocated for their districts was inadequate. The conditions governing issues from the grant were the same as in previous years. The allowances of milk are limited to children under five years whose parents and guardians are in receipt of assistance or are unable to provide from their own resources an adequate supply of milk for children of this age. The value of this scheme continues to be highly reported upon by county medical officers of health.

There was a scarcity of suppliers of milk in some of the rural areas in Donegal, Galway, Kerry and Mayo. In these areas the issue of supplies of dried milk powder was resorted to as a temporary measure so as to obviate as far as possible any hardship on the children eligible for a supply of free milk.

The administration of the Milk and Dairies Act, 1935, was, on the whole, satisfactory during the year and active steps were taken by sanitary authorities in general to ensure that the requirements of the Act and the regulations thereunder were complied with. Legal proceedings were successfully instituted in many cases. During the year 164 orders refusing registration under the Act were made by sanitary authorities. Formal appeals against these orders were received in six cases. In every case the appeal was disallowed after investigation of the circumstances. Applications for consent to the cancellation of registration under the Act were received in 12 cases. Consent to the making of two cancellation orders was given, and in one case consent was refused. In the remaining cases the dairymen took steps to comply with the necessary requirements, and the sanitary authorities decided not to proceed with the making of cancellation orders.

Schemes for the treatment of tuberculosis are in operation in each county and county borough. There has been a slight increase from 2,498 deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis in the year 1938 to 2,574 in 1939, but a decrease from 718 deaths from non-pulmonary tuberculosis in 1938 to 633 in 1939. The figures for 1939 represent a rate of 0.9 per 1,000 population in respect of pulmonary tuberculosis and 0.2 in respect of non-pulmonary tuberculosis, making a total of 1.1 per 1,000 of the population for all forms of tuberculosis, which is a small increase on the rate of 1.09. The progressive development of institutional treatment of all types of tuberculosis on modern lines is proceeding throughout the country.

During the year there was further progress made with waterworks and sewerage schemes in urban districts and in towns in county health districts. Grants from the Employment Schemes Vote were allocated towards the cost of 35 schemes undertaken by local authorities, involving a total expenditure estimated at £250,000.

In the year 1938 the deficits in the accounts of voluntary hospitals amounted to approximately £115,000, showing a substantial increase over the preceding year. The total amount of deficits has increased by £65,000 since the year 1933, and the matter has now become one of serious import by reason of the growing demands on the Hospitals Trust Fund.

In the past three years the Hospitals Commission has drawn special attention to the trend of rising expenditure, and on more than one occasion it was necessary to exhort the voluntary hospitals to exercise a greater measure of internal supervision with a view to reducing working costs. Further suggestions to this end were made in September, 1939, which if closely followed should help to arrest the growing excess of expenditure over income. As pointed out on previous occasions, an increase in endowment reduces the amount available for the provision of new hospitals.

The Hospital Library Council set up in 1937 have rendered very valuable service in the administration of the library service for hospitals. I would like to pay a special tribute to the chairman, Father Browne, S.J., and his colleagues on the council and their secretary. Seventeen additional hospitals were registered during the year, bringing the total number to be served with books to 74. The service is very much appreciated by patients. In 1939 over 6,000 books were issued.

During the year grants amounting to £5,000 were made to the Medical Research Council out of the Hospitals Trust Fund. This sum was part of a grant of £25,000 which is payable over a period of five years in accordance with arrangements made with the Council in 1938. The grants so far paid to the council amount to £17,500. A number of Grants-in-Aid and awards have been made to research workers who are carrying out investigations into various medical problems. A special investigation into the causes of goitre is being made.

Full particulars of the collection of revenue by county councils at the 31st March are not yet available. The general financial position of these bodies at the end of the year was satisfactory with the exception of four councils which failed to collect sufficient revenue to discharge before the close of the year temporary overdrafts obtained for the purpose of meeting current liabilities.

Mr. Brennan

I move that the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration. I should like to be able to compliment the Minister on the success of his Department. I would particularly like to be able to compliment him on the success of his efforts and the efforts of medical science generally in stemming disease and counteracting its influence. I am afraid I cannot do that. I am afraid that the figures given by the Minister are not very encouraging in that respect. I was sorry and disappointed that the Minister glossed over so easily two very important matters. One of them is what is regarded by the medical profession in the country at least as an alarming increase in pulmonary tuberculosis— the indications are all that way. I was also sorry that the Minister did not give the House some indication of the activities of the Department in regard to hospital services. Perhaps it is not any wonder that these two particular matters were glossed over, because I think there is definitely a big responsibility on the Department for failure in this particular respect.

Before I deal with that matter, let me say that the country is entitled to expect improvement from the Department with its increasing expenditure year after year. It is entitled to expect a genuine effort to check disease and to enable the community to have a better chance of resisting disease. Since 1932, the salaries, wages and allowances of the Department have increased from £75,000 to £135,000, according to the figures given in the Estimates for these years. What are we getting in return for that increase? Surely an increase in salaries, wages and allowances this year of £60,000 odd over 1932 ought to give us some results. But, from the statement of the Minister, it does not appear that there are any results to be spoken of except as regards housing and the net result of the housing activities ought to be great security for public health. Again, I am afraid that when we come to deal with public health we have not that improvement we ought to have had.

We have had inaugurated in the country a system which I very strongly supported, the system of county medical officers of health. The cost of that system has weighed pretty heavily on the country and on local authorities. In that respect, as far as local authorities and the Department are concerned, I admit they have done what they thought was the right thing to do, but what has been done by the Department to see that there was segregation of T.B. patients in the hospitals of the country? I have here by me records of Departmental inactivity in my own county. As a matter of fact, although I should have known the details very well, they amazed me when I went through them for the purposes of this debate. I do not think there has been any failure in any Department in this country to equal the failure of the Local Government Department, as disclosed in the last few years, to deal with hospitalisation. We have had overcrowding in Roscommon county home hospital since it was established in 1921. We have had tubercular patients mingling with other patients. We have had Local Government inspectors advising that they should be segregated, but we never had sufficient room to segregate them. The Department has had the plans and all relevant documents from the Roscommon County Board of Health, in an endeavour to remedy that state of affairs, for the last seven or eight years, but we cannot get them sanctioned. They have been sanctioned partially but not finally and so the work was never put in hands. It is amazing, appalling one might say, that the Department has been absolutely unable to deal with the situation that has arisen in connection with hospitalisation and hospital overcrowding. I believe that even a worse case can be made out against the Department as regards people living in the city.

For instance, we had a report from the chief medical officer of the Department in 1932 that there was then an urgent need for a new district hospital in Boyle. The board of health was sent that report by the Department, and they were asked by the Department to take action and to provide the necessary accommodation for Boyle. The board of health did what they were told but, from that day to this, no hospital has been built in Boyle and there is no chance of its being built, notwithstanding the fact that in 1932 it was urgently needed in the eyes of the Department. What happened? This is apparently what happened. When the Department came into possession, or at least into the direction of the funds of the Hospitals Trust for the purposes of hospitalisation, they were like a child, a minor, who had been left a legacy and did not have a guardian. There was no direction, no planning by the Department. The Department ought to have engaged the services of experts, if necessary, at any salary demanded. Even a fabulous salary would have saved this country thousands of pounds and possibly saved hundreds of lives in addition. There was, as I said, no direction. Boards of health were asked to put up proposals for the building of hospitals. They were not told what moneys they were to get. There was no basis for the allocation of grants, such as population or anything else.

One would have thought that when the Department had assumed responsibility for the disposal of these funds, they would have planned some kind of a general scheme of hospitalisation for this country, but no. They asked the boards of health to get plans prepared. There was no mention of the cost beyond the statement that two-thirds would be borne by the Hospitals Trust. What happened? Boards of health asked competent architects to provide plans, mentioning the number of beds, as we did in Roscommon for the Boyle hospital. I think it was 24 or 25 beds were required for the district hospital there. Now, naturally, when local authorities directed an architect of standing to provide them with plans for hospitals, particularly hospitals which were going to be provided out of public funds, funds that at that time had the appearance of being unlimited, the architect went about preparing plans, and they did what ordinary human beings always will do —they produced the most costly plans they could possibly think of. The higher the cost, the higher their commission. In any case, they wanted to display their particular creative genius as far as these buildings were concerned. What happened? Elaborate plans of the most costly nature were prepared and were sent up to the Department and were sanctioned by the Department. After being sanctioned by the Department, the contracts were duly advertised by the board of health. Then it was found that contractors shied at the work except at a huge figure. The result was that when the tenders came in, the Department turned them down and said that the scheme was too costly. That happened in Boyle after six years of haggling and left us in Roscommon with a legacy of £1,800 to be paid to an architect for fees for plans that were never operated. Up to that time we had correspondence after correspondence, letter after letter, and inspector after inspector from the Department about the whole business. There is a file 12 inches high dealing with the matter. It has now fizzled out and now, in 1940, the hospital that was urgently needed in Boyle in 1932, is still urgently needed in Boyle, only much more so.

I do not know whether there is any person within the Department fit to deal with this matter. My own opinion is that there is not because, mind you, the eminent architects in this country are big men and it will take a very big and a very qualified man to criticise another. The Department ought to have engaged the best possible man they could get for purposes like this and taken him into the Department. They ought to have given him a general plan or a general outline of what they wanted before any plans were adopted or drawn at all. It is an appalling thing to read in the papers a few days ago that the board of health in a county beside my own, County Galway, have paid £4,000 to an architect for a plan they are not going to operate and that they owe £3,000 yet to the same architect. Whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the ten men who constitute the board of health in that county? Why do we have to pay £125,000 to the Department of Local Government for salaries and emoluments? Could we not get an expert somewhere who would save the country from this class of extravagance?

We have had a similar case in regard to the county home hospital in Roscommon, only that the conditions there are worse. It is more overcrowded and there are more tubercular patients. We had a report made in 1935 that at one side of the hospital there were 54 men and 54 women patients, a percentage of the latter being maternity cases, and the lavatory accommodation in these two wings was one lavatory to each 54 patients. That was reported to the Department in 1935. We proposed reconstructing the place straight away. The Department wrote down and said that we had better get the services of an architect. We did; we got the services of an architect. The architect gave detailed plans and maps, and an estimate amounting to some £5,000 odd. We asked, then, if there might be made available for this particular purpose a grant from the Hospitals Sweep.

It is interesting to note the dates in this respect. We appointed the architect in September, 1935, on the advice of the Department; we got his estimate in April, 1936; the following October, the Department informed us, in reply to some resolution we sent to them asking them to expedite the matter, that they had put our request to the Hospitals Trust for the purpose of examination—that was in October, 1936; in April, 1937, the Hospitals Trust wrote to the Board of Health in Roscommon informing them that the allocation of a grant was a matter entirely for the Minister and not for them. In the same month the representatives of the Hospitals Commission visited the county home.

Then we had a further development: it was reported that one of the boilers in the home was faulty and the insurers would not insure the boiler. We would have to get a new one. A report was made by the county engineer setting out the cost of a new boiler; he suggested that a steam engine which was being used then in the laundry—and is still used in the laundry—be transferred to another part of the building and the laundry be put on electric power. That was submitted to the Department and we got letters advising us to hold up all this, even though our boiler could not be insured until the reconstruction business was put through. From that day to this nothing has been done. We have still the uninsurable boiler, we have still the laundry—in fact, we should be put in jail for having anybody working in that laundry—and we have still over 100 patients with only two lavatories. The Department has not yet sanctioned the reconstruction, yet we are paying them £135,000 a year in salaries and emoluments. It does seem an extraordinary thing.

What has happened with regard to the new hospital? We were asked to provide plans for a new one in Roscommon. We did. Again, there was no limit fixed. We had no indication from anybody as to what amount of money would be spent, or be allowed to be spent, or be approved of, for a hospital with 94 or 96, or something under 100 beds. If the Department wanted to deal with this matter in a businesslike way, they would have set themselves down to the task before they allowed any county to build a hospital out of Hospitals Trust funds and would have said: "You will get so much if you want a hospital of 100 beds; you will get so much money and for whatever else you want you must put the additional money to it." Then we would be in a position to say to the architect: "We want a hospital with 96 beds at such and such a price," and we would get it at that price. We have a hospital in the course of construction—nearing completion—in Roscommon with something under 100 beds which, when it is complete, will have cost in the neighbourhood of £120,000. It will be a fine building and it will be a great memorial to the architect who designed it, but it is going to be a terrible blister on the people of Roscommon to maintain. I have no objection whatever to architects drawing up very fine plans or putting up very fine constructions as memorials to their own creative art for the future to look upon, but once it interferes with the treatment of the sick and poor in this country—and it has interfered with that—I object. Had this matter been tackled properly by the Department, there could be a hospital operating in every county at present, and at one-third of the cost.

A hospital was suggested for Boyle with 24 beds in it. The lowest tender we had was £36,000 on the plans submitted. We have erected in Roscommon a vocational education schools at a cost under £5,000, which would make a tip-top district hospital for 24 or 30 beds, but there was no foresight, no vision, no preparedness, in the Department. There was nobody, in my opinion, who had either the energy or the courage to criticise the elaborate and costly plans sent in for the erection of hospitals in this country. There has been inefficiency and inability in dealing with the whole situation, and now we have all become alarmed because the Hospitals Trust Fund itself may not be able to continue.

My attention has been called recently to other matters in connection with the new hospital in Roscommon which have shaken my confidence completely in the Department, as a Department able to deal with this matter and as having any idea as to what they ought to have done in these particular matters. We have had correspondence with the Department recently in connection with the equipment for Roscommon Hospital, including an x-ray plant and sterilisation plant. The Department was insisting upon the acceptance by the board of health of one particular x-ray plant. It might have been the best. I do not know. I know nothing about it. But our local surgeon felt that if he had in this hospital another plant he would at least have the advantage that he would have service for it because there was more of its sort in the country and there was service attached to it. He feared that he would not have service for the plant that was recommended by the Department. Nevertheless the Department insisted. What happened? When our county surgeon went to the Department to ask for the slides for the x-ray plant they were recommending they had not a slide and did not know if it was ever able to take a slide and they had to wipe it out. They could not recommend it further. Is not that a shocking state of affairs?

What the Department ought to have done originally was to have some kind of general scheme of hospitalisation for this country. I am not advocating a stereotyped building. There is no necessity for that, but if they had a tip-top man in the Department he could have easily outlined what was required in the country, what was required in every county and in every district. There are two things that could be sterotyped: x-ray and sterilisation. They could be the same in every hospital. We found in Roscommon that one particular x-ray plant which was being recommended to be installed in our institution would not fit and could not be put into it. If the Department went about their business properly they could have stereotyped every x-ray department in this country and could have bought in bulk at a saving of millions of pounds all their requirements. In that way they would have, what we will not have now, service for every one of them. It would not matter what went wrong there would be service. Now we do not know where we are. We are at sixes and sevens.

We had another instance the other day of the inability of the Department to deal with this matter. An engineer from the Department came down to make a report upon a new furnace in the county hospital. He found in connection with his examination, and reported, that there was some contraption in this furnace—he described it— which he did not like and which he feared would possibly induce explosion. Right on top of that, a few days afterwards, a report came from the engineering inspector of the insurance company for this particular furnace or boiler, whatever it was, informing us that this particular device was the most welcome thing he had seen for some time because it would obviate any danger of explosion. Is not that an extraordinary state of affairs? The Department are merely children in this thing. The experts are walking around the Minister and the country is at the mercy of everybody.

In connection with the building of our hospital it was declared by an inspector or somebody else—I do not know who—some years ago that in the general lay-out the doctor's residence ought not to be placed where it was being placed, that there would be a shadow on it from an eastern wall or a western wall, or something like that, and the board of health was advised to buy a site in addition to the seven acres upon which the hospital containing 96 beds was being built. We had seven acres of land for it and it was not enough. We were advised to buy another site for the doctor's residence. We advertised for a site and got offers of a site. We wanted one acre and we were offered an acre, but when we went to buy the majority of the board decided on buying six acres at a cost of £100 per acre. I may say in passing that I was not in favour of that. I was not in favour of the purchase of any site; we had quite enough land in the seven acres to put up a hospital and doctor's residence for the size of the hospital we required. However, I do not want to enter upon the reasons why, in my opinion, six acres were bought, but they were bought at a cost of £100 per acre. The board, by a majority decision, asked the Department to sanction that and the Department refused. The Department said the price was too high, that it ought not exceed £400. The matter was left hanging for a considerable number of months. Resolutions came up, letters went down and, eventually, the Department agreed to allow £600 to be paid for the six acres. What happened then? By that time the contractor who was building the hospital had shifted all his building materials, the war period had started and we have now to pay an extra cost to get the doctor's residence erected. That is the efficiency we have in the Department.

We are going to impose managers upon counties. I advocated that. They are not going to get anywhere, however, in putting this country where it ought to be unless that Department is reformed from top to bottom. Mind you, I am not finding any fault with the officials who are there in the Department at the moment; they are courteous and they meet everybody, I think, as they ought to be met, because it is the one Department that has more human contacts than any other Department of State; but what are we paying a Minister £1,700 a year for if he is not able to foresee what is necessary and to get in whomever should be got in to undertake a responsibility of this sort?

We have had a Housing Board set up—and have been paying them for the last six years or so—and that Housing Board, to my mind, have never done anything whatever. I believe that they were brought in there just to keep their mouths shut and for nothing else, and this country has been paying them, while here we could have been paying an expert, let us say, £5,000 a year, who would be the best man that could be got and render the best service, if we got the right man for it. Now, the country is at sixes and sevens with regard to hospitalisation. We still have overcrowding in connection with sufferers from tuberculosis and so on, and we still have the same cry that there is no room. We had a letter the other day asking to know why the board of health was allowing the site in Boyle, County Roscommon, to remain derelict. That was condemned by the Department, in 1932, as being unfit for habitation, and yet we still have to continue. With all their lack of knowledge of this big and important matter we also have other things being foisted on the country, which are a damn nuisance. For instance, the Minister spoke about sewerage a while ago. Yes, there is a lot of sewerage to be done yet. I have heard discussions on the Department's latest up-to-date view on sewerage, and they are certainly not complimentary to the Department. From what I understand—and we have had cases in Roscommon recently—we are now taking our sewerage lessons from across the water, and the kind of purification works that are necessary to get rid of poisonous trade waste in Britain and industrial areas of that sort are being introduced in an area where they are not necessary at all at a huge cost to the people of this country.

I am now going to mention a matter at which, I am sure, Members of the House, and particularly Fianna Fail Members, will be surprised, and that is in relation to the Department's knowledge of turf. One would have thought that the Government would have seen to it that, in the matter of turf at least, since it was their pet child, they would have informed themselves about it. When the Roscommon County Hospital was in the course of erection, the builders asked what fuel they were to use in the furnace since it was necessary for them to have that information at a particular stage, and, of course, out of our patriotism, we said that turf was to be used. Very well. Then arose the question of storing turf, and it was decided that we would build a shed for the turf in a particular place. That, however, was turned down, as it would be unsightly, but it was eventually agreed that we would build a shed in another place convenient to the furnace room because, if it were built in the former place, according to our engineers, it would take a man with a pony and cart every hour of the day carting in turf in order to keep the furnace going.

Accordingly, we decided then that we would erect a shed in a particular place. However, the time had not become ripe for the erecting of the shed. The machinery and equipment was there, the plastering and painting was going on, and the heating engineers demanded of the people who supplied the furnace that the equipment should be put into operation. The board of health were acquainted accordingly, and we issued advertisements for turf and got the turf at a reasonable figure. The turf was brought there in lorries but there was no shed for it, and it was heaped up and left exposed to the rain and weather for months, but the Department steadfastly refused to allow a shed to be erected over the turf and still refuse. One of the reasons for refusing was that it was an expert opinion that the calorific value of turf for use in a furnace was increased by moisture. Now, mind you, that might be true, but if it were true it would still be good finance and good economy to erect a shed for the turf to keep it dry and, if necessary, to hose it back into the furnace. You still would be saving on your turf.

What happened? We had hundreds of tons of turf there, and the people who put up the equipment came down and started a fire but they could not get up heat enough because of the wet turf, and so eventually they had to cast around until they got sufficient turf, both dry and half dry, to get up enough heat; and now we have tons of turf thrown around there, and we still have the Minister's letter informing us that we cannot erect a turf shed. It is interesting to hear what he says about that, and I should like all country Deputies, who have some knowledge of turf, to listen to it. The letter says:—

"The Minister is not satisfied as to the necessity for providing covered storage for turf. The engineer states, in his letter of 22nd August, that it is possible to store 25 tons of turf at the fire floor level in the boiler room."

Now, listen to the Minister on this:—

"It should be possible, therefore, for the boilerman to have the turf, which he proposes using immediately, sufficiently dried before use."

Could you beat that? No, you could not beat it in the world. Yet, those are the people who are in charge of hospitalisation and in charge of the huge costs of this hospitalisation scheme for this country. Just imagine your boilerman bringing in 25 tons of turf, and apparently drying it before the boiler fire. There is no other way in which he could dry it. Now, however, I presume that, if the suppliers of equipment have complained, the Department will bow to their complaints and we will probably get a turf shed. We probably will, but still, if that is what we pay the Department £135,000 a year for, in salaries and emoluments, I think that that money is very badly spent. We are entitled to better value for our money than that, and to much better value.

Now, there is another matter to which I wish to draw the attention of the House, and that is in relation to the Road Fund. The manipulations of the Road Fund are very intricate and, possibly, I would not be very well advised to follow them in all their intricacies, but there is one thing to which I want to draw the attention of the House, and it is this. The revenue for motor vehicle duties in 1932 was £941,000 and, in order to administer that, the administration expenses of headquarters, namely, the Local Government Department, took £6,320 in 1932. In 1939, the revenue was £1,162,000 and administration expenses went up by 50 per cent., being £9,612. In 1932, of a total revenue of £941,000, £858,650 was spent upon roads at a cost of £6,000 odd, while, in 1939, out of a total revenue of £1,162,000 less was spent on the roads, £808,546, at a cost of practically £10,000. Is it any wonder that I am moving that this Vote be referred back? I think that, on the face of it, there was never such glaring inefficiency, and we have the same kind of red tape running through all local government matters, so far as the boards of health are concerned. We have delays in sanctioning, and I was told to-day by some people from the City of Dublin that, when workmen are taken on in Dublin and sanction has to be got, the men are on and off work again long before the sanction arrives, and these men have to subsist on home help until their wages can be paid. It is not any pleasure to me to find fault with the Department. The officials there are the most courteous officials, and, so far as I know them, in dealing with these matters, are very efficient, but with regard to these matters of construction, there does not seem to be anybody with either the courage or the qualifications to deal with them.

Mr. D. Morrissey

Deputy Brennan has certainly given the Department a very severe castigation on the question of the Roscommon hospital and the hospitalisation of the country in general, and it would be bad enough if it were confined to Roscommon, but it is not. I think there is scarcely a Deputy from any county who has not got complaints to make regarding the whole scheme of building and equipping hospitals. Undoubtedly, very fine and very elaborate buildings have been erected. They are, as Deputy Brennan has said, a credit to the men who designed them, but whether they were designed to give the most effective results from the point of view of patients, or the people who are supposed to be served by them, is another question.

In the southern end of my own country, a very large hospital, costing somewhere in the neighbourhood of £100,000, was built. I understand that that hospital is completed and that the principal members of the staff have been appointed for a considerable time, but there is no sign of the hospital being opened for the admission of patients, and no explanation in this respect is forthcoming. At the other end of the county, we had another hospital, a magnificent building, built at a cost of about £70,000, but giving us, I think—there may be a difference of a bed one way or the other—exactly the same number of beds as we had in the old hospital, and so far as the people of that town are concerned their position is much worse to-day than it was before the new hospital was built. If a person wants to be admitted to the hospital, he is very often told that there is no vacancy, and is sent to Thurles, Roscrea or somewhere else. Unfortunately, in many cases, it has happened that people were only a short time in the other hospital when they had to be brought back for burial. That is not by any means a reflection on the hospital to which they were sent, but I do say that people who are seriously ill and so near death as those people obviously were should have accommodation at the nearest hospital.

We find that although there were not within 30 to 40 beds of the number required in the new hospital, and although we had a magnificent building in the old hospital still standing— and, I would venture to say, without casting any reflections on the builders of the new hospital, a building which will probably be standing when the new hospital is not standing because it was a cut-stone building in first class repair—when we asked that the building should be allowed to remain to provide for the wants of the local people pending the provision of the additional number of beds in the new hospital, they would not allow it to remain. Because this, as I describe it, comparatively magnificent building was said to be unsightly and not in keeping with the new building, it is now being razed to the ground, and old and very sick people are whisked away to other hospitals, and are there only a very short time when their relatives, who, in the vast majority of cases, are extremely poor, have to bring them back for burial.

There are a few questions in relation to other aspects of this matter which I wish to put to the Minister. Firstly, in view of the war situation, can the Minister tell us exactly how we stand with regard to stocks of medicines, drugs and other surgical and medical requirements? Can he say whether there are adequate stocks in the country, whether the total requirements of our hospitals can be met from production at home and whether any of the requirements which have to be imported can be imported, and to what extent?

There is another matter of equal importance to which I wish to call the Minister's attention, to ask how we stand as regards supplies of materials for road-making. I do not mean supplies of stone, but the composition that is generally described by various names and that is used for tar painting of roads and for what is called tar macadam work. Are there sufficient stocks available at home or are there suitable substitutes that can be produced here? If not, I should like to know if the Minister is satisfied that adequate stocks can be imported. The matter is very important because one of the greatest sources of employment in rural areas is road work.

That brings me to a point upon which I think the Minister has a certain amount of responsibility, as to the supervision and direction of local authorities. With regard to relief schemes, I have from the beginning expressed my opposition to these socalled rotation schemes. My principal reason for being opposed to them is because I believe that ultimately the way in which they are being carried out will lead to the disemployment of men who were in permanent employment prior to the starting of rotational work.

What has been happening is that the Department foolishly, I think, and without achieving the purpose on which it set out, employed men who were signing on at the labour exchanges for two, three, four or five days weekly. Different kinds of grants were given, supplemented by money provided by local authorities, and these men were employed to work on roads and quarries and to remove dangerous corners, work which ordinarily would fall to be done by the permanent employees of the local authorities. What has been the result? I can speak for one county and say that men who were for many years in continuous employment were last year disemployed in September, and were only re-engaged recently at the beginning of the new financial year. I am sure the Minister does not consider that to be a desirable state of affairs. I believe that the reason the Government introduced rotation work was to relieve the Exchequer of its respon sibility for the payment of unemployment assistance, as they found that they could not only get a certain amount of work performed by men employed on these schemes but that it would be done at a saving to the central Exchequer. Ultimately, there is going to be no real saving, because if the effect of having rotational work done on roads and quarries, which in the ordinary course would fall to be done by the permanent employees of local councils, is to throw permanent men out of work, and leave them to draw unemployment benefit or unemployment assistance for six out of the 12 months, instead of a saving there is going to be a definite loss.

There seems to be a lack of thought and of foresight about the whole matter. Not only every Department, but every sub-department seems to be pursuing its own course, unmindful of what the reactions may be on the work of any other Department. There seems to be no co-ordination and no planning about the work carried out by local authorities. I am afraid that whilst in certain directions we suffer from an overdose of supervision and inspection, in other directions there is not that supervision and inspection that there should be, with the result that there is a great deal of waste and efforts that are well meant—I am sure they are well meant—are having results that are not at all desirable. The Department of Local Government should play a very big part in trying to absorb the unemployed. Unfortunately its efforts, like the efforts of other Departments, are not succeeding, and if one is to judge by one's knowledge, apart altogether from the published figures, the extraordinary position seems to be, notwithstanding all the efforts of Government Departments, notwithstanding all the grants, notwithstanding all the rotation and other fancy schemes, notwithstanding all the tariffs and quotas, and the very great amount of emigration that continues down to the present day to Great Britain, that there are still, unfortunately, more people signing at the employment exchanges than ever in the history of this country. That fact in itself should be food for thought for a Minister in charge of the Department of Local Government and Public Health.

In this House, I have always given the Department the fullest credit for its very fine housing policy. So far as its housing schemes are concerned I have never been a critic. This Department is also responsible for public health, and we find this position, that families were removed willy-nilly out of houses the rents of which were from 9d. to 2/- weekly. I am speaking of the position in the ordinary country town, where such families went into new houses costing anything from 3/6 to 4/-, 4/6 and 5/- weekly, and from 25 to 50 per cent. of them, varying in different towns, were dependent on a total income of 14/- per week unemployment assistance. The numbers of children in these families range from one to seven or eight. The first charge upon the 14/- was on an average 4/- per week for rent, leaving 10/-, I was going to say, to maintain them, but "keep" would be a better word. It would require some thought to keep such a family in existence on that amount.

What is the use of building hospitals, and spending not only hundreds of thousands of pounds but even millions on buildings and equipment in such circumstances? What is the use of the Department's health services, medical services and sanitary services if a large number of the children are suffering from infancy from malnutrition, due not only to an insufficiency of food, but to an insufficiency of suitable food? I should like any Deputy, whether he is the head of a family or not, to ask himself this question: How is it humanly possible for parents to rear children on a total income of from 10/- to 14/- weekly? I am not drawing on my imagination when I ask that question. My statements can be borne out. One of the reasons why it is possible to do it, is that there are, fortunately, in this country some very excellent charitable organisations. In towns in the south which I know there would have been, during the past winter, actual starvation if it were not for the amazingly good work of the local branches of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. I am not exaggerating when I say that.

The greatest amount that an unemployed man can get in rural Ireland or in the vast majority of provincial towns, no matter how many children he may have, is 14/- a week. The first charge on that is an average of 4/- per week for rent. A cwt. of coal costs 3/4. In those two items—roof and fire—more than half his income goes. That is before he has bought a morsel of food or a pint of milk. Does it not seem as if we were really starting at the wrong end? So long as we have these conditions obtaining, there will be need for hospitals and more and more hospitals. So long as you have children brought up under these appalling conditions and, side by side with that, you have the best young men and women in the country going across to the other side to find employment, you will have here a race bound to end up in the hospitals and county homes. Members of the Government and, in particular, the Minister for Local Government and his Parliamentary Secretary will have to make up their minds that first things must come first. There is no use in talking of a Department of Public Health if either willingly or unwillingly they are closing their eyes to what I can only describe as the breeding ground of disease. If children do not get sufficient suitable food, they cannot be healthy. If they do not start their lives in a healthy state, they are not likely to continue or to come to the end of their lives in a healthy condition.

It is not pleasant to talk about these things. None of us can be proud of the position. None of us can say that we are in no way responsible for that condition of affairs. But you are not going to remedy it by refusing to admit that it is there or, admitting that it is there, refusing to deal with it. I submit that it can be dealt with. I do not believe that it is going to be remedied overnight. I do not believe that it is a state of affairs which can be cured in a few weeks or a few months, but I do believe that, if it is tackled in the proper way, backed by the proper purpose, it can be improved and improved immensely. If this House, as the National Assembly, does not take whatever steps are necessary to see that the younger generation gets what is required to make them healthy men and women, it is failing in its fundamental duty and it is all nonsense to be spending £100,000 or £200,000 in wages, salaries and expenses in connection with the Department of Local Government and Public Health. You are not spending that money in the interest of the health of the citizens so long as the conditions I have described are allowed to continue.

Mr. Hickey

We, in Cork, have reason to regret the lack of co-ordination in the Department of Local Government and Public Health. The last time we were discussing these Estimates, I pointed out what the Department should have done when it set out to hospitalise the country. They should have appointed architects of their own and have some plan for hospitals right through the country. Instead of that, they appointed different architects here and there. We, in Cork, have four hospitals awaiting construction since 1933 and 1934 and we are nearly as far from anything being done at the moment as we were four or five years ago. The mental hospital proposal was first mooted in 1932. Plans were prepared and then altered. Three years ago, another alteration was made; we were going to build a certain class of hospital in Youghal as an auxiliary. Four years ago, a plan was prepared for a mental hospital and last Tuesday week we had a letter from the Department stating that we should proceed to build a wooden structure costing something over £30,000 with a view to meeting the emergency at the Cork Mental Hospital at the present time. That is a very serious matter. We had money for building a hospital and, after four or five years, instead of going on with the brick or stone work, we are asked to build a wooden structure to meet the situation which has arisen in Cork Mental Hospital.

We have also a serious complaint in connection with the regional hospital. Plans were prepared about six years ago in respect of a site belonging to the South Cork Board of Assistance. The plans cost £2,500. After the plans were prepared, we got word that the site was condemned by the Department and that we would have to seek a site elsewhere. Last year, we acquired a site and we were told that we should proceed to build a regional hospital costing £300,000. We had a letter from the Department saying that the plans for the design should be put up for competition. As a member of the board, I supported that but, by a majority of one, it was agreed to give the work to a certain architect. Notwithstanding that the Department asked the board to put the plans up to competition, they accepted the decision of the board. The board, in its wisdom, was trying to give a certain architect work which would cost in fees about £15,000. That was well worth competition, but we were surprised to find that the Department went back on its decision. There may be very good reason why the Department went back on its decision.

We are very sorely in need of a fever hospital in Cork and, in 1935 or 1936, we were asked by the Department to select a site. A site was selected by experts and some technical men in the Department. Plans were being prepared when somebody, evidently, went to the Department and condemned the site—after it had been purchased and paid for. We have that site now and it is condemned after we paid £3,500 for it. We had, too, to pay the architect £2,500 for the plans for the regional hospital which were accepted. We have to pay £15,000 for plans for the new mental hospital. The question of a maternity hospital has been under consideration since 1932. We also paid £1,285 for plans for a maternity hospital and someone from the Department condemned it about two and a half years ago and asked us to select a better site. A site was suggested and, without any inspection by officers from the Department, or any real investigation into the matter, this site was purchased for £6,000. I am satisfied, and I am one who knows something about the matter, that I could not readily congratulate the Department for sanctioning the payment of that huge sum of money for a site that is purely a slobland.

I mention these things in order to show how necessary it is for the Department to change their whole method of dealing with hospitalisation. The best way would be to get the architects more in touch with local opinion. It may be a bit late in the day to carry that out, because most of the architects are involved in other schemes, but what is really required is that whoever is sent by the Department should have a little more contact with local opinion in the various districts visited. It is a rather strange thing that one official from the Department will be prepared to accept a site and, after that site is paid for, another official comes down to condemn the whole thing. We bought a second site for our fever hospital and, after we had purchased it and got the plans prepared, we were told by the technical experts that we must not proceed with the building because there was not an adequate water supply there. I could point to several more cases of that type. I am afraid there is a great lack of co-ordination in the Department. As I suggested last year, what we really want is a Minister for social services and a Minister to carry out local government administration.

Mr. D. Morrissey

More confusion.

Mr. Hickey

I do not think so; there could be little more confusion than there is at the present time. Let me now deal with relief schemes. In Cork we have spent over £212,000 on roads and footpaths within the last three or four years. We have many other schemes that would provide a larger labour content, very desirable schemes from the point of view of relief work, but we are told that these cannot be done as the grants are confined to roads and footpaths. We are definitely opposed to tearing up good roads while we have many desirable projects on which the money could usefully be spent. We have repeatedly appealed to the Department to allow the corporation some discretion as to how the money should be expended. Members of the corporation are at a loss to know what they really should do. If we decide that a very useful work could be undertaken for £60,000 or £100,000 we will be told that we cannot get a grant for it, as it has no relation to roads and footpaths. Perhaps the Minister will give us some idea of what is in his mind in this connection.

I do not want to go over the ground covered by Deputy Morrissey. I am very much in agreement with a good deal of what he has said. I am not at all enamoured of the idea of constructing elaborate hospitals, because I have in mind the maintenance of these buildings. If we arrange for the building of a reasonable hospital, say for £300,000, the architect will probably assure us that it will have to cost £475,000. In that way the expenditure mounts up unnecessarily. When some of the members of local authorities try to reduce items of that type they are told that they are not technical experts, that they are simply laymen, and they must allow themselves to be guided by the technical experts. I have a grave suspicion that when an architect is put to work on a job and he finds he is paid 5 per cent. on the last £100 just as on the first £100, his desire will be to make the job as big as possible. We have, from time to time, tried to cut down the cost of construction of fever hospitals. In one instance the estimated cost was £300,000 and when we tried to reduce that by £60,000 we were told that we could not do it and that, in fact, we would have to pay something like £364,000.

I think the Minister should pay a little more attention to local opinion in connection with these matters. There is a good deal of commonsense in the majority of the members of the different boards. They have a good idea of their requirements, and they are opposed to the construction of costly hospitals without some regard being had for the cost of maintenance. I am afraid that drastic measures will have to be taken by different local bodies throughout the country. In Cork we are becoming suspicious about the way in which the plans are drawn up and accepted by the Department. We have made our minds up that we are not going to accept so freely as in the past the advice given by some of the technical experts in the Department and elsewhere. I suggest to the Minister that the Department should have architects of its own planning for hospitals and other large buildings that may be necessary in connection with local government administration.

With regard to the treatment of widows and orphans, there are certain aspects to which I would like to draw attention. Where a widow sends a child from one school to another, or where she may leave one portion of the city in order to reside elsewhere, it is the practice to take her book and she is then thrown back on home assistance. I think that is very unfair. I wish to make a special appeal in regard to Cork. We have a very serious problem to deal with there. The city area is so limited that most of our housing schemes are outside the borough boundary. If the Minister could assist us by extending the borough boundary, without having to go through a vast array of legal enactments, it would be of considerable help. We have over 2,000 houses outside the borough boundary and large numbers of men, with their families, have been taken from the city and put into those areas. When that happens the allowance given to these men is reduced from 23/- to 14/- at the labour exchange and home assistance has to make good the balance. The same applies to the widow who gets 10/- or 7/6. The moment she changes her residence her allowance is reduced to 5/- and home assistance has to do the rest.

This is becoming an intolerable burden on the home assistance authorities. Then we have the employment period order for which, of course, the Minister is not responsible. The whole thing is becoming a most serious problem for Cork City and we are very much at a loss to know what can be done. Why should there be so much delay in the Department in the sanctioning of plans? It is a very serious matter in view of the existing position. We were anxious to have hospitals built during the last two or three years, but no progress was made. I can understand a delay now because we have a war situation which makes it almost impossible to go on with building schemes. The plans for the construction of hospitals have been travelling between Cork and Dublin for years and there is scarcely one yet agreed to. That tends to make people suspicious and they feel there is a lack of co-ordination in the Department. Perhaps the Minister will afford us an opportunity of going ahead with the work that is so much needed in Cork.

Mr. Hughes

Listening to the Minister's statement, I was amazed to hear him gloss over one of the most important problems of his Department. I refer to hospitalisation and the administration of the Hospitals Trust Fund in view of the emergency position that obtains as a result of the war situation. In view of the present position of the Sweepstakes and the increase in the cost of construction, one would expect the Minister to make a comprehensive statement, but beyond a passing reference to the excess of expenditure over income in the case of voluntary hospitals, the Minister made no reference to the hospital requirements of the country. The local authorities find themselves in a dilemma in regard to this because of the fact that they have incurred substantial expenditure in the way of architects' fees for preparing elaborate plans for hospital schemes in the various counties. I do not know what the position is at all on the part of the Department of Local Government and Public Health. I cannot sum it up. Personally I expected the Minister might give us some information to-day.

We want to know whether the Department proposes to go on with hospitalisation schemes and spend the money at present or whether they propose to wait until in the post-war period the cost of building materials falls. I know the problem is a difficult one to calculate and it is hard to say which plan is the worst or best. Notwithstanding the fact that we have no comprehensive plan or co-ordinated plan for hospitalisation schemes for the country, we are told that this problem has been examined in detail by the Hospitals Commission and that they have made certain reports on the matter. However, it strikes me that this question is not being dealt with from the point of view of the institutional requirements of the country as a whole. To a great extent it has been tackled piecemeal, and new hospitals have been constructed in some counties while in other counties these schemes have been left on the long finger. Again we have heard of the Department's plan to build regional hospitals.

I would like to know from the Minister what is his proposal with regard to hospitals for the country? Are we to build hospitals in areas that are not within easy reach of centres like Dublin and Cork? Is it the policy of the Department to build hospitals on a county basis or on a regional basis? In other words, if we are going to build general and surgical hospitals what should be the most economic size of these? What is the size of hospital that will best make for efficiency and economy in administration? Is it the hospital with the 60 or 70 beds or the hospital with 300 beds? A general and surgical hospital is a clinical hospital where generally team work is required. The practice of modern medicine and surgery requires team work. There must be a complete team if you are to have a hospital properly staffed. You must have a surgeon, a pathologist, a radiologist, and a gynæcologist. I know that in cases, plans have been got out for hospitals with 60, 70 or 80 beds. Would it be an economical proposition to put in a complete team—medical and surgical staff there—or is it the intention of the Minister to put in a general surgeon and rely on him to tackle every type of case that comes into his institution, and throw on him the great responsibility of making decisions— decisions involving a matter of life and death? That is a problem with which you are not faced in the City of Dublin where there is a competent staff and where, if consultation is necessary, consultation can be easily arranged. But in the country, with the hospital of the 60 or 70 bed type, you will have a different problem to face where you throw on the medical officer the responsibility of looking after 60, 70 or 80 patients and treating every type of disease in an institution of that size.

It strikes me that the Department have not yet made up their minds as to the best type of co-ordinated plan for a hospitalisation scheme for the country as a whole. It is a shortsighted policy to be dealing piecemeal with this problem, county by county. I am of opinion that this is a problem that must be tackled and decided, not on a county basis but on a two or threecounty basis. The local authorities are in an extraordinary position. They do not know where they are. As a result, for some time past they have not been making any improvements in their local institutions. They have not carried out any renovations in their existing hospitals. Anything that can possibly be put off is put off. In a number of counties new institutions have been established.

We had it from Deputy Brennan that big fees had been incurred as a result of the elaborate schemes suggested by the Minister's Department. A number of architects were set to work. These architects are now pressing for payment of their fees. Evidently the architects think that the future holds very little hope of the plans for these institutions being implemented. Those institutions have been drafted on paper and the architects have qualified for a certain portion of their fees—2½ per cent. or whatever it is. The view has arisen that the work owing to delays on the part of the Local Government Department and to their change of policy is not going to go any further.

In my particular county we were told that we required a complete set of institutions, including a county home. We were told even that the old workhouse was not suitable as a county home. We got out elaborate plans for new institutions. It was pointed out by the inspector of the Minister's Department, after making a survey of our institutional requirements, that such and such expenditure was required. Plans were obtained four or five years ago based on the inspector's survey. No progress has since been made. But within the last 12 months we had another man down who, after an inspection, told us that the old workhouse was a good, sound building, that it could be renovated and reconstructed and made a suitable county home. That is the sort of problem that the local authority is up against. We have one inspector coming down and contradicting another inspector. One inspector reports to our board and to the Department that a new county home is required. On his advice we incurred large expenses in the preparation of plans for that institution. We are now informed that a county home is not necessary, and that the old building can be renovated and turned into a good hospital. I would appeal to the Minister to see that some responsible committee or commission would deal with this problem in a comprehensive way so that local authorities will know where they stand. Neither the Minister, the Department nor any local authority appears to know what exactly is the policy in regard to the hospitalisation of the country at the present time.

The Minister referred to housing. If he wants to encourage local authorities to proceed with housing schemes to meet the requirements of the country, then I suggest to him that he will have to increase, beyond the £300 limit the amount that ranks for subsidy, especially in urban areas where there is no urban authority in existence. It is not possible for a board of health to develop a site for housing within the present limit of £300. It has not been possible to do that for some years. I do not know if it was ever possible to do it. The cost of raw materials and the cost of house construction generally has so increased that they are not in a position to erect houses in rural districts at an all-in cost of £300. Houses that cost more than that do not, as the Minister and Deputies know, rank for subsidy above the £300 limit with the result that the added burden falls on the ratepayers. That situation is not going to encourage local authorities to embark on new housing schemes.

The Minister referred to the system that prevails for selecting tenants for cottages, and said that the rule of his Department was that tenants were selected on the recommendation of the local medical officer or the county medical officer of health. He pointed out that under those rules families suffering from tuberculosis, or those living in overcrowded conditions, got first preference when a vacancy in a cottage arose. He mentioned three or four classes that come under the rule, and said that all these get first preference. I disagree with that system. While the present method of selecting tenants may be an admirable one from the medical point of view, it operates adversely in many cases so far as the agricultural industry is concerned. A house becomes vacant in a rural district where a good agricultural worker is required. The selection of the tenant depends solely on the recommendation of the medical officer. Speaking from experience, I can say that one often finds that the tenant selected by the medical officer is not a good agricultural worker. But the position is that irrespective of whether he is or not the local authority has to give him the tenancy of the house. I do not think that is a good thing, because we cannot afford to lose sight of the economic aspect of the question. The selected tenant may be a man who has been living previously under very impoverished conditions. His family is undernourished. They may have been living on the dole for a very long time, and it very often happens that the man is a bad workman.

Mr. Hickey

The conditions under which he has been living are not due to any fault of his.

Mr. Hughes

To put such a man as that into a house in a rural district, where a good agricultural worker may be urgently required, is not a good thing for our main industry. Very often the man selected is not prepared to work on the land at all. I suggest to the Minister that that is an aspect of the question that ought not to be ignored. The agricultural community are bearing a substantial share of the burden imposed in order to provide houses under the Labourers Acts, and surely it is only natural to expect that the farmer should get some recompense for that in the way of having good agricultural workers properly housed in our rural districts. There is a good deal of talk about increasing the agricultural output. The prosperity of agriculture must, to some extent at all events, depend on the output of the agricultural worker. The present policy of putting men into houses, irrespective of whether they are good agricultural workers or not, is not a sound one. It is operating detrimentally to the interests of the agricultural community, and there is the danger that it may be carried too far. I hope the Minister will bear that point in mind.

The table published at page 185 of the Book of Estimates gives some details with regard to the Road Fund. The estimated receipts for the year 1940/41 are put down at £1,000,000. In another table the Road Fund receipts for this year are stated to be £1,174,700. That figure includes £12,000 court fines for motoring offences. Out of the £1,174,000 contributed to the Road Fund from road tax £808,506 was spent directly on roads. During the past year the motorists of this country have contributed from £3,250,000 to £3,500,000 in taxation. Petrol duty accounts for £1,500,000, while the duty on motor cars and motor car parts is represented by a sum of £600,000.

Out of a contribution to the Road Fund directly you have, as I have already mentioned, £1,174,700, making a total approximating to £3,500,000. The ratepayers are contributing directly to road maintenance and upkeep a sum of approximately £1,500,000. Out of the Road Fund there is paid £808,546. That is paid out of a fund into which over £3,000,000 is contributed by the people who use the roads much more than the agricultural community. I refer to the people who use motor vehicles, motor cars, buses, and lorries of every description. It is most unfair and unjust and a crushing burden on the agricultural community to throw on them the responsibility of contributing £1,500,000 to road upkeep. One of the greatest problems which the agricultural community and the Government have to face, if we are going to improve the agricultural industry, is that burden of taxation, not only central taxation but local taxation as well. That is one aspect of this Vote which I am most critical about, namely, the enormous increase in the cost of local administration in recent years, nearly 85 per cent. of which is thrown back directly on the agricultural community. That is a position which cannot be maintained.

There is an opportunity offering at the present time, owing to the war situation, of developing and improving agriculture here. It does not appear to me that we are making any progress in the matter. One of the reasons why we are not making progress is the impoverished position of the agricultural community as a result of the enormous cost of administration, the enormous charges thrown on them, and the burden that has to be shouldered by them. This is a particular instance where there is a huge contribution made by the people who use the roads mainly and yet the ratepayers have to make a contribution of 60 per cent. more than is made available out of the Road Fund for road upkeep. The difference between £808,000 and £1,174,000 is collared for some other purpose. The Minister for Finance will probably collar a portion of it to help him in his Budget problem and that amount has to be made good out of the ratepayer's pocket. I suggest that it is not fair and that it is most unjust and unreasonable to expect the agricultural community to make such a contribution, which has to be made mostly by men who have no motor cars and who use the roads only in a very limited way.

The Road Fund is administered on the basis of the 1926 Act, which I believe is obsolete because to-day you will find the main arteries fully developed. The main arteries at present are good modern highways. The policy of contributing by way of grant from the Road Fund 40 per cent. of the total expenditure of the local authorities on main road upkeep is unsound at the present time. The distribution of the Road Fund is divided into two parts. There is a contribution of 40 per cent. of the amount spent by the local authorities on maintenance and then you have improvement grants as well. Where you have your main roads fairly highly developed, the amount spent by a local authority on maintenance is becoming smaller each year, with the result that that 40 per cent. of the amount spent is reducing each year because there is no necessity to spend that money. Where the local authority is anxious to secure all they can by way of grant for maintenance cost the only way to secure that grant is to scarify a road and resurface it. The labour content in resurfacing an already good road is small, because you scarify it with a steam-roller, you resurface it with a small quantity of road material, and you tar it, which is a mechanical operation to a very great extent.

I suggest to the Minister that much more of that money ought to be spent on road improvement. Possibly in some counties you will find that there is much more spent in maintenance per mile of main road than in others, and the reason is that these counties have not gone in for road improvement to any extent. In the counties which have been progressive in road development and improvement and have put down new and improved roads, the amount spent on maintenance is much smaller. The result is that you are penalising the progressive type of county that improves the roads when you simply make a contribution of 40 per cent. for maintenance. On the other hand, where a county did not go in for that improvement but continued to try and keep an old road in a fairly decent condition by tarring, spraying and surfacing each year, the maintenance cost on a road of that type is much higher than on the improved new and modern road. Therefore, in that type of county which has not gone in for improvement, the maintenance cost and, incidentally, the contribution for maintenance out of the Road Fund is higher.

In that way I suggest you are penalising counties like County Kildare which have highly developed their main arteries. Not only does County Kildare benefit by that development, but all the counties in the South benefit by the good roads in Kildare. Kildare is more or less a corridor to the South, and 90 per cent. of the vehicular traffic of the South must pass through Kildare. Kildare is one particular county which has been victimised as a result of the continued operation of the policy adopted away back in 1926. While that policy was sound for a decade of years, it is no longer sound to-day with highly developed modern main roads. I suggest that instead of scarifying roads already good which do not want to be resurfaced, the money should be spent on county roads outside the main roads altogether. We must remember that the mileage of main roads in this country is only 9,737 as against 46,798 of county roads. I might point out that there is no contribution to the maintenance of these county roads except by way of relief grants. There is no grant out of the Road Fund.

The mileage of the county roads represents five to every mile of main road, to which a contribution is made from the Road Fund. There is a tremendous increase in motor traffic and in lorry and van services all over the country, so that people in the backward parts away from the main roads are now getting a service right into their places from bread vans and lorries of every description delivering and taking away grain and delivering artificial manures. It is no longer, I submit, good policy to stick to the administration of the Road Fund on a main road basis only. The classification of main roads rests solely with the Minister. He is the sole arbiter in deciding whether or not a road is a main road. He is naturally not anxious to extend the mileage of main roads because, the moment he does so, there is an increased demand on the Road Fund. If he wants to nurse the Road Fund, or if he wants to help the Minister for Finance with his Budget, he is not anxious to extend the main road mileage.

I suggest there are many roads outside the roads recognised as main roads which are carrying an enormous amount of traffic. Owing to the tremendous development of motor and motor transport in recent years, it is not fair to ask the local ratepayer to bear the full brunt of the maintenance of county roads. I suggest to the Minister that while that poncy might have been good enough in 1929 or 1930, or even up to 1933 or 1934, it is now obsolete owing to the fact that our main roads are already highly developed. Part of the money expended on these main roads could be more usefully spent on improving county roads and it would have a higher labour content than when expended on main roads. I made reference to this matter last year and I take a very serious view of it. It appears to take a long time to convince the road engineers of the Department that the present method of administering the Road Fund is not suited to modern requirements. I appeal to the Minister specially to see what can be done about the matter. We certainly would get better value for our road expenditure if, even without extending the mileage of main roads, the expenditure of the money provided were left to the discretion of the local authority or to the discretion of the local engineer in consultation with the engineers in the Minister's Department. They could decide on the best method of spending this money. It could, I suggest, be more usefully spent under a system of that kind than is the case at present. I am personally satisfied that it is not being spent to the best advantage at present.

Again, I should like to suggest that serious consideration should be given to the cost of local administration. One of the factors that is directly affecting agriculture in this country, and that is operating against any improvement in the agricultural position, is the cruel burden of taxation that has been, without the slightest hesitation, pushed back on the agricultural community. Take the provision of minor relief grants for roads. The money provided by way of relief grants is, generally speaking, badly spent for this reason. A certain amount of money must be spent in a particular area in the county and the amount of the grant is usually so small that it is only sufficient to carry out improvements for half a mile of a road—in some cases less than half a mile. When the county surveyor comes to make out his estimate for the maintenance of the county roads in the following year, because the length of road improved in the previous year with the aid of the grant was so small, he does not seriously take it into account. In other words he does not take credit for it as the grant has been spread over seven or eight districts, or lengths of road of half a mile or less. If, instead of improving half a mile here and there, the money were expended so that three or four consecutive miles of road could be improved at the same time, he would immediately take credit for that work and to that extent the rates could be relieved.

Driving a car over a road of the type I have mentioned, you will find that you strike a good patch here and there. Some people when they strike this good patch are optimistic enough to think that they have at last reached good roads but again, after they have travelled another half mile, they find they are into another bad stretch. They ask how does that happen and why is it that you find a good half mile and then a bad stretch of road again. The public do not understand that that is due to the manner in which the minor relief grants are administered. I want to point out to the Minister that, to my mind, that money is not being usefully spent under the present system. Money of that sort provided for the relief of unemployment can only be secured if a contribution is forthcoming from the ratepayers. The responsibility for relieving unemployment in that case is thrown back on the unfortunate ratepayer who feels that his money is being badly spent. The system of which I complain appears to obtain not only in this Department but also in schemes administered by the Board of Works and other Departments. The major consideration, we are told, is to relieve unemployment and the utility of the work afterwards is not of any great importance. We are not such a wealthy country that we can afford to ignore the utility aspect of schemes of this kind. I suggest that that system of spending money on half a mile of road here and there, from the utility point of view means that the money is being wasted. It is not fair to impose on the unfortunate agricultural ratepayers the re sponsibility of providing big sums of money to relieve unemployment by that wasteful method. If we are going to avail of the opportunity that is now presented to the agricultural community as a result of the emergency position, we must take the present crushing burden of taxation off the farmer's back. If he is to get going at all, he must be relieved, and not be overburdened with taxation, not only central but local. The sooner the people responsible—the Government—realise that, the better for the community.

Mr. Linehan

When we consider the amount of money that this House will have to provide for local government services this year, possibly the Department of Local Government and Public Health will include it in social services. It is rather remarkable that it is one of the Departments the Estimates for which have increased rapidly from 1931 to the present day; but, while some of the items in which the increase has taken place may be referred to as social services, it is perfectly obvious that others cannot. In fact, one of the largest items of increase in the Local Government Estimates for a number of years past has been that for wages and salaries. If there is any justification in an attack on the increased expenditure over the past few years, it is amply justified when you find a Department of State which has been in existence under our own Government in this country for 20 years, without doing any greatly increased extra work in the last nine years, now coming along to present this House with an Estimate for wages and salaries alone of over £60,000 in excess of the Estimate for 1932. In fact, the Estimate this year shows an increase of practically £3,000 over last year.

The total Estimate for this Department this year at £1,211,000 shows a decrease on the Estimate of £1,349,000 last year. That decrease is entirely made up of the reduction provided for under subhead S (2), where the grants under the Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous) Provisions Act have been reduced from £455,000 to £200,000. If the figure for the housing grants under the Housing Acts were left as it stood last year, the Minister would now be looking for £1,466,000 instead of £1,211,000. No matter what anybody may say of the work of this particular Department, it is perfectly obvious that it is one of the Departments of State which is rapidly taking more money out of the taxpayers' pocket and not spending it all on social services. It is one of the Departments of State which are growing and increasing every year and placing an additional burden on the backs of the taxpayers by its increased officialdom, its increased staff and, consequently, its increased wages and salaries. Probably we will be told by the people who defend these increased Estimates every year that the mere fact that it is the Department of Local Government and Public Health is sufficient to make it expenditure on social services. That is the excuse in this House for every increased expenditure, but the fact that the actual expenditure last year on salaries and wages alone was £45,702 over that of 1932 shows where some of the money is going, at any rate.

There are a number of minor items to which I should like to draw attention. One of them is the question of the provision of the present type of labourers' cottages. I wonder if the Minister has ever seen one of the new labourers' cottages which have been built in rural areas and if he considers it the most suitable type possible. I do not know who was responsible for the plan on which the present cottages are being built, but I know that the man who invented the plan—and it appears to be general all over the country; it is general in Cork, at any rate—made no provision for a back door—there is no back door in the cottages. It is utterly ridiculous to come along and provide labourers' cottages on the bungalow style. If the people have to bring in turf or anything else, or if they have to throw out anything, it all has to be done by the front door. That does not help the people to keep the cottage plot or garden in nice order. I do not know who invented it or is responsible for it, but the person who made a plan for labourers' cottages in the country and completely forgot the back door must have had an extraordinary mentality.

Mr. Hickey

I am informed the Department is responsible.

Mr. Linehan

I believe the Department was responsible, but I did not like to be so blunt as to say so. I wonder what the Department would do if somebody applied for the usual grant of £70 or £80 under the Housing Acts and built a cottage without a back door. We can imagine them coming down later on and reducing the grant. When they build these cottages, surely they should provide a back door, which is a very necessary adjunct.

There is another matter. It is hard to see what the position will be with the increased cost of building, but, if it were at all possible, I would prefer to see the type of house for labourers' cottages being of the old type rather than of the bungalow type. I do not believe that, from any point of view, the bungalow type of house is a suitable one in a climate that is damp, as this is. Particularly when houses are being built of mass concrete and tiles, it is actually asking for trouble in regard to the health of the people to put them into bungalow houses, the walls and roofs of which are continual'y soaking moisture. I believe the old type of house of 20 or 30 years ago was the best type, and that it also gave better accommodation. Further, I say that, where six or seven of these houses are built in a row, as has been the custom recently, it will be found that, in 15 or 20 years' time, they will compare very badly with the labourers' cottages of 20 years ago.

Deputy Hughes referred to the question of the selection of the applicants for these cottages through the medical officer of health. Personally, I do not object to selection through the medical officer of health. There is, however, one point which does give rise to certain objections, that is, where the boards of health stick to the rule—as, apparently, they are bound to, if they are going to get a grant from the Ministry for the building of the houses —that a person, to qualify for one of these cottages, must come out of a condemned dwelling. Very often that gives rise to hardship. There are numbers of people all over the country—married men with families—not occupying condemned dwellings, but possibly living with another family: they have no right to a new house, although they have no accommodation of their own. You find a man with a wife and four or five children living in one room in a house belonging to somebody else, and, because that house is not condemned, he cannot qualify for one of the cottages.

I have seen a number of cases where this has been the cause of hardship, where a person has been summarily put down in the secretary's list as nonqualified, though his hardship was far greater than that of the person in occupation of a house condemned by the doctor. Very often the houses condemned by the doctor may have been houses capable of repair after very little expenditure, or the landlord could have spent a little money which would have made the houses fit for occupation. There is a real hardship on people not in occupation of condemned houses, but living possibly with their own families. Take the case of a man who gets married and has nowhere to go, and who lives with his relations, or he may be a man with a family of his own of three or four small children, living in one room in an already overcrowded house. Now, because that house has not been condemned, he cannot qualify. I would like to see the regulation waived, and would like to see that the applicants were being selected on the actual accommodation of the people applying, and not on the question of whether the houses have been condemned or not.

There is another slightly objectionable feature about the present system of labourer's cottages. In every small town there are as urgent housing problems as in many of the cities. The Department seems to be double-crossing the public—if I may put it that way—by building a number of these labourers' cottages which are intended for purely agricultural workers, within a quarter of a mile or so of those towns. In urban area towns, where the urban councils have already had a housing scheme in consideration, I believe the problem should be tackled in this way. As far as possible the cottages built for agricultural labourers should be spread singly throughout the country, because that gives a greater possibility of employment to the people occupying those cottages. If eight or ten of these houses are built within a quarter of a mile of a small country town, after a year or two—or perhaps after six months—none of the people occupying them will be strictly agricultural labourers in the sense that they are working for farmers. They might be agricultural labourers within the meaning of the Act, but they would not be people who are actually working for farmers.

While I am on the subject—I am sure that other Deputies from my constituency will be interested very much in the same subject—I would like to know what has been happening to the non-urban schemes for the Cork constituency. There are two or three towns where we have been hearing for years of schemes being prepared and of houses about to be built, but nothing seems to have happened. That is so in the case of Kanturk and Millstreet. In Kanturk, it is true some houses have been built, but as far as Millstreet is concerned, we are still waiting for information. Apparently, some of the delay is concerned with the difficulty of acquiring title to the plots selected. This is one trouble about the Department of Local Government in this country. For anything that it is vitally necessary to do the plans will be prepared, the money will be allotted, everything will be ship-shape to start work immediately, but of all the Departments ever hampered by red tape the Local Government Department is the worst. Surely at this stage there should be some means of cutting through these difficulties with which very often the Department is deliberately confronted. Where housing is vitally necessary, as it is in many of these cases, I do not see why the Department of Local Government should not be at least as quick in acquiring the sites—whatever about questions of title—as the Land Commission are in acquiring lands when they make up their minds to do so. They could acquire the land and put the money into court or into some fund where it would subsequently be got by the people who said they were entitled to the money.

While I am on the question of housing, there is one fact to which I would like to direct the Minister's attention. It is the question of grants for reconstruction of houses. There seems to be great difference of opinion about what is reconstruction. Some applicants appear to have been turned down for reconstruction grants because they were not actually adding to the house, they were not actually building a new room or a porch, or something of that nature. In other cases where repairs have been done, in the sense of supplying new doors, new windows, new walls or floors, the reconstruction grants have been given but, to my knowledge, at least, in a few cases where people have applied for reconstruction grants and where the houses have been in a bad state, the timber work rotten in the windows and door frames, where the joists of the ceilings had rotted away and the roofs in danger of coming in, these people were refused grants because the person who inspected those houses said the work they intended to do was repair and not reconstruction. There seems to be a very fine definition of the difference between repairs and reconstruction. I would like the Minister to look into that point. If a house is in a bad state internally is it not just as necessary and is it not just as fair that the money should be given to a person who wants to repair his house as to give it to somebody to build a fancy porch with a glass roof outside his front door? Very often the people who are most in need of the grant do not get it, and the people who are in a position to add to the house get the grant.

I would like to draw the Minister's attention to another point with regard to housing. It is in regard to the question of small dwellings loans. There is one great difficulty arising on applications for small dwellings loans. I do not know if the Minister has been made aware of the fact or not. The solicitors to the various county councils are in sisting that the applicant for a small dwellings loan will produce a copy folio, in other words, will produce the title to his land registered under the Local Registration of Title Act. I quite agree that if the Government, or any Department of State, are giving a loan, and where the loans are subject to the Land Purchase Acts, the Department or local authority in question are perfectly entitled to see that the equities are discharged, and that the title on which they are advancing the money is a good title. Where the difficulty comes in is where people hold their property in fee simple, where no land purchase annuity was ever paid, where the lands never came under the terms of the Land Purchase Acts, where the fee simple title is very often a far better title than any folio. That particular person, with a perfectly good title, if he is seeking for the loan, must make application under the Local Registration of Title Act for first registration. In my opinion that is a needless expense to impose on the applicant. The applicant is in possession of fee simple land, and has an absolute fee simple title to it, a title that would be accepted by any bank or any person who would lend money and take land as security. I think that regulation could very easily be waived. In urban areas, at any rate, it has been holding up the operation of the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act, because people can buy plots of land where the land is held in fee simple with much less inconvenience to themselves and everybody else than they can where the land is registered. Where the land is held in fee simple, there is no necessity for application for registration which will hold up the transaction from three to 12 months. But, where these people decide to buy these fee simple plots, having good title and having paid for it, they are immediately held up as far as the small dwelling loan is concerned and required to register their title under the Local Registration of Title (Ireland) Act. I can see no danger in the Department or any local authority advancing money on fee simple land on which they could get their deed of charge in the ordinary way.

Deputy Hughes also mentioned the question of hospitals. There is one hospital, at any rate, in which the North Cork Deputies should be very interested—the Mallow Hospital. One would be very pleased at the appearance of the Mallow Hospital. It is a most magnificent building of a huge size on a very fine site, and it has been completed for a couple of years. That beautiful edifice, overlooking the valley of the Blackwater, having been completed for a couple of years, has not yet been opened. I do not know who is responsible for that, and I do not care whether it is the Department of Local Government or the local board of health. If is the Department of Local Government who is responsible for the delay in the completion of that work, then it is the Minister's duty to see that we will not have another white elephant in Mallow overlooking the other white elephant and remaining closed there for another number of years. The patients sent into that particular hospital are still housed in the old building while this magnificent new hospital is there unopened. If it is the fault of the local board of health it is the Minister's duty to see that the local board of health do their part. I am inclined to suspect that the fault lies somewhere in between, that this mysterious passage of plans from the board of health to the Department, from one Department to another, from that Department back to the board of health, and the other mysterious passage of communications from the Department back again, is causing a lot of trouble. There appears to me to be more red tape in the Local Government Department than in any other Department of State.

I would like to know from the Minister when we will have the pleasure of inviting him down to open that new hospital in Mallow, or whether we will have to wait until we get another Minister for Local Government. It will be a very sad commentary on both the present Minister and his predecessor if the Mallow Hospital has to wait to be opened by the next Minister for Local Government. Whoever is responsible, it is a very sad commentary on the business capacity of either the Local Government Department or the North Cork Board of Health, or both, that this hospital which has been completed for such a length of time is still shut and useless as far as the present circumstances are concerned.

As regards the reduction in the grant under the Housing Acts—the figure this year is £255,000—might I ask the Minister was the figure estimated for last year not spent? The Minister last year estimated for the spending of £455,000. I would like to know if all that was spent, if all that was required under the Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, because if that money was spent last year, and if it was all required, it seems a terrible pity now to cut down that particular item. The only saving in the Minister's Department is on that item. The cutting down of any type of expenditure on housing at the present moment is bad, and particularly where these grants for new houses and the reconstruction of houses in the country are concerned, because it is quite possible that money could be usefully spent in the building of new houses and the reconstructing of other houses in the country still, even despite the increased cost of certain materials due to the war, because in many parts of this country, where people decide to build new houses, they would not be so much affected by increased war costs where they have their own labour available, and where there is sand, gravel, and so on, also available.

These people would still continue to build if they had these grants, and I hold that if building in this country is to slump as a result of the reduction or withdrawal of any type of housing grant, it will mean that practically the only type of regular, casual employment—because you might call it that— in this country is gone. There is nothing else in the rural areas in this country at the moment to keep people employed, if they are not actually working in shops in the small towns or on their farms, except road work and housing, and if the building schemes should start to drop, it will mean a terrible increase in unemployment in rural areas. It will mean that a lot of people in these areas will not have any type of employment to which to look forward, and there will not be much hope of a man being able to say that he is genuinely seeking work in order to qualify for unemployment assistance or unemployment benefit. If these schemes drop, there will be nothing left but farm work, and a man would have to travel very far before he would find such work as would be sufficient to provide a living for himself and his family.

There is one other item to which I should like to draw the Minister's attention, and that is in regard to minor works under public authorities. At present it appears to me that the system is that, annually, quite a number of these small works are put up for contract, and tenders are asked for. I think that that is a nonsensical idea in that connection. For instance, in every small town in the country you see advertisements every year asking people to tender for the scavenging of the town, the caretaking of waterworks, of sewerage, and so on. The result is that a kind of competition takes place and the job goes to the lowest bidder. Now, in my opinion, that is not conducive to good work in connection with such schemes. I can give an instance of one particular work where, seven or eight years ago, the job used to pay £52 a year. A certain amount of competition arose for that job and, as far as I understand, the very same job is being done for £19 this year. I think that is the figure. It is very hard to expect that the same good work would be done for £19 a year now that was done for £52 seven or eight years ago. I am not saying anything at all against the person who has the job at the present time. As a matter of fact, I think it is the same man who had the job in previous years, but I hold that it is very hard to expect a man to give the same service for £19 that he formerly gave for £52; and where there is a number of these small jobs in the gift of the local authority— jobs which amount to a contract—or in the gift of the manager, as they will be in the future, I suggest that somebody ought to be paid a reasonably decent amount of money to do the work, and that whoever gets the job of scavenging a small town or taking care of sewerage and waterworks, should get a reasonable amount for that. They should insist on his doing the work properly, of course, but the person concerned should be paid reasonably. The same would apply to everything else of that kind. In my opinion, the present method of costreducing is not of any great benefit in the circumstances.

On the question of roads, I think the motto of the Department for the future should not be so much better main roads as better by-roads. The main roads, with very few exceptions, are fairly well kept, but the by-roads are not. The by-roads are as bad as, if not worse than, they were ten or 15 years ago, and everything seems to be concentrated on the main roads. One can understand concentration on the main roads in view of the modern development of traffic, but I think that if the Minister goes into any rural area in this country he will find that the by-roads are in a shocking state, and in particular the type of by-road that used to be let out on contract. In the area that I represent the contract system is practically dead, and a number of roads that used to be under the contract system and that are not under that system now have got into a shocking state of disrepair. Another thing I should like to say is that, if they were not so particular about the main roads when they were being repaired, I think these roads might be just as good. For instance, I think that the tarring of main roads is overdone. I know of several main roads where, whatever the advantage may be for a motor-car, the tarring of these roads is a danger to everybody, even including the motorist himself, and I have seen steam-rolled roads that were not tarred which were perfectly good. I have in mind one example of a long main road that was completely tarred for 20 miles and then branched off on to another road that was not tarred, and, as far as I can see, the non-tarred road stands up just as well as the tarred one, and the non-tarred portion is certainly much easier for horse traffic. Very often, and particularly on hills, the tarring of these steam-rolled roads is a danger to everybody because, when the road gets wet and the gravel and sand wears off, the place is like a sheet of glass, and nobody could hold a motor-car on that road, not to speak of a horse.

One thing that the Minister will have to consider, when he comes sooner or later to review the expenditure on this Department and the position of local government in general in the country, is the question of rates in this country in the future. The Minister sees the reaction of the agricultural community. He sees what they have to pay in order to carry on the local services of this country. Take this question of the Road Fund, for instance. The position at the present time of small country towns in this country is worse even than the position of places like Cork City and Dublin City, where they complain of rates of 20/-, 21/- and even 25/- in the £. The reason is that the people in the small country towns, who are in a very small way of living, pay the full rate that is struck for the county on their holdings and they do not get relief of any kind. I maintain that they have every bit as good a right to complain as the people in the cities, and my reason for saying that is that any business that is being done in the country at the moment is being done in the cities. Whatever business is doing, the cities are getting some of it, while the country towns are getting nothing. Business in the country towns is being wiped out, and any business that is being done is done in the cities. I believe, therefore, that if there is any type of people in this country who at the present moment would be entitled to get a remission of rates, either on a portion or on the whole of their valuation, it is the people in the small country towns who actually have been looking at the grass growing on their doorsteps for the last ten years.

Mr. Norton

I was disappointed this evening that, in the course of his speech introducing this Estimate, the Minister made no reference to what I regard as a very vital activity under the control of his Department, namely the question of the supervision of national health insurance legislation in this country. It may be, of course, that the Minister intends to deal with that matter on another Estimate which is under the control of his Department, but it might be convenient if I were to be permitted to deal with this matter on the Minister's main Estimate. However, Sir, I do not mind leaving it over for discussion on the Estimate dealing particularly with that matter.

An Ceann Comhairle

With what particular matter does the Deputy desire to deal?

Mr. Norton

I am referring to National Health Insurance, Sir. It would really come under Vote 44, but the Minister who is introducing Vote 41 is also responsible for Vote 44, and it might be more convenient to discuss Vote 44 now. If I am allowed to deal with it now, I shall not raise that matter when Vote 44 comes up.

An Ceann Comhairle

But unfortunately other Deputies might raise it on Vote No. 44. The same matter should not be raised on both Votes. I do not know whether it is intended to discuss all the Local Government Votes on Vote 41.

Mr. Ruttledge

That was my intention, Sir. I understood it to be the intention of the Committee to discuss them all on this first Vote.

An Ceann Comhairle

Then I am prepared to hear the Deputy now.

Mr. Norton

Some time ago I asked the Minister what he intended to do in respect of national health insurance in this country, and what he intended to do, in particular, in the light of the last actuarial report received by his Department on the position of the National Health Insurance Society in this country. On that occasion, I think the Parliamentary Secretary told me that he hoped at an early date to be able to indicate generally what the intentions of the Department were in respect of that report and in respect of legislation, having in the meantime examined the actuarial report.

I should like to call the Minister's attention to this very important matter because a situation is arising here which cannot be ignored, and, while I appreciate that the Minister is new to his Department, the whole subject of national health insurance legislation is one which will require very careful consideration, unless we are to allow the position to deteriorate to such an extent that very serious and drastic legislation may be necessary in order to preserve the existing rates of benefit, and possibly to increase these rates in the light of experience from time to time. The actuary who examined the finances of the National Health Insurance Society over a period of five years presented his report, I think, last year, and in the course of that report he said that he had discovered, in respect of the payment of benefits, what he described as a remarkable and disturbing position. He said that the sickness benefit was within the limits to maintain solvency, but that the men's disablement benefits are twice what they should be in order to maintain solvency. He said that the disablement benefits of widows and spinsters were four times higher than they ought to be and the disablement benefits of married women five times higher than they ought to be in order to maintain solvency. Having examined figures of that kind, the actuary expresses himself in a description of the position as both remarkable and disturbing.

When an actuary says that an examination of this kind reveals a remarkable and disturbing position, one has, of course, to realise that the whole basis of valuation of national health insurance societies here, as in Great Britain, has mainly a relationship to certain theoretical standards of sickness and disablement which were conceived when the main Act was introduced in 1912, and when the actuary says that the position here is remarkable and disturbing because of these higher rates of benefit, or perhaps I might more accurately say, because of this greater frequency of claim to benefit, what he is really indicating is that the rate of frequency is much higher than the notional standard of frequency contemplated when the main Act was introduced. But, in view of the statement of the actuary, I think we should have some indication from the Department as to what it intends to do. Does it intend to allow a position to develop whereby the National Health Insurance Society is to be compelled to anchor itself to an actuarial basis of existence, or does it intend to look into the whole matter with a view to revising the actuarial basis of variation in operation at the moment, and to adopting a new standard of valuation, which, I feel convinced, if adopted, would enable the society to render a much more useful service to the insured population of the country than it is possible for it to render to-day?

As I said, the present standard of valuation is really a British standard. Originally devised in 1912, it took cognisance of certain notional standards then in existence, but there is no evidence at all, since our main Act is a British Act, going back over a period of close on 30 years, that it ever at any stage took cognisance of conditions in Ireland, or the liability of our people to more frequent sickness or disablement claims than in Great Britain. There is, of course, a marked dissimilarity between the insured populations in both countries. One is a highly industrialised country where the standard of wages is very much higher than the standard of benefits received from sickness or disablement, whereas, in this country, we have a relatively rural population with a standard of benefits more closely resembling the rates of wages which many of our rural population receive even when in fulltime employment. Factors of that kind—and I just mention that as an example—must not be overlooked in ascertaining whether the British standard of actuarial valuation is really applicable to the circumstances in this country.

Although the actuary is bound to take the view he does take, once he values the Society on the basis of an actuarial valuation, I do not think there is really need for alarm in respect of the ability of the Society to overcome whatever difficulties reside, and they only reside, within the present method of valuation, and if the Department would apply itself to the task of examining the whole basis upon which the Society is valued at present, I think it would be found possible to make the Society a much more useful instrument for the insured population of the country than it is possible for it to be to-day. I know that the Society, within the limits of the Act which applies to it, is doing its best, but I know, too, that every person who has experience of the administration of the Society will warmly endorse the viewpoint which I am endeavouring to put to the Minister in regard to the necessity for an alteration in the basis of valuation, so as to enable the Society to render better service to the insured population. But an actuarial report which can command a streamer heading in a newspaper, indicating that the actuary found the finances of the National Health Insurance Society in a remarkable and disturbing position, can well lead to a good deal of uninformed talk, and help to create an uninformed viewpoint on the real defects associated with national health insurance legislation here. Many would be inclined to suggest, from the mere reading of the Press headings, that the Society in question was heading for bankruptcy. Of course, the opposite is really the truth. Financially, it is a most flourishing institution.

The Society's income at present is approximately £700,000 per year, and it is putting away approximately £200,000 per year, after paying all claims to benefit in the year, and, in fact, in 1938, after paying all claims for that year, the National Health Insurance Society put away £290,000. No Minister for Finance could fail to feel very pleased with himself for having such a surplus at the end of a year. This year the Minister would be very glad if he could show a surplus of £290,000. With an income of £700,000 in 1938, the National Health Insurance Society, having paid the claims, was able to put away £290,000, and in December of that year had accumulated funds amounting to £4,500,000. Being able to put away £290,000, and having £4,500,000 in reserve, the society obviously is in quite a prosperous condition. But when you get back to the valuation basis, to ascertain the position of the society, the actuary is bound to say, judging by the terms of reference, that the position disclosed is both disturbing and remarkable.

Judging by the British method of valuing the assets of the society, and judging by the application to the society of a scheme of valuation which is not adopted anywhere national health obtains, except in Great Britain and this country—and here because we inherited it from Great Britain—it is the British method of valuation which has given us this ludicrous result, of the position being remarkable and disturbing, although it is putting aside from £200,000 to £300,000 this year, and has accumulated funds amounting approximately to £4,500,000. In a certain number of European countries where national health schemes are in operation, the method of valuation is entirely different from that which obtains here and in Great Britain. Let me say that in respect of Great Britain I concede that there may have been a case, based on prudence, for the actuarial method of valuation there, because they have probably 1,000 separate national health societies, some on a district basis, some on a class basis, some on a vocational basis, some on an industrial basis having the inspiration of that particular type of raison d'etre for their existence, and it is conceivable that one of these societies might have 2,000 members. When the last member came in, as no more might join, such a society would have to make provision for the theoretical last man, by making sure to have a certain income invested with the utmost prudence and frugality, so as to ensure, when that man got sick, that there were sufficient funds available on the assumption that he would live to some theoretical age.

You might justify a valuation scheme on that basis because at any time a society might have to close down and the investments should be sufficient to pay in circumstances of that kind. But that is not the position here. The actuarial basis of valuation could be justified on the possibility that people are free to join any society, that there is a certain membership, and that others will not join. There is an entirely different position here, where the entire insurance population is compelled to go into the National Insurance Society. There is no other society. There is no need, therefore, to provide for the theoretical last man, because everyone, on reaching the age of sixteen years, who is in employment, and who is not in exempted or excepted employment, is compelled to pass through the National Health Insurance Society. If we feel satisfied that the Irish race is going to survive, we may be satisfied that every single member of the race in insurable employment will have to pass through the National Health Insurance Society. That position of affairs is going to go on.

There is no need, therefore, to maintain the present slavish method of actuarial valuation. It is time the Department gave consideration to the question of abandoning the present basis of valuation, of getting a basis much more in tune with conditions here, and patterned on the lines adopted in other European countries. In France, and in Yugo-Slavia in particular, where there are national health insurance schemes that are, from the point of view of a utility, greatly in advance of ours, the method is based on having a reserve of one year's income. If we went on the Yugo-Slavia or the French examples they say it is sufficient as a reserve to have one year's income. In other words, if we transferred our society to France or to Yugo-Slavia, £700,000 of a reserve would be sufficient, according to their method of valuation, to guarantee the solvency of the society. In this country, although we have got £4,500,000 in reserve, and although the society is able to put away between £200,000 and £300,000, and with almost seven times the annual income, we are being told that the society is actuarially insolvent and that a remarkably disturbing position has been disclosed.

I suggest to the Minister that as we had 12 years' experience of the National Health Insurance Societies and five or perhaps six years' experience of the Unified National Health Society, or in all 18 years' experience of National Health legislation, entirely related to our own conditions, that that experience enables us to make due allowance for the peculiarities of our country in respect of the type of vocations which our people follow. I had hoped at this stage that the Minister would give some indication as to the direction in which the Department's mind is working on the very complex question of National Health Insurance legislation. It seems to me that if we do nothing but merely continue to operate the present scheme, and apply the present basis of valuation of assets of the society that there are two alternatives before us. One is that insured members can pay the present rates of contribution, or if you try to adjust the insolvency under the present method of valuing the assets, you must pay less benefit or, in order to maintain the present rate of benefit, pay increased contributions.

I do not think either of these alternatives is necessary. It seems to me that not only can the present scale of benefits be maintained on the present contribution, but that by an alteration in the basis of valuation of the society, you can pay substantially higher benefits on the present rate of contributions than are being paid by the present National Health Insurance Society on the basis of legislation under which it is functioning to-day. Therefore, faced with the alternative of the existing rate of contributions and lowering the benefits, or higher rates of contribution with the same benefits, or the abandonmens of the present method of valuing the assets of the society, which now amount to more than £4,500,000, the obvious course to take, and one which, I think, the Minister will find on inquiry is recommended by people who are in no sense revolutionaries as regards National Health Insurance, is that he should give serious consideration to the whole question with a view to the introduction of legislation, if that be necessary, in order to alter the present basis of the valuation of the society.

I should like to call the Minister's attention to one other matter. Our insurance legislation is actuarially archaic. If a member falls sick and is incapable of working, by reason of any physical or mental infirmity, that person merely goes to a doctor and gets a National Health Insurance certificate. If the doctor fills it up in a perfunctory fashion, he hands it to the applicant who makes a claim, and in due course gets a very small benefit from the society. You can never check lax certification—if there be lax certification— nor can you shorten the period of sickness, unless it can be assumed that the certificate is related to the treatment of the patient. At present there is no obligation on the doctor to treat the patient, and he is not paid to do so.

It seems to me, therefore, that our aim ought to be to reduce the loss of national productivity by keeping the people in the best possible state of health. You can best do that by linking up with National Health Insurance legislation treatment of the insured person during illness as well as payment of benefit to him. I put these suggestions to the Minister in the hope that he will receive them sympathetically. I trust that he will give some indication that the Department is alive to the necessity for dealing with this matter speedily, and that it will deal with it in a big and comprehensive way.

Mr. Byrne

I took down a few headings as speakers went along of matters to which I wished to make special reference. My notes show that I should refer to Government interference and to delays in giving sanctions to corporation proposals to improve conditions in the city. In respect of all these delays and this interference, particulars can be had, if necessary, from our City Manager. I should specially mention the high rates of interest charged on loans for building houses in the city, resulting in the high rents that our people are trying to pay by depriving their families, in some cases, of the necessaries of life. We should be able to get money at a lower rate of interest than that at which the Government gives it to us.

I am, according to my notes, to draw attention to tuberculosis treatment in the city and to ask for an X-ray apparatus for Charles Street dispensary, as requested by the public health experts of this city. An X-ray apparatus was sought for the treatment of tuberculosis some time ago but, so far, there is no X-ray apparatus in Charles Street dispensary for tuberculosis patients. The Parliamentary Secretary dealt to-day with tuberculosis and I earnestly hope that the Minister will give the corporation permission, as the public health experts have asked, to instal an X-ray apparatus in the dispensary or somewhere convenient to it.

I appeal for greater activity as regards school meals for children. I am to ask the Minister if he is satisfied that all our new hospitals in country districts are fully staffed and that a specialist's advice is always available for the patients. That matter should be worth investigating because I have been informed that, in one or two cases where they have handsome buildings, the staff is inadequate and that, if a specialist's advice is required, they have to wait for a considerable time. The patient after prolonged treatment locally is sent to Dublin and in one case, I have been informed, too late for specialist's attention. I finish my remarks by asking the Minister if he has any proposal to improve the conditions of the unemployed in the city, who are existing on a totally inadequate allowance. My principal complaint, however, is in respect of delay and interference on the part of the Local Government Department. That delay occurs in nearly every one of our Departments. We receive complaints of matters which are held up by local government interference. I earnestly trust that the Minister will give some hope to the unemployed in the city, to the list of which some hundreds are being added by people pouring in from all parts of the country and from across the water.

Mr. McGovern

I should like to refer to the condition of the main roads. In County Cavan and, as I understand, in other counties, the state of the main roads needs attention. It is impossible for anybody to venture out with horses or cattle on them. The farmers cannot use these roads, and they contribute the greater part of the rates which go to their construction and up-keep. Besides, they had the right to these roads before they were taken over by the Automobile Association—because that is practically what has happened. I do not suggest that the motorists are not entitled to good roads, but I am satisfied from experience and from the opinions of competent engineers that there is a method of providing good roads without making them so slippery as to deprive the farmers of their use or prevent men engaged in driving horses from availing of them.

I heard Deputy Linehan make a suggestion with regard to the tarring of roads. That is a rather technical matter. I believe that tarring is useful in many ways, because it keeps the road dry and prevents pot-holes. Even when tar is used, it does not follow that the road should be slippery. To have the sort of road that will suit both motor car and the man driving animals, it should be finished off in the ordinary way and afterwards completed with white sand. From experience, I find that that is the correct course. I know of an engineer who tried that experiment and found it satisfactory. I consulted other engineers about it and they could see no objection to it. I suggest that the Minister take a note of the suggestion and ask the engineers in the different counties to report on it. In some counties there is no trouble in getting white sand. In other counties there may be difficulties. In County Cavan there is no trouble in getting the sort of grit to which I refer. No extra trouble would be involved in applying it. It would add to the wear of the road. During the hot weather, in July or August, the sand could be spread out on the roads. No road is slippery immediately after it is tarred. It is only when it gets worn and the tar goes that it becomes slippery. That would be the time to apply this stuff. It would add years to the wear of the road and would involve no extra expense. The county councils are feeling the pinch, and they do not want to increase the charges on the ratepayers by doing this. I suggest that the Department should go fifty-fifty with them in putting this additional application on the roads. There would be no trouble in regard to slippery surfaces then.

I notice that, in small towns with no industries and in which there is a great number of unemployed, the local authorities are building a large number of houses. People are walking into these houses and living on the dole. There is no hope either in the immediate or distant future that these people will get employment there. When houses have to be built for such people, they should be built in rural parts of the country, and these people should not be collected around the towns.

The people will find work at certain periods of the year if they are living out a distance from the town, but if they are gathered around the borders of a town—a large number of unemployed—they never will go to work It is very important that local bodies should get a direction from the Department, and should be discouraged from proceeding along such lines. They should be encouraged to build these houses out in the rural districts rather than around the small towns.

Captain Giles

While I agree that Local Government is one of the most useful of the Departments, I am satisfied it is not above criticism. I believe it needs an immediate tightening up, because there is a great waste of public money. There are many branches of local government with which I am in touch, as a member of a board of health. Let me take housing as an example. I must give the Minister every credit for the fine housing programmes put into operation over the last seven or eight years, but I am not at all satisfied with the manner of building the houses. In my county, in connection with houses that were built during the last two years, we have had to get carpenters and other tradesmen back to put them in repair, and to keep some of them from falling down. That is chiefly due to the bad system of house building that was allowed, because the Department directed boards of health to accept the lowest tenders. We all know there is a certain type of contractor who will tender at any sum in order to get a contract, and then, perhaps, before he is half through the building of the houses, he goes "burst," and we cannot go after him because he has very little, if any, property. Most of the contractors who do good work are to-day almost broken because they have to tender at very low prices in order to put out the "quack." The result is that they are not able to build houses to the satisfaction of the boards of health. I should like the Minister to pay special attention to that particular aspect of local government.

The building of houses is a very important affair, both for the country and the persons who will occupy them. It is too bad to find that some houses erected about two years ago are already toppling down. I went out the other day at the request of a tenant to see a house that was erected just 12 months ago. He showed me a crack in the chimney which extended right inside the fireplace. The place was almost unfit for habitation, although it was only 12 months built. There must have been very bad supervision there, or a bad contractor. The house will not last much more than five years. I think the Minister should allow the boards of health a little more discretion. It is unfair to tie them to the lowest tender, when you see the type of work that is being done under such conditions. If we were allowed to use our own discretion we would get better work done.

A somewhat similar condition of things exists in the case of water and sewage schemes. Many small towns are clamouring for these schemes, but I believe it is a waste of money to carry them out. A properly constructed well, with a suitable type of pump, is quite good enough for those towns. The expense of water and sewage schemes is enormous and, if you ask the people, the most of them will agree that they do not want things of that sort. It is usually at the request of five or six people in those towns that schemes are prepared, and then these schemes are put into operation at a huge cost. The ratepayers generally do not want them.

Deputy Linehan spoke about scattering cottages throughout a county, more or less in single file. I am against that idea. In our county, during the last five or six years, we have constructed cottages in a scattered fashion. To-day we have a clamour from all the tenants for pumps, and we have to accede to the request in most cases because the people are in a bad way for water. I think we should group the houses six or eight together, and then you could erect a pump for the group. That would mean a great saving. It might cost a little more to buy out a field on which to group the cottages, but the scheme would pay in the end. We have dozens of demands for pumps in our county. The tenants have pretty good cases, and we do not know what to do. It would be better if in our new schemes we grouped the houses to the extent of six or eight in a group and put up a pump for them. It would mean greater efficiency and the saving of expenditure.

I believe the Department of Local Government has done much useful work, but it should tighten up a great deal of the work now carried out by different sections. One thing I am against in my county is the direct labour scheme as applied to cottage repairs. It is very costly. I must say that the work carried out in repairing these cottages is very well done and gives satisfaction, but it means a huge expenditure and that is unfair to the ratepayers. There would be anything from £30 to £50 expended on a house, in some cases a house not five years built. That is unfair to the people who cannot get houses built for themselves, people such as the small farmers. I do not believe in the direct labour scheme at all. It is too costly. You have to pay the high trade union wage and bring workers in a lorry to and from their work.

With building almost at a standstill, we have in the different counties good contractors longing to get good schemes, such as the repairing of cottages. The direct labour scheme has resulted in putting these men out of employment. They cannot get work. By dropping the direct labour scheme and advertising contracts again you will tend to put these good contractors into useful employment. We have spent from £70,000 to £80,000 on repairs during the last 18 months. We have not got through half the work yet. The repairs, though well done, are too costly.

With regard to road employment in general, I have a great complaint to make. I am not at all satisfied that justice is being meted out to the men who seek employment on the roads. So far as my county is concerned, the whole system of getting employment on the roads is through a clique; in fact, a certain group seems to have a vested interest in declaring who is on or who is not. I would like to see that type of thing broken. The proper type of man who tries to struggle along, rear his family and live decently, is being trampled on, and he cannot get an opportunity of earning his livelihood. Too much power is vested in the gangers throughout different parts of my county. Our engineers will tell you that everything is going well, but I believe they do not supervise the work as they should. They should go out and see where the boot pinches a great many people. The proper way to break this vested interest is to exchange gangers into different areas. We have good gangers in our county, but there are others who are not honest or sincere.

I would like the Minister to take particular note of this matter, because it is of great importance to my county. We feel that the ratepayers have a grievance. They say that some men get constant work over the 12 months. One man holding 30 acres of land on the 11 months system was given constant work on the roads for 12 months. In other cases, men had money snugly tied up in the banks; yet they were getting constant work at the expense of the ratepayers. There were men, on the other hand, with six and eight children hungry and crying for work, and they could not get it. I have brought this matter up on two occasions already, and I am bringing it up again, because the same vicious circle exists. The Minister should see that only men genuinely in need of work will be employed in the future. The ratepayers put up the money, and they do not want to see sung and well-off men getting work while they have to maintain unemployed men and their wives and families.

At the present moment we have a crisis in regard to unemployment, and it will become intensified as the year goes on. The best thing the Department of Local Government could do is to give all the employment it can with the resources at its disposal. In that respect, one of the chief things will be to do away with a large amount of the machinery that is in operation in the country.

The use of machinery in my county has done away with a huge lot of labour. That was all right to a certain extent, but when you have a problem so serious as the unemployment problem, a problem that cannot apparently be solved, it would be better to spend the money that is used in the purchase of machinery in giving work to unemployed men than to pay it over to the makers of these machines. Just imagine the large number of men who could have been employed breaking stones on the roadside with a hammer instead of having this work done in central depots where men turn out a huge amount of road metalling by machinery and get through it in a few weeks. We should decide to drop to a very large extent the use of this machinery. The machines are too costly, and while we have to bear the cost of the machinery we have at the same time to carry the unemployed on our backs. In addition to the doing away with this machinery, we should also discontinue tarring the roads. During the last five or six years an immense amount of money was spent in our county on the tarring of roads. The tar was spread so profusely on the roads that in the summer one finds it flowing off them and burning the grass at the sides. This expenditure on tar is to a large extent a waste of money. Very little money should have been spent on tarring the roads. Instead the money should be more usefully spent in giving employment to the unemployed labourers who are crying out for work.

Why should the local ratepayers pay for the maintenance of the main roads? The main roads undoubtedly should be maintained by the Central Exchequer. This is a national problem and not a local one. With 30,000 to 40,000 of an Army with heavily equipped tanks and lorries passing over the roads, it is no wonder that the roads so quickly deteriorate. For that reason alone the Government should take over the repairing of these roads and do the work themselves. They are a heavy tax on the local ratepayers. Such institutions as mental hospitals should also be a national charge. The people everywhere should press for making these national charges. Without the exertion of a great deal of pressure the Government will carry on as they have been doing. It is only by bringing constant pressure on them that there can be any hope of the removal of this burden on the ratepayers.

In connection with the question of the hospitals, I want to say that we in Meath are disgusted with the Department of Local Government and Public Health. A few weeks ago they sent us down a memorandum. I never saw such a preamble to any document as there was to that, and we came to the conclusion that there was nothing to be done with it but to throw it into the waste-paper basket. A few years ago they told us they would give us a Nazareth Home which would cost from £50,000 to £80,000. We were told that it would be a fine institution and that it would house the poor. Deputation after deputation from our Board were sent to Dublin at much cost to the ratepayers in connection with that home.

We had numbers of meetings about it, but now all prospects of that Nazareth Home have gone burst. Anyway we are not worrying about it. Get us a county hospital but repair our old county home. Give us at least a decent grant and put it in proper order. You get nothing but red tape from the Department of Local Government and Public Health. When a public body asks them to hurry up a matter it is then they delay it. When they are asked for immediate sanction to a scheme they always delay or refuse. As a result half of our best schemes have slipped by. The Department insists in the matter of contracts on our accepting the lowest tender. That is responsible for the fact that many of our recently-built cottages are already tumbling down. In those cases we had to accept the lowest tender. The man who was not worth a ten pound note, tendered for the building of a cottage. When he got as far as the roof he went burst. The Local Government Department should realise that amongst many of our problems that are unsolved is the housing problem. We have been spending from £60,000 to £80,000 in the last few months repairing cottages that have not been built quite four years. In one case the cottage was built only two years ago and it was already crashing down. We have complaints from almost all our cottage tenants of smoking chimneys. The smoke instead of going up the chimney insists on coming out the doors and windows. It is clear that their engineers are not giving satisfaction. One wants the smoke to go up the chimney but it refuses. As a result, people have to open the doors and windows and leave them open, summer and winter, thus bringing about colds and other sicknesses amongst the cottagers. If we were not obliged to take the tender of the lowest quack who contracts to build a house our cottages would not be in the position they are in to-day. Men who are incompetent and insolvent slip in and get contracts which they do not perform; the good contractor is driven out of business. The good contractor wants a fairly reasonable and decent price that will give him a margin of profit. The quacks have driven him out of business. I would urge on the Minister and on his Department to tighten up on this matter and prevent this huge waste. The country cannot afford these heavy losses.

I wish to say a few words in connection with the plots attached to our cottages. I do not know the exact number of cottages we have in Meath but there would be 3,000 or 4,000 of them anyway. That works out at 3,000 to 4,000 acres of the very best land that could be got in Meath. Scores of these acre plots are not worked at all. In some cases one sees the fences tumbled down. A goat is tied in the centre of the garden and neither a head of cabbage, nor one potato is grown there. Some proper supervision over these matters is needed. This acre of land that is given with each cottage was given at a huge cost to the ratepayers; that plot should be efficiently worked to the satisfaction of the officials. Some scheme should be carried through whereby these people should be made realise that it was the goodness of the ratepayers who gave them these cottages and plots, and they should not be allowed to insult the ratepayers by letting the plots go to waste.

We cannot afford to lose an acre of good land in this small country, not to mind 3,000 or 4,000 acres. As a matter of fact, there was no need in a good many cases for giving the acre of land at all. A rood would have been quite as much as they needed, or a half acre at the most, in plenty of cases. These are some of the things which are causing the ratepayers great loss and great concern. Any farmer looks on it as a hateful sight to see the acre of land which he gave up to a cottage going waste and wild. I ask the Minister and the Department to tighten up the machinery of local Government and so reduce overhead costs and all this waste about which I complain.

Mr. Hurley

In considering this Vote for the Department of Local Government and Public Health, I think we might fairly assume that the most important duty that devolves on the Department is the proper safeguarding of the health of the children. There is an old saying that prevention is better than cure. Therefore, the prevention of disease amongst children should also, I think, be a very important function of the work of the Department. Unless the children of the country are housed under proper conditions and are well nourished and clothed, we cannot expect that they will have that resistance to disease that better conditions would give them. While I agree that the Department are carrying out these functions in some fashion, I have to criticise the way in which they are being carried out.

With regard to housing, it is a fact that in the rural parts the housing of the people is being sadly neglected. That has been brought home to me in a very striking way at the meetings of the South Cork Board of Health, at which, when there is a cottage vacant, we usually have from six to ten applicants. One person gets the cottage, and nine others are disappointed. I think the Department should seriously tackle the question of building more cottages throughout the country. Deputy Giles' reactionary statement with regard to the tenants of labourers' cottages surprised me. It has not been my experience, or that of any other Cork Deputy, that the cottages in our county are sadly neglected. The Deputy's statement was a rather sweeping one. It may apply to the County Meath, but it certainly does not apply generally through the country. I think it is freely admitted that, as a general rule, the cottages are well-kept by the tenants. In my opinion the trouble is that we have not enough cottages, and that better provision is not made for building more. The Department seems to be inactive in that direction. At the moment the South Cork Board of Health is engaged on an enormous housing scheme. That has been put forward as a reason why the building of more labourers' cottages should be delayed.

I do not agree with the statement that less than one acre of land should be given with a cottage. I think it is very detrimental to the health of the people to have a number of cottages grouped together, with no provision made for sanitation or water supplies. A scheme of that kind was carried out at Watergrasshill, in the County Cork, by the North Cork Board of Health. From six to eight cottages were erected to the acre, the back of one facing the front of another. The cottages have been jumbled together, with no provision for sanitation or water supplies. One can visualise the conditions under which the occupiers of those cottages are living. I do not know whether the North Cork Board of Health is to blame for that or not. I am inclined to put the blame on the Department, whose inspectors and experts must have visited that place, and should not have allowed such conditions to exist there. The plea of a scarcity of land could not be made in regard to that area of the country, or I am sure in the County Meath, if the Department were serious about providing more cottages and acre allotments for the tenants. If we are serious in our talk about keeping the people on the land, we should build cottages for them and give them at least one acre of land.

The Minister spoke about cottage purchase schemes. I think he said that there were 51,680 cottages in the country, and that 4,297 schemes for purchase had been received. That is a small percentage of the total number. I would like to know how many of the older cottages are included in these purchase schemes, and how many new cottages. The condition laid down for purchase is that 25 per cent. of the present rent is to be remitted to compensate the tenant for taking over responsibility for the repair of the cottage up to and including 66½ years from the date it has been built. That applies to the older cottages. In my opinion, it offers no inducement to occupiers to purchase. There may be something to be said for the scheme so far as the newer cottages are concerned, in respect to which, I understand, the term is 35 years. With regard to the Minister's figure relating to purchase schemes, I would like to know how many of the older cottages it includes, and how many of the newer cottages. I think that the cottage tenants have been treated very unfairly. They are offered a remission of 3d. a week where the rent is 1/- a week if they are prepared to take over responsibility for repairs. The cottages are supposed to be put into proper repair before they are handed over, but I think that it will be admitted in the case of the older ones that they were not very substantially built. I know that in my constituency the tenants are not at all enamoured of the purchase scheme put up by the Government. Very rosy promises were held out to them, when the present Government came into office, but when it came down to a question of hard facts, the tenants found that the promises were not fulfilled. Of the 51,680 cottages, I would like to know the number that has been purchased. The Minister referred to 4,280 schemes or applications for purchase. In the Cork area, so far as I know, no cottages have been purchased.

The Party to which I belong tried to remedy that position some time ago, but the Minister stoutly resisted it. I do not know what reason can be advanced for dealing in such a fashion with agricultural and other rural workers, because there is no denying the fact that the annuities, if you like to call them that, that paid for those cottages went into the fund which was withheld from Great Britain during the economic war. The farmers got a reduction of 50 per cent. on their annuities, but under this purchase scheme cottier tenants are offered 25 per cent. reduction, and for that they have to take over the cost of repairs. It is not a very good bargain for the cottier tenants, and they realise that because they are not making any effort to purchase under this scheme. They are hoping that this Government, or some other Government, will realise the justice of their case, and that justice will be done to them by a amending the legislation in operation at present.

The provision of rural housing, as I have said is a very important factor in the health of the people. At present we have an outcry from all parts of the country with regard to hospitalisation. If we had proper housing for the people as a whole, I suggest that we would not require so many hospitals, because bad housing, especially in the rural parts, is a big factor in connection with the ill-health of some of our people. I am sure that the Parliamentary Secretary will agree with me that bad housing is a big factor in the incidence of tuberculosis. That disease is contracted very often by children of tender years, and there is no chance afterwards of repairing the injury done then.

Some effort is being made, as I have said, by the provision of school meals to make up for the want of nourishment which, unfortunately, is only too prevalent among the children of the country. From the Minister's statement, it appears that school meals were given to 29,000 children during the past year. The Minister mentioned that there were 5,000,000 meals provided in what I might call the Galltacht portion of the country—that is the portion outside the Gaeltacht areas—and 2,600,000 in the Gaeltacht areas. I see by the estimate that in the areas outside the Gaeltacht a sum of £14,500 was spent on the provision of meals, and in the Gaeltacht a sum of £10,000. For information I should like to know how it is that £10,000 was spent on 2,600,000 meals in the Gaeltacht, while 5,000,000 meals were provided outside the Gaeltacht for £14,500. There is no cost for service, as far as I am aware, outside the Gaeltacht areas, but there is some cost for service in the Gaeltacht areas, which might account for that discrepancy, but I should like some information on the point.

I also want to draw attention to the fact that a great difficulty in the rural schools is the want of some kind of water supply. Although the meals are provided, very often there is no water with which to cook them. Of course, it is also necessary that the children should have water to wash their hands before and after the meals. In other words, the provision of a water supply in rural schools is very necessary in order to encourage clean habits amongst the children. That is a very big deficiency in country places. The matter was commented on at the recent Teachers Congress in Killarney. Although, in the first instance, the local authority would be responsible for that matter, at the same time I think that the Department has a certain responsibility when it does not insist that the health of the children should be safeguarded as far as cleanliness is concerned by the provision of a water supply for schools.

Unfortunately the provision of school meals is not sufficiently extended. At present the meals are only provided during the winter months in the urban and rural parts outside the Gaeltacht areas. It would be very good business on the part of the Department to extend the provision of meals all the year round, because with the present state of unemployment numbers of children are under-nourished and the provision of meals in the schools all the year round would very materially help to counteract the effects of under-nourishment. As to whether milk or cocoa should be supplied with the meal, I think milk is pretty generally used. It does not require any great cooking. In other places, of course, cocoa is supplied. I should like to ask the Parliamentary Secretary, as a medical man, what he would advise as being of the highest food value. Personally, I think that good pure milk is a very good food for children of school-going age.

Dr. Ward

None better.

Mr. Hurley

On that point, I should like to say that if more milk were supplied to schools and to growing children it would be a way of counteracting the evil effects of unemployment amongst the fathers or other guardians of the children. I understand that a half point of milk per day is the average consumption per head of the population of this country. That is a very low average if it is correct. I think the Local Government Department should do a little more to raise that average by seeing that there is a greater distribution of milk amongst the school children. These meals are very much appreciated, and I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary, as a medical man, will recognise the necessity for an extension of the scheme.

A good deal has been said about the want of hospitalisation in this country, and I shall not deal with that. But I should like to ask the Minister if the grants given to the hospitals, especially to the voluntary hospitals, to make up the deficit in the revenue, will be continued?

It is very important to know that even though there may be a slackening off in the building of new hospitals, the hospitals we have in existence will continue to operate in at least their present state of efficiency. The position of some of the voluntary hospitals with which I am acquainted is that all sources of revenue outside the grants from the Hospitals Sweep have now dried up. The flag day, the voluntary subscription and all the other items that went to make up their revenue have stopped on account of the grants from the Hospitals Sweep. They are dependent, in carrying out their good work on the grants they get to make up the deficit in revenue. I hope that the grants will be continued and that the Minister will be in a position to give us that assurance because the liquidation of Hospitals Trust, Ltd., has caused a certain amount of uneasiness amongst these hospitals.

I have tried to keep in mind the fact that one of the great functions, at least in my opinion, of the Department of Local Government and Public Health is the prevention, rather than the cure of disease. The housing of the people is one very important factor in that programme, if that be the programme of the Department. The other matter to which I referred, the provision of school meals and of water supplies for schools, has also a very big bearing on the health of the children. The question of roads has been dealt with by other speakers and I do not want to go over the same ground. I should like, in conclusion, to urge that the Minister should see that every effort is made by his Department to ensure that cheaper money would be placed at the disposal of local authorities to complete, within a reasonable time, the work of housing the people of the country, especially housing the people in rural parts. I am afraid that with the great anxiety to provide housing accommodation for people at present housed in the slums in cities and towns, the rural people have been forgotten. The conditions of some of these people living in the rural areas are as bad as you could find in any slum and I hope that they will not be overlooked or forgotten.

Mr. Cogan

I think nobody will dispute that this Department is to a great extent the most important Department in the State. In the first place, the amount of revenue and the amount of expenditure which it directly or indirectly controls constitutes a very large portion of our national Budget. I suppose the total expenditure on local government at the moment would not be less than £13,000,000 if we include the cost of the Department and the expenditure incurred by local bodies. The most serious matter which concerns citizens is the fact that this expenditure is every year increasing by leaps and bounds. The ordinary individual feels that his efforts to make a living, to carry on his business, to expand his private enterprise, are curbed and restricted to a great extent by this enormous expenditure.

Naturally there is a widespread feeling that we are not getting full value for the amount of money that is being spent. We know that nothing is more important than the maintenance of the health of our people. We know that there is no citizen who will not cooperate to the fullest extent with the Government in any scheme or measure designed to improve public health, but we find that notwithstanding all the money that is being spent, notwithstanding all the officials and inspectors who are employed to look after the health of the people, there is very widespread neglect in regard to health. We find that there are people suffering from contagious diseases, particularly amongst the poorer sections of the community, who are left to suffer and to die in their own homes and to spread contagion amongst their families. So far very little has been done to ensure that these people will be isolated and taken to some institution where there will be some hope of their being cured, or at least some hope of preventing the disease from spreading.

We have in every county a medical officer of health who is undoubtedly a highly efficient officer. We find him frequently or occasionally visiting people who suffer particularly from tubercular diseases, but of what use are these visits? I have in mind a number of cases of mothers of large families who are dying of this terrible disease, dying in their own homes, with the result, of course, that the disease is spread to other members of the family. I cannot see what use it is to have a highly paid, highly efficient, medical officer of health visiting these people occasionally and perhaps giving them advice while nothing worth while can be done to check the disease in the crowded homes of these poor people. I think it is sheer waste of public money unless more drastic action is taken to see that people suffering from dangerous contagious diseases are given institutional treatment and to insist that they avail of such treatment. That is one direction in which I think money is being wasted.

Again, I want to refer briefly to the position in regard to hospitalisation. I feel no useful purpose can be served by proceeding with hospitalisation on a large scale at the present time, having regard to the cost of materials. If there must be a stoppage, as it appears there must, in schemes of hospitalisation, I think the Department of Local Government should take advantage of that delay to reorganise or to review the whole system and to find out if the measures or the methods adopted during the past few years have been in the best interests of public health. As far as I could observe, the procedure has been to encourage each county to apply for the largest possible amount that could be obtained for the county and to draft the hospitalisation scheme with a view to securing the largest possible amount of money available for that purpose.

As a result, there has been competition between different counties, each trying to devise the most elaborate scheme possible in order to bring to the county the largest possible amount of money, and to have it put into circulation within that county. I do not think that that was the best way to deal with the situation. I think at the outset, when these large sums were made available as a result of the Sweep, national schemes of hospitalisation, rather than county schemes, should have been devised. Having regard to the fact that counties vary in size and in geographical characteristics, a national scheme should have been devised first of all. If it was necessary to group a number of counties together for hospitalisation purposes, it should have been done.

With regard to the expenditure on county homes, I think that these institutions should have been very greatly reformed, and that the reform is long overdue. The county home should not be a home for the destitute or for the poor, but mainly for the aged and infirm, regardless of whether they may be destitute or not; that is to say, aged and infirm people should be able to avail of such homes on payment, if they have the means to do so. That would raise the status of the county home and make it an institution which any citizen could enter without suffering humiliation. Again, county homes should not be places where a number of different types of inmates are congregated. There is no justification for herding together so many different types of people as the aged, infirm, imbeciles, maternity cases and children. Separate institutions should have been established long ago for each of these different types of inmate, in order that the aged and infirm—for whom these county homes should be mainly kept—may be able to avail of these institutions without suffering any humiliation whatever.

In regard to housing, I have never been able to understand why some effort has not been made to provide a certain type of house for the aged and for the invalid, as well as for people with families. All over the country there are numbers of aged people—old age pensioners—who cannot find housing accommodation at all. I quite agree that the first object in regard to housing should be to provide houses for the workers with young families. At the same time, there is great need for houses for aged people and for those with dependents. As a result of the intensive housing campaign during the past few years, a number of small houses which have been condemned or left derelict are being pulled down. With a certain amount of renovation or reconstruction, these houses would be suitable for the type of people to whom I have referred, that is, aged people and those with dependents. It is sheer waste of public money to pull down such houses when, with a little reconstruction, they might last as long as some of the new houses now being built.

In almost every county of which I have any knowledge there is very great waste of public money in regard to the repairs to cottages. I have heard it remarked that there has been waste where these houses have been repaired by contract labour, and that it has been found to be uneconomic and expensive. I have experience of counties where there has been very great waste under the contract system of repairing, mainly because the officials of the local authorities have not discharged their duties, and have not insisted upon the contractors giving value for money. I find cottages being repaired at a cost of from £10 to £30, yet, in the course of two years, they are in a worse condition than ever, and require to be repaired over again. That is simply because the officials of the local authorities do not insist that the contractors carry out in full the terms of their contract and give value for the money. These are matters in which economy could be effected, and in which the officials of the Minister's Department could direct that economy be effected.

In regard to road maintenance, I think there is great need for central control for the entire State, and that an official should be selected to supervise it in all counties. It should not be impossible to find at least one county surveyor who has been an outstanding success, and who could be appointed as director of road maintenance in all other counties. There is no doubt whatever that, in a good many counties, value is not being obtained for the enormous expenditure on road maintenance. There is no uniformity, either, in the system of surface construction. Under central control, it would be possible to have a most up-to-date and most efficient system of road maintenance in every county. I am in agreement with the view that the State should take over the charge for the maintenance of roads, having regard to the fact that over £3,000,000 has been contributed to the State by the motorists, who are the main users of the roads. In taking over control, it should be the duty of the State to see that a reasonable return is obtained for the money expended. Undoubtedly, the main roads have been brought to a fairly good state, but the county roads are still deteriorating, mainly on account of the heavy lorry traffic being diverted, to an increasing extent, to what were formerly known as county roads. Some of those county roads are carrying as heavy traffic as some of the main roads. If an efficient county surveyor were given charge of the entire road maintenance of the State, he could bring it to a higher level of efficiency than exists at the present time.

I have already criticised the contract system in regard to housing repairs, but at the same time I do not hold that the contract system is in itself a bad system. I hold that what is wrong is that the supervision is not as efficient or as thorough as it should be. I believe that it would be an advantage if the contract system of road construction and road maintenance were employed to a larger extent than it is at present, because I do not think that it is possible for either the local authorities or the officials of the local authorities to efficiently direct such a huge army of men as is required to maintain and construct roads by direct labour. I think that if not only road maintenance, but improvement schemes and road construction schemes, were to a large extent left to contractors, and if the officials and county surveyors were sufficiently vigilant to see that those contractors gave full value for their money and carried out their contract, a very substantial economy could be effected in regard to road maintenance, and substantial improvement could be obtained. There is no doubt whatever that there is still a very large percentage of the roads of this country which have not been brought to a condition suitable for modern traffic. I think that is not due to the fact that insufficient money has been spent on these roads, but to the fact that sufficient value has not been obtained for the money spent.

Mr. Childers

I think that on the occasion of this Estimate it is only right that the Government be congratulated on what I think is generally agreed by the whole community is one of the most successful of their enterprises during the period of their administration. In the desperate need for better housing conditions of our people, the improvement that has been effected will go down in history as one of the great social achievements of the age. I think that, although to spend money largely and even recklessly without being aware of where the income may come from to pay for it is questionable in some matters, if there was one excellent gamble which the present Government took in engaging in large expenditure at a time of depression, it was on the large expenditure of money on the improvement of the housing of the people.

In actual fact, we have placed upon the next generation the obligation of paying very considerable sums which have been incurred in debt in providing that housing. It is well for us to recollect that since it is generally admitted that a percentage of the people who are living in cottages are barely able to pay the rent of them at the present time, owing to their being unemployed, as the debt accumulates for housing, unless the national income of the people improves, that position will become worse rather than better. Therefore, for those of us who travel around the country, and who observe everywhere cottages springing up along the roads, and the vast improvement in our housing system, it is just as well to remember that unless we can improve the fertility of the land around those cottages, and improve the production from that land, the value of having built them will be lost, at least in this generation. We have at least given hope to the people in these houses. We have offered them conditions of life which will enable them, if given the right encouragement, to carry out the necessary improvement in the country's production.

As far as large scale housing is concerned, I would ask the Minister if he could give us his views as to whether the proportion of expenditure in encouraging private building as compared with subsidising public building is the most desirable at the present time. Without its being the fault of the Government, the effect of largely subsidising Government building or local government building undoubtedly drives up the cost of building, undoubtedly raises the labour content of the cost, and undoubtedly tends not to increase the output per worker. I believe that the Government have at their disposal figures which quite clearly prove that. I believe in the last three years there has been a considerable increase in the cost of building outside the increase in the cost of materials and that not many more people have been employed. That is simply a matter of adjustment between the extent to which you encourage voluntary building and public building. I would ask the Minister whether he has any particular views on the subject or whether the matter is engaging the attention of the Government? I do not speak in a critical spirit, because I myself have no direct opinion on the matter. I would ask the Minister to say a few words to us on that subject.

Secondly, I would like to ask the Minister whether his Department have examined or whether they could examine from the point of view of State policy the whole question of the advantage of differential rents in housing schemes. We have been informed by a number of people in Cork that the system of differential rents whereby people pay according to their means for corporation houses has proved in that area most successful, and in view of the statements by Deputies, such as Deputy Morrissey, who spoke of the inability of people who were unemployed to pay the ordinary rents of the cottages, I would ask the Minister if he has considered it from the point of view of State policy, whether the fact that it has succeeded, as we are told by many people, in Cork would indicate that it might succeed elsewhere, whether he is prepared to advocate that, at least, it should be examined by different urban authorities as a solution for the difficulty of enabling unemployed persons to pay for their cottages and houses; in other words, that the family who were earning a good income would pay a higher rent than the family who were unemployed for a cottage or a house of the same type.

I would like to add to the voice of the Minister in appealing to urban authorities to make use of the provisions of the Housing Acts which would enable urban houses to be reconstructed and repaired. It is rather a terrifying spectacle going into a town and, accompanied by the medical officer of health, being shown the houses still condemned that have to be replaced by new houses and also being shown a very large number of houses that are very much on the edge. They are just sufficiently good not to be condemned, but they are not improving. No capital is being put into their reconstruction privately, and unless the Government can persuade whoever owns those houses to put capital into their reconstruction the only alternative is for the urban authorities to make use of the Government scheme in existence to repair and reconstruct them before the cost becomes ten times greater, when they will all have to be rebuilt or replaced by new cottages. I suggest that the Government could do a little bit more, by advertising of one kind or another, towards directing the attention of urban authorities to that section of the Housing Acts.

As far as hospitals are concerned, there has been a great number of very disquieting rumours circulating among local authorities as to what are the Government's intentions with respect to the use of the Hospitals Trust money. There are certain counties, among them that which I represent, County Longford, in which the hospitals are in an absolutely appalling condition, and I think that there are at least six other counties where that is also the case. I am sure that the Minister will agree, at least, that County Longford is one of the worst. There have been rumours that owing to the reduction in the income of the Hospitals' Sweepstakes Trust, it may be necessary to divert so large a part of the present Fund in order to pay for hospital deficits that the hospitalisation that is still required in counties like County Longford will not be carried out in view of the reduction in Hospitals' Trust receipts. I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity, in closing the debate on this Estimate, to say something about what would be done in the case of counties like Longford, where hospitals are desperately needed.

Other Deputies spoke in this debate on the question of the health of the people, and the Minister, in his speech introducing this Estimate, referred to the fact that a considerable amount of malnutrition among our people is due to a wrong understanding of diet, and he mentioned the fact that the technical schools were teaching domestic economy and that, as a result, the younger generation have a far better idea of what constitutes a balanced diet than the older generation had. In that connection, I submit that not half enough people attend these schools, and I submit, secondly, that the matter is so urgent that the Minister should consider the adoption of some scheme of propaganda of a simple kind which would go far towards remedying that whole matter. I have in mind a story that was told to me by a playgrounds supervisor of the Corporation of Dublin who noticed a child who was suffering from malnutrition. He followed the child back to its home and found that the family earned a very small income —not exactly a starvation income, but a small income—and that the principal diet of the child—and I think the Minister referred to the same diet in his opening speech—was white bread and tea, and I think that the other item in the diet was tinned salmon, for some extraordinary reason.

This supervisor of the Dublin Corporation playgrounds obtained from some English local authority a very interesting series of propaganda charts in which, for any given income, he could give a family a sheet describing how much they could spend on food for that income and how they should spend it in order to provide a balanced diet. I mean that, for an income of 40/- a week, or whatever it was—let us say, from 40/- to 45/- a week—you picked out a sheet which showed the different ways in which you could spend a certain sum of money out of that in providing a balanced diet.

It was far from a luxurious diet, I must say, but nevertheless it was sufficient, and I think that that is a form of propaganda which has worked excellently in other places. I submit that the Minister should examine schemes of that kind with a view to educating our people in this matter of providing a properly balanced diet. I am quite certain that a very large proportion of our population, living in the large cities under appalling conditions, and never having had the chance to live decent lives, do not spend their very small and meagre earnings in the best way in which they could be spent, and do not do so because they have never been taught. I admit that, fundamentally, it is no cure for malnutrition. Fundamentally, the matter is really economic, but other countries have succeeded in remedying the matter to a large extent by the use of propaganda of the kind I have suggested.

Another question I should like to ask is in regard to the provision of medicines to local authorities. I speak subject to correction, but I understand that the practice of providing a sufficient quantity of the two drugs prontosil and M and B 693 has become fairly widespread, but that there are certain cases where that unique discovery of the past five years is not available in sufficient quantities for the people who want it. I should like to be sure that medical officers should have adequate quantities of that very excellent drug, which, I understand, is a remedy for about a dozen maladies. I have been told that there are cases where it is not available in sufficient quantities. I am aware, of course, that it is an extremely expensive drug, but I think that, in view of the marvellous cures it effects, it would be well worth the expense.

I should also like to know from the Minister what is his view as to the extent to which the allotments scheme is used by the local authorities. Does the Minister feel that that scheme could be extended? The other day I was given the cash value of an allotment to a family, and the sum was astonishing. Unfortunately, I have not got the exact figure, but it was astonishing what could be produced in the way of vegetables and so on from these allotment schemes. It seems to me that there is insufficient use of the allotment scheme in local or rural areas. I know that there are cases where the scheme is available, and yet there were very few applications for allotments, although very many people were unemployed in the area concerned, and were well qualified to make use of the facilities offered.

As far as economy in the Department is concerned, I should like to join with other Deputies who spoke of the necessity for cutting down wasteful expenditure, and I should like to ask the Minister whether there is any definite plan for what has long been talked of in connection with the separation of the Department of Local Government into separate categories. Has a scheme been considered, or is a scheme being considered, for a Ministry for Social Services? Have any estimates been made as to the possible saving that might be effected by the binding together of many of our social service schemes into one organisation, thus avoiding the duplication of inspection that takes place in so far as means are concerned, for instance? I realise that that cannot possibly be hurried and that it will require a great deal of careful consideration and administrative work, but it is hardly possible for the ordinary person who has some knowledge of business to believe that you could not effect savings by cutting down inspection services and generally rationalising the whole of our work of providing people with old-age pensions, widows' and orphans' pensions, national health insurance, and so on.

Seosamh O Mongáin

Ba mhaith liom ceist a fhiafraí den Aire faoi

Ospidéal na Gaillimhe. Dá mbeadh maith i ngealladh agus an t-ospidéal a tharraint ar pháipéar, bhéadh sé againn fadó. Ach níl. An méid tarraint a rinneadh ar pháipéar go dtí seo is cosúil é le páistí ag tarraint tithe ar an ngaineamh a cheapann siad atá áluinn agus a bhriseas an taoile anuas go gairid ina dhiaidh. Sé an méid deifir é atá idir iad sin agus an tarraint a rinneadh le haghaidh Ospidéal na Gaillimhe go gcaithfidh na daoine na mílte punt íoc as na tarraintí seo nach raibh blas maitheasa ionta.

Tá a fhios agam-se go bhfuil Bord Sláinte na Gaillimhe, a bhfuil an Cathaoirleach anonn ar m'aghaidh annseo, ag déanamh a ndíchill. Timpeall is le mí o shoin d'iarr siad ar Easbog na Gaillimhe is ar Theachtaí na Gaillimhe a dhul in éindigh chuig an Aire ag iarraidh air tús a chur leis an Ospidéal.

Is olc an t-am a bheith ag déanamh tithe anois—chuile rud chó daor. Ach an rud a theastuíos go géar ar nós é seo ní féidir níos mó moille a choinneál air. Más fíor, tá go leor de na daoine ina luighe ar an urlár faoi láthair agus scéala dhá chur amach ag na dochtúir gan aon duine a chur chuig an ospidéal ach na daoine a dteastuíonn sé go-rí-ghéar uatha. Mar sin tá an oiread faitís ar na dochtúir duine ar bith a chur isteach go mbeidh sé i ngar do chrothadh an bháis.

Nach iad na boicht agus na fíorbhoicht atá siar leis seo? Ní fhéadfa siad san a dhul chuig Ospidéal ar bith ach Ospidéal le haghaidh na mBocht. Agus nach bhfuilmid uilig ar leigean orainn féin annseo gur ar shon na mbocht atámuid uilig? Ach bíonn an comhartha le n-a chois. Féadfaidh na daoine a bhfuil an t-airgead acu a dhul ina rogha ospidéil. Tá fhios agam go bhfuil croidhe chó bog san Aire le croidhe cheachtar againn ach tá sé in am aige an diallaid a chur ar an gcapall ceart, agus a innseacht do na daoine cé is cionntach leis seo a choinneál siar agus tá súil go gcuirfe sé dlús leis.

Mr. Nally

Might I ask the Minister what is the intention of the Department with regard to building a hospital in Claremorris? I understand that, in 1932, £9,000 was allocated for the purpose of building such a hospital but nothing has been done in the matter of proceeding with the work since. As the Minister is aware, Claremorris, Ballyhaunis and Ballinrobe are three of the largest towns in County Mayo, and there is no hospital in any of them. Ballyhaunis is over 30 miles from Castlebar, and Ballinrobe and Claremorris about 20 miles. In 1933 the board of health purchased a site for the building of a hospital for which, I understand, they paid about £300. It is still in their hands, but is derelict, and I should like to know what is the intention of the Department with regard to it. I do not expect that the Minister will have the particulars now, but he could furnish them at a later date. I hope he will look into the matter and, if possible, provide the people of these areas with a proper hospital in Claremorris. The valuation of the two unions of Claremorris and Ballinrobe is over one-third of the valuation of the whole county and yet there is not a hospital in either town.

Mr. Ruttledge

I propose to deal first with the hospital situation. Let us see where we are in present circumstances and let us survey what has been done in regard to erection and completion of hospitals and the progress so far made in the hospital position. Taking the local hospitals first, the amount received and earmarked for local hospitals was £4,263,384, approximately 4¼ million, and the amount paid out is approximately £2,500,000. When the works started have been completed, the amount available for new hospitals will be slightly over £1,000,000. It is proposed to start three large regional hospitals, one in Galway, one in Limerick, and one in Cork. The Galway hospital will cost £320,000; the hospital in Cork £340,000, and the hospital in Limerick £320,000, making a total of £980,000 for these three regional hospitals. I should say that the figure of £4,500,000 was arrived at by allocating one-third of the available moneys from the Sweepstakes for the purpose of local hospitals.

With regard to local hospitals, county hospitals have been completed at Mallow, Tralee, Castlebar, Monaghan, Nenagh, Cashel, and Mullingar, and work is in progress in Ennis, Kilkenny, Portlaoighise, Tullamore, Roscommon and Sligo. The total amount of the grants paid for those completed is £392,266, and the amounts paid in respect of those in progress £338,550. District hospitals have been completed at Ennistymon, Millstreet, Midleton, Youghal, Clifden, Kenmare, Ballina, Belmullet and Thurles, and work is in progress at Schull, Killarney, Listowel, Gorey and New Ross. Fever hospitals have been completed at Naas, Abbeyleix, Ballina, Belmullet, Swinford, and New Ross, and one is in progress at Killarney. The total payments to poor law institutions amount to £1,222,591.

With regard to mental hospitals, works have been completed at Ardee, Castlebar, Kilkenny, Killarney, Limerick and Mullingar, and works are in progress at Ballinasloe, Castlerea, Cork, Ennis, Enniscorthy, Grangegorman and Portrane, Letterkenny, Monaghan, Portlaoighise and Sligo. The amount paid out for completed works is £350,984, and the amount in respect of those in progress, £510,773. The total payments in respect of mental hospital works was £872,534. With regard to the voluntary hospital position, the amount in hands, and available for these hospitals is estimated at £6,500,000, and to get the figure which would be available for endowment of these hospitals, we have to proceed on the basis of what the yearly deficits on the hospitals are likely to be. When we ascertain that amount, we have to set aside a sufficient sum as endowment to cover these deficits. The estimate received this year as to the deficits would indicate that £5,500,000 would be required. If the endowment fund could be kept to, say, £3,500,000, it would leave £3,000,000 available for building. The Hospitals' Commission have been examining the position, and both the Department and the commission have pointed out to the hospital authorities the absolute necessity of keeping the deficits down to the lowest possible figure. I am not sure whether we shall we able to deal with that position satisfactorily, but some progress has been made, and where there have been increases, reasons have been given.

With regard to the Dublin hospitals, the funds are proposed to be allocated on the basis of the new Mater Misericordiae Hospital to be erected at a cost of £540,000; St. Vincent's Hospital at a cost—they have some money on hands—out of Hospital Trust funds of £530,000; St. Laurence O'Toole Hospital, better known as the Richmond and Hardwicke Hospitals, who also have some money on hands, £560,000; and the amalgamated hospitals, the Meath Hospital, allowing for money on hands, £470,000. The total amount required for the four Dublin hospitals is £2,100,000. Other large hospitals proposed for Dublin are a children's hospital at Crumlin costing £160,000 and a new fever hospital at a cost of £440,000 (after allowing for amount on hands), which makes the total for large hospitals in Dublin £2,700,000. Other works proposed at voluntary hospitals are at the fever hospital, Cork, costing £180,000; at the Maternity Hospital, Cork, £40,000; at Castlepollard, £65,000; at Cobh Hospital, £8,000; at Dr. Steeven's Hospital, Dublin, £112,000; at the Mercy Hospital, Cork, £30,000; at the Maternity Hospital, Limerick, £60,000; and at the Open Air Hospital, Cappagh, £16,000. This is a grand total of £3,211,000. The amounts are the net estimated costs after allowing for amounts in the hands of the several authorities concerned.

I mention these figures in order to give Deputies an idea as to our inability at present to embark on other schemes throughout the country. The Sweepstakes have closed, and I am not in a position at the moment to say whether there is a possibility of their being revived, but, if they were revived, it is very unlikely that they would ever assume the proportions which they assumed in the past, as anybody can realise, by reason of international complications.

While the position of the Sweepstakes is not clear, in view of the commitments already made, my Department will feel constrained to move very cautiously and very slowly with any other works, whether they are being examined or whether they have been sanctioned. We will have to move slowly because of the present position. If the Sweepstakes are definitely closed, and are not able to return anything that would be of much assistance to the Hospitals Trust Fund and hospitals funds then the position would be that the hospitals fund is running very close to what our commitments are. Deputy Brennan complained about the position in Roscommon, but I think Roscommon has done much better than other places. It has got a mental hospital and a county hospital. As to Claremorris hospital, I do not see that at the moment we can do anything about it. It is in the same position as any other work. Until the position clarifies itself, and we know if the Sweepstakes are coming to an end, or see some results from future Sweepstakes the difficulty is that we cannot enter into any other commitments.

Mr. Hughes

What is the position of the Carlow scheme?

Mr. Ruttledge

It has not been started yet.

Mr. Hughes

Was anything earmarked for it?

Dr. Ward

Unless there is something left.

Mr. Linehan

Can the Minister say anything about Mallow?

Mr. Ruttledge

It will be all right. It is completed. A question was asked by Deputy Morrissey about medical and hospital services, and also in regard to medicines and supplies. As far back as last July a circular was sent to the various public bodies asking them to try to get in at least four months' supplies of medicines and any other equipment they wanted. That was followed up, but a number of public bodies did not seem to take the necessary precautions in that respect. For a time, after the outbreak of war, a number of complaints came from public bodies. For the last two months the position seems to have eased itself. From the reports we got, the position seems to be satisfactory at the moment. It is being watched. We recognise that it is a very serious matter, and that hospitals might run out of supplies and equipment. The situation is examined from day to day, but it is difficult sometimes to get local authorities to get in the necessary reserves of these stocks. However, there is nothing to cause any concern at present. Deputy Childers asked about the availability of prontosil. I have had no complaints from any place. I know there is an ample supply in Dublin. A number of medical men do not believe in it. Various people who use it find it successful, while others take a different view. That is a matter for themselves. If we have any representations or complaints from doctors that they want to get it, we will make the necessary arrangements to get supplies.

The Deputy also referred to allotments. The position was that on March 31st, 1939, 4,555 allotments were provided for unemployed persons, and of these, 3,196 were let to people in receipt of unemployment assistance, 221 to persons in receipt of home assistance, 285 to persons working on employment schemes, and 853 to persons in temporary employment, whose means did not exceed the prescribed amount. These plots usually consist of an eighth of an acre, and are let at rents of 1/-. Public bodies are recouped the difference by grants.

We sent out circulars early this year urging the public bodies to co-operate in making ample facilities available for the cultivation of allotments. Up to the present schemes involving 7,000 have been approved, and it is expected that 1,000 more will be provided, making a total of 8,000 for the year. As Deputies are aware, the Department of Agriculture co-operates by supplying seeds and instructors to assist people to cultivate the allotments. I would be very glad to see a much greater number being worked, and I hope local authorities will co-operate. It really rests with them to extend this scheme.

Some Deputies referred to road work. We gave £730,000 from the Road Fund last year and, in addition to that, there was also an unemployment grant which was largely spent on roads. For the year ending 1939/40, the grant from the Unemployment Relief Vote for schemes of roads and footpaths in urban areas amounted to £246,615, and in rural areas to £588,505. That amount has to be added to the £730,000. This question has been raised every time the Estimate comes up. With the contribution from the Unemployment Relief Vote, and what comes from the Road Fund, the country is being treated very fairly. Deputy Morrissey asked what is the position regarding supplies of road material. As bitumen which is largely used in that work has increased 100 per cent. in price it was considered by the Department to be too costly, and no tenders have been accepted this year.

Tar bitumen—90 per cent. tar and 10 per cent. bitumen—obtainable from, I think, Lancashire, was being used. We are now informed that it is somewhat doubtful if the supply will continue. While our supply of tar is substantial, there is a danger that it may be exhausted. We have arranged a conference with the county surveyors so that we can ascertain what our position is. That conference will be held early in May. We shall try to ascertain ahead what the position will be with regard to road material. The matter is being watched closely, and we would be in a very happy position, indeed, if we could have all the tar we wanted, and be independent of outside supplies.

Deputy Morrissey raised the question of rotational schemes. I do not want to go into that matter, as it arises on the Unemployment Vote, which is under another Minister. Deputy Childers has replied to the question raised about malnutrition. The medical officers of health are the best judges of that matter. The medical officers of health have reported to my Department that the great majority of those cases of malnutrition are due to a wrong dietary basis. I accept that. If the other position were present, it would be a matter for serious notice by my Department, but we are satisfied that it is not. We have the advice of the medical officers of health, and if any such thing as that happens it will be dealt with. Deputy Hickey referred to expenditure on roads and footpaths. He was not exactly correct, because we have sanctioned grants for the making of parks and similar works. I think that Deputy Hickey got a grant in Cork for improving a park as a matter of unemployment relief. It is always a matter for the local authority to put up a scheme and, if they satisfy us that their scheme is better than the scheme suggested by us in that it has a higher labour-content or the work proposed is of greater utility, they will have no difficulty in getting it approved.

Deputy Hughes suggested that, in agricultural districts, the preference, in choosing tenants for labourers' cottages, should not be given to persons in houses which are overcrowded. That happens to be the provision of the Act, and I do not think it has worked badly. I think it has worked very satisfactorily and no case has been made to change it. The Deputy suggested that the housing subsidy should be increased. There may be a falling-off in the building of houses or reconstruction of houses by people for their own use. That is not only possible but probable, because of the higher cost of materials, but I do not think that in country districts the problem is so urgent as it was. Unless it is represented that it is urgent, I do not see why we should increase the subsidy. As regards the cost of building houses in Dublin, they have succeeded within the last few months in getting contracts in Dublin which are lower than those received in 1938. That is a remarkable thing. One tender which came in just before the war was very much lower than tenders received in 1938, but two have come in since which, though not as low as the tender received immediately prior to the war, are lower than those for 1937 or 1938. We are anxious to push forward building as much as we can but the place in which it is most urgent now is not, perhaps, in the country districts but in the cities and in those small towns where slums are to be found. Any assistance that can be given public authorities in dealing with these schemes will be given, and we hope to encourage them in any way possible.

Deputy Linehan referred to cottages without backdoors. I have heard of extraordinary things happening in the building of cottages, but that was some time ago. I have heard of cottages built without stairs, and others without chimneys. Deputy Linehan's case is not as bad as that. In the case to which he referred, there may be two cottages adjoining, and the right of the passage way may be round by the gable end.

Mr. Linehan

It is general throughout the whole country.

Mr. Ruttledge

Was there a garden at the back?

Mr. Linehan

Yes, even where they were single.

Mr. Ruttledge

I shall have the matter looked into to see exactly where this exists.

Mr. Nally

It exists in your own county.

Mr. Ruttledge

They must be very easy going people down there. We shall look into the Kanturk and Millstreet housing question and see if matters can be hurried up. Deputy Linehan referred to reconstruction grants. Reconstruction has been interpreted as meaning an addition to the accommodation in the house. It does not mean that you make some kind of structural alteration to a house containing a kitchen and room and improve it. You must increase the accommodation by a room, or make some other addition. I do not think that it would be wise to allow people to get a reconstruction grant simply by putting a partition across the centre of the house or something of that kind. With regard to the other matter raised by Deputy Linehan about small dwelling loans, I have every sympathy with it, but it is not our Department that is insisting on that; it is the solicitor's office people who are insisting on the title.

Mr. Linehan

The solicitors to the county councils, yes.

Mr. Ruttledge

The Deputy knows that a fee simple title is as good as the other title, and there should be no difficulty about that. However, I will look into the matter.

Mr. Linehan

They have absolutely refused.

Mr. Ruttledge

It does seem somewhat ridiculous. I will look into that matter. I do not want to follow Deputy Brennan in his castigation of the Department. As I do not know the facts about the Roscommon case he refers to, I will have the matter inquired into. I am not suggesting that the Deputy is deliberately inaccurate, but I am not accepting for a moment that the facts are as disclosed by the Deputy.

Mr. Brennan

They are as I got them from the files, anyway, whether they are right or wrong.

Mr. Ruttledge

Deputy Norton referred to National Health Insurance. That matter has been under examination for some time, and it is under examination in conjunction with the Government action. I have met the representatives of the National Health Insurance societies who have done very good work indeed since those societies were unified, and when a proper basis can be found—and I hope it will be found expeditiously—then the matter will be dealt with. Until I have that actuarial investigation by the Government actuary, I am not in a position to make any statement that will in any way, beforehand, commit the Department to any particular line. The matter is being regarded sympathetically, and the Department will be anxious to do whatever is possible to see that the fund is used for the benefit of the people who subscribed to it, but in whatever way I cannot at the moment say.

Deputy Childers referred to co-ordination. I am not in a position to make a statement on that at the moment. We have been looking into it. I often thought, before I went to the Department, that the position was rather anomalous, there was so much inspection from various branches of social services. When you examine these things you sometimes find considerable difficulty. Perhaps there ought to be some kind of co-ordination of services, and perhaps, if economies can be made along those lines—I do not know whether they can or not—they could be pursued. If there was any prospect of economies being effected, I would be glad to have the matter pursued along those lines.

Question put: "That the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration."

The Committee divided; Tá, 25; Níl, 53.

Tá

• Bennett, George C.
• Benson,
• Brennan, Michael.
• Cogan, Patrick.
• Cosgrave, William T.
• Costello, John A.
• Dillon, James M.
• Doyle, Peadar S.
• Fsmonde, John L.
• Fagan, Charles.
• Fitzgerald-Kenney, James.
• Giles, Patrick.
• Hughes, James.
• Keating, John.
• Linehan, Timothy.
• Lynch, Finian.
• McFadden, Michael Og.
• McGilligan, Patrick.
• McGovern, Patrick.
• McMenamin, Daniel.
• Mongan, Joseph W.
• Mulcahy, Richard.
• Nally, Martin.
• O'Donovan, Timothy J.
• O'Higgins, Thomas F.

Níl

• Aiken, Frank.
• Allen, Denis.
• Bartley, Gerald.
• Beegan, Patrick.
• Boland, Gerald.
• Brady, Brian.
• Brady, Seán.
• Breslin, Cormac.
• Briscoe, Robert.
• Buckley, Seán.
• Childers, Erskine H.
• Cooney, Eamonn.
• Crowley, Tadhg.
• Flynn, John.
• Flynn, Stephen.
• Fogarty, Andrew.
• Friel, John.
• Harris, Thomas.
• Hickey, James.
• Hogan, Daniel.
• Humphreys, Francis.
• Hurley, Jeremiah.
• Kelly, James P.
• Kelly, Thomas.
• Keves, Michael.
• Killilea, Mark.
• Kissane, Eamon.
• Lemass, Seán F.
• Loughman, Francis.
• McCann, John.
• McDevitt, Henry A.
• Maguire, Ben.
• Meaney, Cornelius.
• Moore, Séamus.
• Moylan, Seán.
• Mullen, Thomas.
• Munnelly, John.
• Norton, William.
• O Ceallaigh, Seán T.
• O'Grady, Seán.
• O'Loghlen, Peter J.
• O'Reilly, Matthew.
• O'Rourke, Daniel.
• O'Sullivan, Ted.
• Rice, Brigid M.
• Ruttledge, Patrick J.
• Ryan, James.
• Ryan, Robert.
• Sheridan, Michael.
• Smith, Patrick.
• Traynor, Oscar.
• Walsh, Richard.
• Ward, Conn.

Tellers:—Tá: Deputies Doyle and Bennett; Níl: Deputies Smith and S. Brady.

Question declared lost.

Main question put and agreed to.

An Ceann Comhairle

On the subsidiary votes of this group Deputies may raise minor points if they so desire.