I gave notice that I would raise on the Adjournment the subject-matter of Question No. 7 on yesterday's Order Paper. The question was concerned with the large-scale disemployment of workers by Bord na Móna. At the outset and so that my position will be neither misunderstood nor misrepresented, I want to put it on record that I have been one of the Deputies in this House who have consistently supported our turf development programme and an unrepentant believer, as I have said on many occasions, in the national advantages which flow from the fullest utilisation of our peat resources.
That does not mean, of course, that one is committed to approval of the methods adopted by Bord na Móna. I raise this matter this evening because I think it is nothing short of a public scandal that a State body like Bord na Móna should so organise its affairs that in the mouth of Christmas hundreds of workers are paid off, hundreds of workers sent from employment to the labour exchange and that is where they will spend their Christmas.
Deputy Sweetman and I, at the request of a large number of workers who had been paid off and others who were expecting to be paid off, had an interview recently with Bord na Móna. We were told then, when we inquired what the staff position was last year and what the position was this year, that at the end of October, 1952—and these figures were written down from statements made at the time by Bord na Móna directors—the board employed 283 local workers in the Timahoe bog area in North Kildare; at the end of October, 1953, they said they were employing 357 local workers, that in November, 1953, the number fell to 257, and that they anticipated that in December the number would fall to 140.
As a result of inquiries addressed by us to the directors we were told that in 1952 they had kept on 250 local workers in that particular area. This year they said they proposed to reduce the staff to 140, of which 85 would be employed on drainage work; of these 140 they estimated that 50 of those retained would be non-locals who had come to work in the area and as non-locals had entered into the tenancy of houses erected by Bord na Móna.
This position came as a complete surprise to many local workers employed by Bord na Móna in that area. A number of those men complained to Deputy Sweetman and myself that they had been paid off at a week's notice, as if Bord na Móna could not foresee the future beyond the week. Some of the men complained that in fact they had only received four days' notice. If they had got much longer notice, a month or two months, it would have been easy for many of these people to have gone to Britain and to have obtained there three months' regular work before Christmas. They would then have been able to come back with money for their families at Christmas; or, as many of them said: "If we knew that we were going to be paid off so close to Christmas we could have gone to Britain and worked there until February of next year and come back and taken fresh employment withBord na Móna when new staff was being recruited." They were not informed by Bord na Móna that their dismissal was so imminent, with the result that a few weeks before Christmas these unfortunate people have been fired out of their employment and, so far as they are concerned—and this affects workers who have been regularly employed with Bord na Móna for some years—they will spend Christmas on the labour exchange. This situation has been brought about by a State-organised body such as Bord na Móna.
This short period of notice, especially to workers who have been engaged regularly for years in Bord na Móna, is utterly indefensible. Married men approached us, men with wives and children to maintain, who have been employed for years with Bord na Móna in a regular capacity and who were paid off this year for the first time. They had no more notice of their pay-off than a week or four days, as the case might be.
I realise that in turf production a great deal of the work has been, and some of it inevitably will be, seasonal in character, but the more seasonal in character it is the greater the obligation on Bord na Móna so to organise its staffing arrangements that adequate notice will be given to workers of the intention to pay them off so that they may be able to adjust and rehabilitate themselves in other employment.
Bord na Móna apparently has been quite unconcerned with giving adequate notice to these people, and we could get no explanation from the directors as to why notice was so short and why no effort was made to meet the needs of the workers concerned by giving them adequate notice and, consequently, an opportunity of securing other employment. Not only is this the position in the Timahoe area where there is no other work at this time of the year, but the board told us quite calmly that they propose to dismiss another 120 workers in the Rathangan area.