I submit to the ruling of the Chair. This subsidy is to enable the Minister to get over difficulties created by himself and his Department. I suggest that there is no call for this subsidy and I will prove that. It is essential that you should make this fuel an economic fuel. How is the matter being approached? Let us go back to the beginning, to the crisis in 1939. Certain people waited upon the Minister and they pointed out the absurdity of taking this fuel from Donegal, Mayo or Kildare on hired petrol-driven lorries. These men were getting allowances of petrol and it is common knowledge among the people of Dublin that these men were selling half their petrol allowances. They were manipulating the road mileage to suit themselves. I make this statement and I am prepared to prove it. There was a wholesale market at the East Wall among the men engaged transporting the turf; they were selling petrol openly.
They were taking fuel right into the City of Dublin, down to the far end of the East Wall, almost out into the open sea. They brought clampers up with them, men who knew how to clamp turf. Others took a chance. As a matter of fact, not one of these men was required in Dublin. Among the 540 men engaged in the first year in clamping and distributing turf, there were many who would have been better employed in the country, winning the turf. Instead of that they brought highly skilled men, many of them born on the bogs and more suitable for winning turf, up to the City of Dublin to clamp turf, throwing out the men who formerly built coal on the quays. These men were sent to the Labour Exchanges, where they drew unemployed money. Out of the 540 who were registered, there were many who would be more useful in their own areas, winning turf. They were only coming to Dublin on the first stage of the road to England. They could not get a permit to go away while they were on the bogs, but they got over the difficulty by coming to Dublin to do work which should be done by Dublin labour. There were many men here who were put out of work here because of the falling off in the shipments of coal. They were getting unemployed money. The next thing that happened with the men who came up was that they got permits to go to Great Britain and there was a regular flow of those men to that country.
The Minister was told that the whole policy was stupid, and I dare him deny that. Why should that stuff have to come right through Dublin, passing through Inchicore and Drimnagh, right down to the sea edge? It was bad enough in the rainy and windy weather to have turf clamped in the Park, but it was nothing but stupidity to put turf on the edge of the sea. No doubt some of it was properly clamped, but more of it was not properly clamped. The rain was driven in from the sea on top of it and in addition to that it was affected by the sea water. The clamps were caught not alone by ordinary rain, but by water from the sea, thus ruining the turf altogether. The turf there is being destroyed by the salt water spray from the sea. The Minister was advised to set up depôts in the different areas of consumption. A resolution was carried, on my initiative, in the corporation three and a half years ago asking the City Manager to set up depôts, with the Minister's approval. The City Manager, under the direction of his engineer, drafted a scheme for 11 depôts. Not one of these depôts has been opened yet. The possibilities are that, with the Minister's good will, they will be opened in the near future. A Deputy mentioned Lucan and the practice of taking turf through Lucan to the East Wall and having to bring it back 12 miles to Lucan for distribution. There was never such an asinine policy.
We are not, in this democratic country, being governed by elected bodies any longer. A board was appointed. Surely the first interest that should have representation on that board is the consumer's. The consumer is not represented although I have been pleading for representation for the consumer for three years. The manager of the gas company was on the board and certain other interested parties who were distributing coal. They are all men of capacity. I am not questioning that, but after all, they must be actuated by their own selfish interests. All of the members of the board are employers. There is not one individual representing the consumers on the board, not even to-day, although there are three vacancies. I have asked the Minister, in this House and outside it, why does he not appoint somebody representing the corporation, for instance, which is the largest consumer of turf in the city, either directly or through their boards of assistance. Why should not someone representing the consumers as a whole be given the right to sit on that particular board? You have on the board the coal merchant, Carroll—a very able man, whose family have been two or three generations in the coal business. There are other people of that type on the board. These people are not concerned to make turf an economic proposition. I believe—I may be judging them wrongly—that they are not concerned with the efficient production of turf.
The Minister knows that during the last few months there have been continual crises in turf distribution. The merchants say they are not going to handle it, that it does not pay, that their yards are occupied with great volumes of turf and that they do not get anything out of it. I suppose they are going to get some of this £170,000. I would not give them one red cent. They pay their men only what they are compelled to pay. Why should they get any of this subsidy? I am quite sure that this subsidy is asked for in order to give another handful of the national wealth to these merchants.
I suggest that the Minister should pay particular attention to this matter of turf production. The House will help him if he will be helped or if the men in his Department will only approach the question in a business way. What is the approach to it? Somebody should be appointed to represent the workers on the bog so that when any crisis occurs, such as complaints of bad food or bad bedding accommodation, lack of ordinary social contacts, the men's point of view can be represented. That is not the position at the moment. Militarisation for the camps is the order of the day. If a man attempts to agitate for improved conditions for the men in the camp, he is driven out of the area, under the emergency law: There is no proper approach to the problem. Men are being taken from various counties. Men are being brought in from Donegal who were accustomed to work on a piece basis. They are employed with men from the Kildare area, whose families have been engaged for generations in winning turf, on a weekly wage. You have these antagonistic ideas. There are other men from Mayo, a migratory class of workers, who usually go to Great Britain and work on a piece rate over there.
I am not objecting to a piece rate being paid for this job, but I say if you want to encourage men to do this work you should give the man who is working an ordinary day's work a decent wage and keep him in the bog to which he belongs and with which he is familiar. The town-bred man should be given the ordinary work which can be done by any intelligent man after a lesson or two. Men are brought from County Kildare, Mayo and Donegal to Dublin. After a time they want to get away to England. They go, and another group comes up from the provinces. Everyone knows that, when the ordinary man from the provinces gets to Dublin and finds work, his next move is to send for his 41st cousin.
These men are coming into Dublin and the Dublinman is being deprived of work and is standing idle or is employed through the labour exchange to clamp turf. After five years we are still clamping turf. The turf that was brought into the Park has been reclamped four times. Deputies should go to the Park to see the absurdity. It has been admitted by the board that 22 per cent. of that turf has gone into mould. I suggest that 25 per cent. is a conservative figure. Twenty-five per cent of the turf that was brought to Dublin from the different counties has been woefully wasted. As Deputy Norton said, it has been criminally wasted. What can be done with this mould? It has been advertised for sale. How can it be used? Somebody suggested that it could be made into briquettes. You cannot make mould into briquettes. It would have to be mixed with slurry or something else to give it a body.
There was a contract entered into a few days ago at 3/6 a ton to lift this mould and carry it to James's Harbour, from where it would be taken to Carbury, 30 miles from Dublin, where it would be pressed into ordinary briquettes. The surprising thing is that the man who had that contract in the City of Dublin, and who employed Dublin men, was told that his contract was finished and a new contractor, who gets 5/6 per ton, goes in. Within four days, there was an increase of 33 per cent. in the cost of picking up this useless mould, some of which is being trodden into the ground in the Park. That mould is now being carted to James's Harbour and loaded into barges. I suppose the canal company is getting about 6/6 per ton and think of how many tons they can take on a 40-ton barge. Such a barge will take seven tons, or ten tons at the outside, of this mould to Carbury to be pressed, and brought back to Dublin in the form of pressed sections.
That is the way this money is being wasted, and, yet, when we citizens, who pay these rates and are interested in this industry not from a temporary point of view to meet a crisis, but as a permanent feature of our economics, bring these matters up, we are told that it is not our business. I suggest to the House that it is our business, and if ever the House did a justifiable thing, it would be to vote down and to refuse to give this subsidy until it got an assurance from the Minister that he will turn his attention, as a business man, to these matters.
The extraordinary thing about it is that those who are less interested in this country than any other group seem always to be congratulating him and patting him on the back. Even Mr. David Coyle, the President of the Federation of Employers, has taken to eulogising him. He is almost an omnipotent person from the point of view of these people whose only interest is the making of profits. Yet those who know him well, who lived and worked with him and feel that he could do such useful service to this country, are supposed to be antagonistic to him. That is not true; he has more sincere friends among the working-class and among those interested in this nation than amongst the people who are interested only from the point of view of profit. I suggest that he turn his attention to these matters.
Take the position with regard to this mould of which there are tons and tons in heaps. It has to be moved two or three times off the road, because, as the men work into the face of the clamp, they have to move the stuff, and it is sometimes handled three or four times. It is pushed here and there in heaps, and is now being carted away to the canal banks and taken to Carbury. I suggest that before it gets to Carbury this waste material costs the State 11/- a ton, which is a low estimate. It costs more to take it to the machines, the hydrogenation plant, and when it has gone through that process, it has to be pressed and brought back to Dublin.
When it has been pressed and brought back to Dublin, what happens? It comes alongside the canal bank as one of the finest fuels the world produces. A private company was selling this pressed fuel made in Carbury, under a subsidy from the Government, as a result of which they lost £96,000—that, of course, is nothing; it is just something one throws about here and there—in Dublin, in 1934, at 29/- per ton delivered to the Joint Grangegorman Board. That turf cannot be sold in Dublin at present under £3 4s. 0d., but are they selling those pressed briquettes? No—they are being taken across the city, at a cost of 5/6 or 6/- per ton, to Portland Row and stored there, and nobody is supposed to go near it. Yet, strange to relate, you will find shops selling this pressed turf and when you ask how they got it, or under what licence it was obtained, nobody knows. I saw a load going into a certain shop in Baggot Street and I asked the carter where he got it. He told me he got it from Portland Row. I asked another carter and he told me he got it from James's Harbour.
That stuff is being sold and distributed, and I suggest that the Minister should send somebody up to Portland Row to measure the quantity of pressed briquettes in the brewery there, and to find out how many tons went in and how many there are at present. I suggest that when that turf in Portland Row is weighed out, there will be 30 per cent. less than was put in. I further suggest that we should get from the Minister the tonnage of ordinary turf which went into the Park. I should like to know has anybody got any figures as to the amount of turf which went into the Phoenix Park and was clamped there, and how much has been distributed. I undertake to say that there is not one man in any Department knows anything about it. They neither know whether 100,000 tons went in or whether 100,000 tons came out.
The same applies to the position at East Wall. There is not a man in a Government Department at present could say how much turf has been sold and how much remains. That is a problem which can be very easily adjusted, but it can be adjusted only by men with a full sense of responsibility, and I suggest that the Minister should turn his attention to that matter before he comes to the House to ask for another £170,000. It is a glaring and barefaced imposition to ask for money until there has been a full investigation of the business attitude and sense of responsibility of those charged with the duty of turf production and distribution.
I turn now to the question of distribution. I have some knowledge of this industry from the beginning. When Clonsast Bog was opened up, the men were paid on the basis of lineal measurement for the winning of turf. A bogman knows by looking at the ground, almost to the ton, how much he will get out and how much he can win in a day. Winning turf is a job for skilled workers and the man who wins turf on a bog is no unskilled worker. He is a skilled worker, and I could get men like Joe Connolly and others who would get more turf from a bog in half-an-hour than any man here would get in a week. But that is not the way they do it. They first had a German gentleman down there who was a great authority on turf. I do not suppose he had ever seen a bog in his life until he came to Ireland and we had another gentleman there under semi-Government control. He had £1,000 a year, and he walked about with a beret. Half his time was spent walking up and down the bog and one would think he was a landed proprietor. Inside the study owned by that company, subsidised by this Government, he had a picture of Hitler which would cover one of the walls of this House.
He was receiving £1,000 a year, and, when I examined his credentials, I found that he had never seen a bog. That man has another job now—a good secure job in the City of Dublin at £12 12s. 0d. a week, but the Government lost all that money in that venture. The man we had on the bog at Clonsast looked on the Irish labourer, and more particularly the bogman, as something much lower than a human being. The men were being paid on the basis of lineal measurement and it was decided that they were earning too much. Some of them were making as much as £2 per week and one of these brilliant geniuses suggested that the men be put on metric measurement. I wonder how many Deputies here know anything about metric measurement? Just imagine a poor workingman with a national school education being paid on the basis of metric measurement—and that in a country which believes in decency and Christian conduct towards one's fellow-man.
That continued for some period and there were objections and repeated strikes. Now, Clonsast is working again, and so is Kildare, and all I ask the Minister to do is to see that these men who are engaged in this industrialised form of turf production are treated as human beings. These men have human rights and social rights.
