I want to resume on this Estimate by drawing the attention of the Minister to the very serious situation that exists in relation to the administration of the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts as they affect Dublin City and County. The present position is of such a serious nature so far as borrowers or intending borrowers are concerned that it merits the immediate attention of the present occupant of the Ministerial post of Local Government. Many hundreds of people in this city and in County Dublin who are anxious to avail of these Acts are being held up by reason of administrative difficulties which exist in the legal section of the Dublin County Council. These difficulties are not new. They have been there over a long period. They came to a head recently owing to the resignation from office of an assistant law agent who dealt particularly with applications for loans under these Acts.
There are many people, young people recently married, families who have been struggling for years to save sufficient money to make a deposit on a new house, who are now held up and prevented from receiving the first or second instalment of loans and prevented from going into new houses because of the fact that this vacancy exists. It is a scandalous condition of affairs inasmuch as it results in the infliction of very severe hardship upon large numbers of people who are doing a very admirable thing in trying to provide themselves with houses and not placing it a burden on the local authority to provide them with houses. I ask the Minister to take particular note of that situation and to take such action as may be necessary to bring it to an end, to bring about a satisfactory position for the unfortunate people to whom I have referred.
Deputies will be familiar with the situation I am speaking about. As well as the borrowers, and the people who want to get possession of houses to reside in, there are also affected large numbers of building contractors who are engaged upon the building of houses under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts and who are dependent for their capital and ordinary running expenses upon the even flow of money from the Dublin County Council in respect of these Acts. That position has existed for some weeks now and it has been a growing sore over a long period so far as public representatives in Dublin City and County are concerned, and must be remedied. I believe the difficulty exists because of the reluctance of some authority to provide adequate remuneration for a competent legal man to deal with the day-to-day problems which arise where borrowers are concerned. I hope that the Minister will look into this matter. On a previous occasion I asked the former Minister when something similar occurred to look into the matter, and it was adjusted satisfactorily. I hope that example will be followed and that the complaints made to public representatives over a long period in regard to the slow working mechanism of the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts in these areas will be remedied.
It is obvious to everybody who has had any dealing with this particular aspect of the housing drive that the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts have been of tremendous benefit to the people on the whole. From day to day difficulties and delays arise in the operation of these Acts in connection with the acquisition of title so far as sites are concerned and so far as the price and valuation of houses are concerned. All these matters cause very great delay in the housing of middle-class people and people of that kind who have managed to save sufficient money to put down a deposit for a house. They all seem to converge and to get held up in the bottle-neck of the legal department of the local authorities. I speak particularly of the legal department of the Dublin County Council and I do so in the knowledge that we have in the Dublin County Council one of the most competent law officers in Ireland who is working very hard to clear up the position but cannot do so until the whole thing is reorganised and adequate remuneration is made available for a suitable and competent man so as to provide that there will be no interruption of the work so far as the making available of loans to borrowers is concerned. That is an important matter and I sincerely hope the Minister will give it his immediate attention.
I also want to refer to an aspect of local Government which will, I am sure, come under the consideration of the Minister within the coming year. It is one with which members of local authorities in every part of Ireland are very familiar; it is a problem which strikes into the homes of ordinary people, that is, the question of the size of the houses which are now being built and which have been built. In many cases the houses which were built in rural areas ten, 12 or 20 years ago were of the three-roomed labourer's cottage type. In that period the families occupying the houses have grown from families of one or two children to families of six, seven, eight, nine or ten children. Admittedly, these people are housed, but they are inadequately housed because the number of rooms is totally insufficient to provide living space for the number of people living in them. There is only one method whereby that problem can be remedied, namely, by building additional rooms to these cottages. Every county councillor in Ireland is aware of the tremendous demand that exists and that has existed over the years for the provision of additional rooms to county council cottages.
One of the difficulties in regard to this matter is the eternal difficulty of finance. In County Dublin it was decided to tackle this problem and it was discovered, on an estimate provided by the officials of the county council, that the cost of building one additional room to a county council cottage would be £400. When it is considered that practically every old type county council cottage in the county needs an additional room it is obvious that there is a tremendous financial problem involved. The question, where to find the money, immediately arose. The estimated cost, £400, may be somewhat exaggerated, but that estimate was given to at least one council, the council of which I am a member, by the officials and it was given in good faith as representing the cost of building an additional room.
If county councils throughout the country are to be required, as they must be, to build additional rooms, finance must be found to help them to do it. This is work of a capital nature. It is work which must be encouraged. It can be encouraged in a practical way by the provision of financial aid to enable the councils to build additional rooms.
If Dublin County Council, for instance, is forced into the position of building additional rooms at its own expense, if they are built entirely from funds which the council itself must find, then the position will be that an increased rent will be levied which will be altogether outside the competence of the tenant to pay. It is suggested that in Dublin County, if an additional room is built to a labourer's cottage, irrespective of what the existing rent may be, say, 9d, 1/6, 3/- or 7/6, the building of that additional room will mean a charge of 11/6 per week in addition to the existing rent. Manifestly, that is a ridiculous proposition. That is the charge which the officials of the council say would be required to ensure that the sum expended on the additional room, estimated at £400, would be returned by way of rent to the council over a period of years. That is a ridiculous proposition. The worker living in a rural area and the worker in the town are at the present time lowly paid. They have a hard enough job to meet the ordinary commitments of life and to try to rear their families in decency and in some kind of frugal comfort. The suggestion that they should pay such a sum as 11/6 a week in addition to their existing cottage rent is completely unreal and is one that anyone with any experience of local authorities would not consider for a moment.
The problem is, how are county councils or local authorities to be persuaded to build these additional rooms, which should be built and which must be built, and at the same time bear the full cost themselves? We all know that the predominating factor that influences members of local authorities throughout the country is the overwhelming desire to keep rates down at all costs. That is the overwhelming motive, it seems to me, of most county councillors. That idea may appear very laudable to some people and, within reason, rates should be kept down, but I think it is very often pushed too far by members of all Parties with the result that it has a certain bad reaction in many cases on the well-being of the people who reside in the administrative area of the particular council. As long as that mentality exists, there will not be adequate housing facilities.
It is not sufficient in this day and age that a family of five, six, seven or eight should be huddled together in three small rooms, sleeping in two, eating and living in one. That is not a civilised condition of affairs. It might have been quite acceptable 50 years ago. It might have been good enough in those days for the ordinary people in the mind of those who were ruling this country, but we should have a higher concept of the needs of our people. It is not right that four or five people should be huddled together in a small cell-like room and the rest of the family huddled together in another room. It is wrong from every point of view. It is wrong from the point of view of the preservation of the family unit, of which we speak so much at various times both in this House and outside it. We are never done paying lip service to the ideal of the family unit, but is there an influence more destructive of the family unit than the crowding together of too many people in too small a space? Anyone who has had the experience of being crowded with a number of people, even members of one's own family, in too small a space, knows that it has a bad effect; that it creates dissension. Human nature is not made for that kind of living.
I hope the present Minister will give some consideration to the need for extending the existing living space in county council cottages and to the financial problems that underlie the problem, which must be met in some way. I have found that, as a general rule, the tenants of cottages who need additional rooms are prepared to face a reasonable increase in their rent but, as things stand at the moment, they are being asked to pay unreasonable increases. I would ask that the whole matter be investigated.
While the matter is under consideration and investigation, a little imagination might be applied to the design of council cottages throughout the whole country. It may be cheaper to build a three-roomed house rather than a four-roomed house or a five-roomed house but it is surely a short-sighted policy because, in the long run, it will result in emphasis and accentuation of the housing problem. Everyone knows that a great part of our present housing problem is due to the fact that in county council cottages and working-class houses, when the children of the tenants reach maturity and get married they have no alternative but to bring their bride or bridegroom, as the case may be, into their parents' home. They live in one room in that home. A family comes into existence and for many years they live there waiting for a house. The conditions of overcrowding in such cases are very often nothing less than appalling. If we are to provide against a recurrence in our lifetime—and that is a modest enough ambition—of these awful housing conditions, in cycles, as they seem to have occurred over the last 25 years, we must look well ahead and we must plan a type of house which will provide space for people to live in harmony, to live without friction and to live as they were designed and created to live.
That leads me to the equally important question of the general condition of county council cottages. No doubt, this problem which vitally affects the constituency of Dublin County has an equal application throughout the country. For the period from 1939 to the end of the war, and possibly for a couple of years after, it is within the knowledge of everybody that county council cottages and local authority houses generally fell into a pretty serious state of disrepair—not in ones, or twos, or in isolated cases, but generally, and for many reasons. The reasons which undoubtedly will be given and have been given by the Minister and by representatives of the Party now in Government are connected with shortage of supplies. There are two views on that, but I am concerned now with trying to get something done with the present situation.
In my own constituency, we have approximately 3,500 labourers' cottages, cottages in which working-class people live-most of them rural dwellers, badly paid and struggling to live—and anybody who cares to go out to see them will be shocked by the condition of disrepair into which many of them have fallen in the past ten or 12 years. It may be said, and will be said, that it is the function of the local authority to maintain these houses in a condition of repair, but again we come up against the problem of finance. It has been estimated in my county that, in order to repair these cottages adequately, to bring them into a fair condition of repair, approximately £100,000 will need to be spent in the next three or four years. That gives an idea of the problem as it affects County Dublin, and it is repeated all over the country.
The question of finance arises, and I think that work of that kind is essentially capital expenditure, because the homes and houses we build for our people are the most important work that can be undertaken. Although the building of these houses is undertaken directly by the local authorities in the different areas, indirectly the Government of the day is responsible in no small measure for seeing that houses are built for the people and for making financial provision to ensure that they will be kept in some sort of reasonable repair.
I suggest to the Minister that, in the coming year, he might give attention to the need which exists for a complete revision of the provisions for cottage purchase. Every tenant of a cottage is interested in the proposition that he should own his own house and bit of land and that proposition undoubtedly has a tremendous appeal for the people. That is only as it should be, but the present regulations governing cottage purchase are not of such a nature as to attract the tenants sufficiently to induce them to set about the purchase of their houses. The period of payment of the annuity is far too long. When the tenant hears the length of time he has to pay the annuity in order to purchase the cottage, although he and his people before him may have occupied that cottage for 30, 40 or 50 years, and hears that he has to pay a fixed sum of money for a further 20 or 30 years, his enthusiasm for purchase is killed, and that is a bad thing. If tenants can be persuaded to purchase their cottages, it will mean an easier burden on the local authorities and a lighter burden on the Central Fund, but they can only be persuaded by offering more attractive terms and I trust that some consideration will be given to that very important aspect of the cottage tenants' position.
On the repairs question, it is essential that there should be greater thrust by the local authority to bring cottages into a proper state of repair. I am aware of cottages in my constituency which will not stand much more neglect, which will be beyond repair in a very short time if they are not attended to. I feel that that thrust should be brought about by leadership from the Department. As I said last night, the Minister has a very good example which he might very well follow in respect of many aspects of the housing problem in the work of his predecessor, and this aspect is one which I would commend for his consideration. There should be leadership in this matter and local authorities should be told that it is a responsibility of theirs to see that cottages in which ordinary working-class people have to live all their lives, in which children have to be brought up and from which they must be sent out to be educated to enable them to fight their way in the world—some of them could not be called homes because they are no more than hovels—are made decent for the decent people who live in them, because the most decent people in this country live in labourers' cottages.
The question of building generally and building costs is one which will, no doubt, engage the attention of the Minister in the next 12 months, because it must necessarily engage the attention of any Minister for Local Government. In that connection, it is as well to observe the tremendous measure of success which has followed the adoption of building by direct labour in different parts of the country. All of us recall that for donkey's years in this country there was a fetish, a gospel, abroad that the only way you could build a house was by giving a contractor a substantial profit to build it. That was the only way you could build economically. That particular fallacy has been completely exploded in the past three years and it has been found that, where local authorities built houses by direct labour, the cost of such houses was very much below the cost at which they would have been built had they been built by contractors. I hope that the policy of building by direct labour will be pushed by the Department and that local authorities will be encouraged during the coming year to build by direct labour, because it has been found in practice to be the most economical and the best form of building.
That is not to say that the private building contractor should be eliminated. He can give good service to the community by entering into competition, as regards price, with local authorities, who are building by direct labour. It is obvious to all that the direct labour schemes have been a pronounced success. At present some of them are being held up through the shortage of cement and in some areas some of the workers are being gradually laid off. It is a curious thing, however, that while the private building contractor generally has been able to obtain adequate supplies of cement, the local authorities building by direct labour have been the first to suffer, from the shortage. The shortage of cement is a problem which will be solved only by the erection of a further cement factory, but that is not something with which the present Minister has a great deal to do, though it must be tackled as well as the other problems.
Would the Minister indicate, when replying, for my information and the information of people associated with my constituency, what he proposes to do, if anything, in the coming year with regard to a project known as the Bray Road scheme? A year or two ago, when members of the Minister's Party, notably my learned colleague from my own constituency, were speaking here, or as members of his Party in the Dublin County Council, they were demanding that the famous Bray Road scheme should not be abandoned. In fact, that kindly, charitably-spoken gentleman, Deputy MacEntee, the present Minister for Finance, stated on 5th July here in the Dáil that "this is a public work that must ultimately and inevitably be carried out". That is given in Volume 122, column 695, for the 5th July, 1950. Does the Minister propose to restart that scheme during the coming year or in the future? It was to cost £500,000. I was anxious; with others, that it should be carried through and it would appear that the Fianna Fáil Party were also anxious that it should be carried through, judging by their public pronouncements.
I would like to hear the Minister, in replying, say that it will be carried through, as it would provide much-needed employment, or the continuation of much-needed employment, in my constituency. The fact that it was not put through may be ascribed to the local authority, the Dublin County Council, who by a majority objected, under pressure from certain rate-paying interests. In my constituency, it meant that £80,000 which would have been allocated from the £500,000 and which was to be devoted to the improvement of the main Dublin-Belfast road, was not expended. As this proposal originally started before the advent of the inter-Party Government, I hope it will be brought forward again and I would be glad to hear what the Minister has to say about it.
One of the most vital and pressing problems which beset persons endeavouring to build in Dublin City or County is the problem of town planning and the green belt. Town planning is undoubtedly very beneficial and is essential in this modern age. The general concept of it is one with which no progressive person will disagree. Unfortunately, the application of that concept and that theory to town planning in the City of Dublin has not been so happy. We have had great difficulty at various times in securing permission for the working or middle-class people to build houses in certain areas, where impossible conditions were imposed upon them by virtue of town planning regulations. Under the Town Planning Acts, the Minister has discretion to decide on appeal in favour of or against those who may be aggrieved by the actions of the town planning authority and I am glad to say that the previous Ministers who have occupied the Custom House for the past three years have distinguished themselves by their very liberal interpretation of the town planning regulations. It was an interpretation which brought benefit to those who were trying to build and who were grappling with the mass of red tape that surrounds the problem. I hope that policy of the previous Ministers will be followed by the present Minister.
We seem to suffer in this country generally from insufficient numbers of competent officers prepared to work for local authorities. We have had the experience in County Dublin of one of our most competent officers leaving us to work with another local authority— as it was within his rights to do—for the simple reason that the scale of remuneration offered was infinitely superior to that offered by the Dublin County Council. If we are to attract into the public service the best brains in the country, those whom we need in the line of engineers and persons interested in town planning and building, we must be prepared to offer them terms of remuneration which will bring them in. In some cases at present, the scales offered are the surest guarantee of keeping them out.
I would like the Minister to let us know, when replying, whether he will give some thought to the purely local problem between Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council regarding the city fringe housing ground. It strikes those of us associated with the housing problem here that there should be some reciprocity as between the city and the county housing authorities in the matter of allocations. I understand that the present regulation is that no local housing authority has a right to house an applicant unless he resides within the administrative area of that housing authority. Whether it is a regulation or not, certainly it is the practice and it is unrealistic in the case of Dublin City and County because very often we have cases—not one or two individual cases but scores—of people who reside on the borders of the city and county and while one housing authority, such as the county council, might not find it possible to provide houses for them, it might be an easy matter because of the nature of the case for the corporation to provide them. They are prevented, however, from taking such steps because of the lack of a reciprocal arrangement between the two housing authorities and the Minister should take steps to bring that unsatisfactory position to an end.
I referred last night to differential rents and they were the subject of a question asked to-day by Deputy Alderman Byrne. The Minister indicated in his reply that it was entirely a matter for the local authority. I think I am correct in saying that provision for the implementation of the differential renting system was originally made in a housing Bill which passed through the Dáil in 1947 and finally became law in 1948. It is an easy thing for the Minister to say that it is entirely a matter for the local authority. In my view, it is not; it is a matter for the central as well as for the local authority. It is surely a matter for the Government because we must realise that if excessive rents are being charged to tenants of local authority houses, it needs attention and direction from the central authority and from the Minister.
One of the possible solutions which has been advocated by the Minister's own Party up and down my constituency, and I am sure in other constituencies, is an increase in the subsidy from the Central Fund in respect of the building of houses. That was advocated, as everybody knows, on many occasions. The people of County Dublin who were asked to pay rents of 24/4 a week—and some were to be asked to pay 33/- a week—were told by the Minister's supporters that the Central Fund subsidy in respect of houses should be increased. The Minister has an opportunity now of doing that and his supporters have an opportunity of making good the promises which they made to the people, in my constituency at least. I hope it will be done and I will keep a close eye on the progress of events to see that it is done. I hope that Deputy Burke will exercise the pressure which he is now in a position to exercise in order to bring about this desirable end.
I do not think it is right that a Minister of State should dismiss so lightly this question of rents which is so vital to hundreds of thousands of our people by saying that it is entirely a matter for the local authority. It is not a matter for the local authority, but a matter of Government policy. The people should be told what the Government believes in and what they stand for. I am asking the Minister to attend to that problem because it is a scourge at the present time in areas which I can mention. In Ballyfermot, where thousands of working-class families live on the fringe of the city, in Tallaght, in Clondalkin, in Lucan and in scores of other areas where the differential rent system is now being operated, this system is a scourge on the backs of the working people. Those who went out of their way in the past two years to try to create the belief in the public mind that it was purely the responsibility of the Minister for Local Government and not the responsibility of the local authority have now the opportunity to impress on their own Minister for Local Government that something must be done about it and done quickly.