Sir, it is perhaps not inappropriate that the last words we heard in this House to-night were a suggestion from the Parliamentary Secretary that it might be better if the ordinary courts of the land were done away with altogether and a military tribunal used in their stead. Here we have a measure passing through this House which is, I think, the high water mark—at any rate up to the present— of the Government's attack on democratic procedure in this country. We have long been accustomed to the attitude of the Government that the local council should be controlled by their Party representatives in order that local administration by such bodies should be entirely in accord with the policy dictated by the Government. We have even had recently statements by a Parliamentary Secretary that the representatives, at any rate in a particular county, of the Fianna Fáil Party on a local body would be called together from time to time and instructed as to what their attitude was to be in the local council. We have seen the managerial idea introduced—an idea which was intended in its conception to put a better machine into the hands of the local representatives in order to relieve them of much of the detail in administering their areas and in order to put a more efficient instrument into their hands in carrying out their own local policies in relation to local matters. We have seen that idea carried much further than was originally intended and the county manager made an absolute servant and tool of the Minister; and, by being made such a servant and tool of the Minister for local Government, made the servant and tool of the Fianna Fáil Party. We now go another step further.
This Bill, as originally drafted, suggested that the Minister believed that circumstances might arise when, a rate having been struck, it might be clear that that rate was inadequate for the carrying on of the local services visualised under the Bill as originally drafted; and the Bill, as originally drafted, contained a provision that in such circumstances and on reconsideration of the matter a new rate might be struck by the local body. By the time that we came to discuss this matter in Committee, however, we were presented with an entirely different idea. We were presented with an amendment which, I think, was opposed by every single Deputy in the House, outside of the Government Party Deputies, and a new and brighter idea was introduced to the effect that when the Minister thought that a rate, having been struck, was insufficient to carry on the services of the county or the local body—as he understood them—he could order the local body to reconsider the matter and strike an adequate rate. We now provide in this amendment on Committee that if the local representatives do not take his view of the matter, but stand on their own judgment and take their own decisions in their own way, as local representatives dealing with local matters, and decide not to accept the Minister's judgment, the Minister can clear them out and put in a representative of his to take complete control of local finance, to strike whatever rate the Minister may dictate to him should be struck; in other words, to make, levy, collect and recover the rate. It is obvious, therefore, that in the passage of this Bill through this House the Minister has taken advantage of the Committee Stage to pass an amendment by which he can, when the local council, having struck a local rate, decline to vary it in accordance with his instructions, remove them from their position of power and responsibility in representing the local ratepayers and put his own representative into their place; and he can, by all the powers at the command of the Government, through him take control over their pockets and collect whatever rate the Minister in his discretion decides shall be collected.
Now, these powers are taken by a Government who came into office originally on a plank in their programme that they were going to derate agricultural land and reduce taxation generally. Far from doing that, the total amount of rates collected in the year 1945-46 was £3,000,000 more than the total of the rates collected before they came into office and £2,000,000 of that was from county councils. The total amount of taxation raised by taxes from 1932 up to the present year has increased by £17,000,000 and the whole tendency of increased taxation has been to shift the weight of the increasing burdens put upon the country by the Government from the taxes, which cannot now bear any more, on to the rates: and we have a number of Bills going through the House at the present time tending to increase the rates more and more—that is, rates that have been increased already by £3,000,000, to increase them still further by the powers the Minister is now taking to impose still further on the ratepayers. It is in that particular atmosphere that the Minister is taking under this measure the power to wipe out any local authority that does not strike a rate high enough according to his outlook on the situation.
It has been customary here in looking back over the times that have passed to realise that the introduction of local government, as we now know it, and the representative nature of local government, as we now know it, was the beginning of the political education of our people. It was through local government that they developed a sense of responsibility, on the one hand, and, on the other, a sense of power; it was through local government that they developed the capacity to administer local affairs. The general circumstances created by the Fianna Fáil Party's approach to local government have been such as to render local representative work distasteful to a very, very large number of our citizens and to a very, very large number of excellent people who have found it more convenient and more dignified to mind their own business—their own private business—and to avoid giving the public service what they would like to give because they are not allowed to give that public service in an atmosphere in which Christian, dignified and patriotic people would like to give it. They are up against the Fianna Fáil machine.
The public life of our country has been made all the poorer by the withdrawal of these excellent people from public service because of the circumstances created by the Fianna Fáil Party. Now, there are those who still voluntarily give local service on local bodies and I sincerely hope that a large number of them will continue to do that work; but they are going to be put into a more undignified position, if you like, whereby they can be wiped out at any moment by an Order of the Minister who has power to dictate that they shall do certain things in their locality. If the local representative body decide that it is not a thing that can be done and decline to provide, out of the pockets of their fellow-ratepayers, the money for it, they can be wiped out by a stroke of the Minister's pen. The Minister is taking these powers. If I were unconcerned with the order and dignity of public life in the country, I would be tempted to say the Minister is welcome to these powers, because, great as has been the patience of our people, great as has been their bewilderment as to what they ought to do in face of the policy and tactics adopted by the Government Party, our people have not lost all sense of public responsibility and all sense of human dignity. They realise that unless individual people and individual representatives in various parts of the country stand manfully, courageously and intelligently over local problems and local work, this country will be destroyed. Even the very circumstances and difficulties of the last six years have awakened in the people a sense of the fact that they must trouble themselves and exert themselves in looking after their public affairs. There is already an awakening throughout the country of that sense of responsibility. The Minister will find that the wiping out of local government in the way in which he is doing it administratively and is now planning to do it in a more wholesale way, will not be tolerated by out people. Our people realise that unless the local affairs of Cork are carried out with local intelligence and under local direction with a local sense of responsibility—the same applies in Roscommon and Galway—the affairs of the country as a whole will not be properly looked after.
The strength of our people has never been the strength of one man. The strength of our people has been the democratic strength spread throughout the country as a whole, where individual people realised their responsibilities and co-operated with one another to stand up to their responsibilities. It is the systematic policy of the Fianna Fáil Party to destroy that strength. They have destroyed it to a certain extent. There are things that you may damage but there are things that you may not wipe out completely and the Minister, I think, has gone to the end of his tether in attempting to wipe out local responsibility and local sense of service throughout the country. This Bill will not be the tool or the weapon in the hands of the Government that they expect it to be. The country may be in for a certain time of difficulty when the new great plans of the Minister for Local Government and his two lieutenants reach the point of being put into effect, but when these plans and the cost of them disclose themselves and when the relationships between these things to the actual needs and capacity of the country reveal themselves to local ratepayers and their representatives the Minister will meet people that he will not be able to overawe or overcome. While certain difficulties may arise between local bodies and the totalitarian-minded Ministry we have now, I am quite sure the result will be an awakening of Irish democracy to its responsibility, its rights and its duties.
