Vol. 129 No. 3
I move:—
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £4,140 be granted to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1952, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Ordnance Survey and of Minor Services including the Facsimile Reproduction of Ancient Manuscripts.
Would the Minister be good enough to state the reason for the excess?
Yes. The excess arises mainly out of additional expense incurred in building up stocks of papers and chemicals for the processes which are carried on by the staff of the Ordnance Survey. There is also a certain amount of additional expense incurred in arranging for links between the primary triangulation of this country and the new primary triangulation of the Six North-Eastern Counties; and there is a small sum of £40 required for additional photographic equipment.
On this Estimate, the Chair will have noticed that there is provision for two very interesting items. One is for the stockpiling that did not take place. The House will remember that the Minister for Finance has been stumping the country for months explaining that the whole business was a fraud, a lie and a deception; but he trots in here as gay as a thrush and asks for a Supplementary Estimate to pay for the stockpiling that was done by Government instruction in the Ordnance Survey. The astonishing part of it is that— though, to his credit, he is blushing, it is only a pink blush; he ought to be as red as a beetroot, trotting in here to ask for a Supplementary Estimate to pay for stockpiling while the Chamber is still echoing with the clamour of his colleague, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, to embark on a capital investment programme of £22,000,000 sterling.
However, while I think it a salutary thing to portray the Minister for Finance on the treadmill of his own prevarications, so that I may make him supple and resourceful for the painful interviews that lie ahead of him, my private interest in this relates to the provision made for photographic equipment for the Ordnance Survey. I want to suggest to the House that we should make provision without delay to enable the Ordnance Survey to effect an aerial survey of the country and, instead of giving £40 for certain photographic equipment, that we should face the fact that we have not got, and cannot get, the equipment necessary to enable the Ordnance Survey with its own staff to carry out a photographic aerial survey. We might as well reconcile ourselves to the fact that we shall have to do, ultimately, what every other Government of a small country which does not maintain a huge air force has to do, and that is, to get the photographic aerial survey of its country done on a contract basis.
I hate to interrupt the Deputy generally when he is so entertaining, if irrelevant, but is there not a Standing Order which says that discussion on a Supplementary Estimate is rigidly confined to the items therein?
Yes.
Is there not photographic equipment here?
Not for an aerial survey.
There is photographic equipment. The Minister did not tell me what that equipment was for and I do not believe he knows, and my guess is as good as his. They must be photographing something and I am suggesting that the primary function of the Ordnance Survey is to survey the country. It is common knowledge to us all in the House that the most modern form of survey to supplement the peripatetic survey is an aerial survey and it is done by aerial photography.
I am primarily concerned in this matter from the archæological standpoint. The Ordnance Survey in all its maps attempts in the peripatetic survey to mark each suspected archæological site. I believe it is archæologically true that this island of Ireland is the richest of any country in Europe in archæological remains. I am going to be brief on this and am not going to speak on it at great length, but I tell the House no more than this, that in the ordinary course of my duty as Minister for Agriculture, when I was administering the land rehabilitation project, within one week we were fixed with notice that inadvertently two considerable archæological sites had been disturbed. I sent out an authorisation to prevent a recurrence of that and it became clear that, without certain fundamental information, they were unable to grapple with it. Some doubts were expressed as to whether all necessary information to protect the archæological remains of the country could not be secured by reference to maps prepared by the peripatetic survey. To check on that contention and to demonstrate its illusory character I was enabled to get an aerial survey made of an area well known to the Minister for Justice—who has now taken his colleague's place—to wit, Rathcroghan. On the peripatetic survey of Rathcroghan there are, I think, five suspected archæological sites marked. On the aerial survey of Rathcroghan the first examination of the photographs revealed 57 archæological sites which had never been beheld by the human eye before. One comprehensive scheme under the land rehabilitation project on two adjoining farms in Rathcroghan would wipe out one of the richest archæological sites in Europe.
There is excellent reason to believe that dozens of other such sites exist and have remained so long unsurveyed that there is now no possibility of discerning them except through the medium of aerial photography. I am informed that the whole country could be photographed and what they call mosaiced, that is to say, the photographs all brought together by a particular process giving you a complete aerial picture of the surface of the country for £60,000.
Could this matter not be raised more appropriately on the main Estimate? It is not relevant here.
Except in so far as we are appropriating money for the purchase of photographic equipment. What is this photographic equipment for? I do not know. However, I understand that the Minister wants £40. I am suggesting to the House that instead of buying £40 worth for the understaffed survey office in the Park, if he appropriated £60,000 and got a competent body of contractors to do for us what is being done for Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, Iceland, Holland, Belgium, Java and Sumatra, it would be money which perhaps, in the Minister for Finance's estimate, would be unprofitably spent but which I am suggesting that the majority of Deputies in this House would agree would be spent to purchase something which the passage of every day diminishes irrevocably and irretrievably.
I formulated proposals to that end. If the Minister consults his files he will find that one of the comments made on these proposals was that it might be a good thing if everything more than 100 years old in this country were blotted out and forgotten. The discussion of that philosophy was proceeding briskly when I lost my job. If I had not lost my job I have no doubt as to which side would have ultimately prevailed. I am afraid my poor successor is so beaten and battered by his colleagues every time he puts up his head that I have no hope for him. So I come to the Minister for Finance and ask him to resume the battle where I left off and, instead of spending £40 on a second-hand camera for the Ordnance Survey, to celebrate his visit to Mr. Butler by proposing an adequate survey.
I assume that when the Deputy opened his speech by referring to "Reds" he had in mind the satellites to whom Deputy McGilligan referred the other night, his allies in the late Government.
What is the Minister talking about?
Estimate agreed?
What the heck is he talking about?
