I want to second very strongly what Deputy Mulcahy has said here to-day. Whether we like it or not, we are trustees of public money. You have the right, if you want to, and if you are a wealthy man, to expend large sums out of your own private purse in the pursuit of some foible in which you happen to take a peculiar interest, but we have no right to tax the people of the country, who are already heavily taxed for essential services, to pour their money down the drain. I get the feeling on every occasion when we return to the discussion of expenses on these turf proposals that we are in a sort of fog. Nobody knows their beginning, nobody knows their end. Nobody can feel that there will come a time when the Minister can say: "We are now making a profit on Clonsast", or, "We are making a profit on the entire operations of the Turf Board and it is now in a position when it can progressively liquidate the debts which have accrued and we can consider how we shall dispose of the profits." The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, who is now leaving the House, knows that he has spent very large sums of money on turf development. The Minister for Industry and Commerce has spent very large sums on turf development. Nobody sees that more than a person who occupies the position which I have the honour to occupy at the moment as Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. When you come to examine the Accounting Officer for the Department of Industry and Commerce in regard to the expenditure on turf development, you find that a very large part of the money spent is not his responsibility at all. It is astonishing the amount of money that is being laid out in connection with these enterprises, for the expenditure of which the sole justification was that they facilitated in one way or another the operations of the Turf Development Board.
We have all got to recognise that there are such things as political prestige and that once extravagant speeches have been made describing the rosy prospects of any particular enterprise, there is a great temptation on the Government to pour more and more money into it in order to avoid the appearance of a fiasco. But when we are asking the people to make such substantial sacrifices as they are being asked for at present and as they may be asked for in the future, and when we are constrained to refuse benefits to certain sections of the community that we feel we ought to give but simply cannot afford to give at present, it does seem to me something approximating to reckless imprudence to appropriate hundreds of thousands of pounds for an enterprise in which, as far as I can find out, nobody has any confidence. The best the Minister can say is that it is an experiment and that he hopes something will come out of it. He will not commit himself to say: "I stake my reputation after having heard the experts that these schemes will ultimately justify the expenditure of the money we are at present spending on them".
The Minister himself has been Minister for Finance and he has known how often he has felt acute distress on having to veto some admirable proposal on the ground that there was no money to pay for it. I ask him now to cast his mind back to the day when he was Minister for Finance and to ask himself the question: "If the same case were made to me in my office as I have been making on this Vote, could I, in conscience, have recommended to the Executive Council that in order to finance this mad plan, we ought to put aside family allowances, to put aside the claims of teachers in industrial schools and to postpone a variety of other valid requests that have been made to us on the ground that we have no money?" I do not wish to drag a whole lot of irrelevancies into this debate but the House will recollect that yesterday I asked certain concessions for a small group of people which would cost only a few thousand pounds. In making that request I felt strongly the force of the reply given by the Minister for Finance which had been made on a previous occasion to a similar representation: "We have every sympathy with your case; we think there is a great deal to be said for it but the difficulty is that we cannot put our hands on the money because Army expenditure and every other expenditure has gone up and this very necessary act of justice must be postponed." I have seen the people for whom that act of justice was asked dying off. At the same time I am asked to vote a sum for Lullymore Bog far in excess of what would abate that injustice for all time. Surely the Minister for Industry and Commerce has often asked himself the question as to whether he is justified in committing the country to an expenditure of this kind at such a time?
There is a new atmosphere abroad in the country at present. You could understand two or three years ago, when things were pretty hot and political acrimony was active, that Ministers felt a sort of justification in spending public money to preserve the Government from the scandal that might be created by the failure of any considerable Government scheme. It was justifiable perhaps to expend public money to avert such a failure in order that greater good might come. Everyone is now prepared, however, without regard to political considerations to review proposals on their merits with a view to helping the country in any way we can. I do not believe that, in that atmosphere, schemes such as these should be brought before the House. As Deputy Mulcahy has stated we are prepared, with profound reluctance, to abstain from a positive refusal of these moneys if the Minister is prepared to say to us that at some given date he is going to call a halt to this business and that he is going to say to these people: "There is no use saying to us that if we give you million after million after million, some day you will produce something. You have got to carry conviction to my mind that at some reasonably ascertainable future date, I can go before the House and say: ‘We have passed the paying out stage; now we are going to get something back.' If you cannot say that we had better jettison the whole thing and admit its failure."
I should be long sorry to see this Vote passed through the Dáil without its being recorded in the records of the House that as far as I am concerned, and I think as far as most of my colleagues are concerned, we have no confidence in this experiment at all. Nothing further than an assurance from the Minister, after consultation with the experts of his Department, that he is satisfied that these experiments will ultimately yield a return on the money expended on them, would justify us in consenting to these Estimates being voted without a division. I could draw up a long indictment in connection with the bags and the hand-won turf to which I referred yesterday and I could make a good deal of political capital out of them at the expense of the present Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence and the Minister for Supplies. I am prepared to waive all that. All we want is that these matters should be cleared up, that we should know, as Deputy Mulcahy has said, where we are going and what the limit of our contingent liability is going to be.
There is one other matter that I want to raise in connection with the Estimate and that relates to sub-head J. I understood that the governing principle of mineral exploration was that if a citizen of this State went in to the Minister for Industry and Commerce and said: "I think there are minerals in a certain area and if I get a lease and a licence to explore that area and an undertaking from you that I will get the right to extract the minerals if I find them, I am prepared to go ahead," and that, in consideration of these representations, the Minister was prepared to say: "If you are going to spend your money looking for the minerals, I am prepared to say to you that, in the event of your finding them, you will get a lease to exploit them." That is fair enough. If the lease is probably going to be of a valuable character the Minister says: "I am going to lay the terms of the agreement on the Table of the Dáil and I will recommend it to Dáil Eireann for confirmation." On confirmation, the individual went forward with the exploration either with his own or with friends' money, and if he found something he reaped a rich harvest, and if he found nothing he lost his money. That is a fair rough and ready way of getting the mineral deposits of the country exploited to their full potentiality.
But, what justification can there be for a citizen coming in and saying: "I think there are minerals in Laoighis-Offaly and I not only want the right to explore them and the right ultimately to exploit them, but I want to be paid for going to look for them."? That does not seem to me fair at all. If the Government think it worth while to pour public money down bore holes in Laoighis-Offaly, they ought to do the exploration themselves. If the minerals are there and are exploitable, let the profit accrue to the public purse. If the public purse is going to take a financial risk, why should an individual reap the profit? Is there any precedent for making contributions of this kind to individuals for the purpose of mineral exploration? If there is, I never heard of it. It seems to me to upset the whole basis upon which the system of prospecting for minerals has been established.
I should like the Minister when he comes to deal with that to tell us quite definitely what the policy of the Government is in that regard. I suggest to him that the proper policy is that, if an apparently solvent person or corporation approaches him whom he believes to be bona fide, he ought to give the lease and licence sought, submit it to Dáil Eireann in the usual way for approval, and then tell them to take all or lose all. If, on the other hand a person approaches him in respect of mineral development and says, “I could not go on with this unless you are prepared to put up money”, and the Minister feels that the proposition is of a character that would justify a contribution from the Government, he ought, instead of making a contribution, to take over the prospecting functions himself on behalf of the people and, if a mineral deposit materialises, exploit it as a State property. I can imagine Deputy Hickey intervening and charging me with having become a socialist. I do not think that is socialism at all; I think it is commonsense.
