Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Friday, 12 Feb 1954

Vol. 144 No. 3

Private Members' Business. - Labourers Bill, 1953—Second Stage.

Mr. Lehane

I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time. This is really a very simple measure. It sets out to do something with which I am sure Deputies on all sides of the House will agree. At the moment there are thousands of parcels of land required for housing that have not been paid for and there are very many of these that will never be paid for. This Bill is an effort to enable payment to be made for these plots, also for plots that were acquired in the past and for which payment has not yet been made.

Money was lodged in court years and years ago in respect of parcels of land acquired for housing which was never passed on to the person from whom the land was acquired. I am informed on reliable authority that some of that money was there so long that it was appropriated by the Government after a certain period. I do not know whether the statute of limitations applies in this case but I know a number of cases in County Cork where land was acquired over 30 years ago, the money lodged in court and that money was never paid to the person from whom the land was taken. I doubt if there is a record in the offices of the local authority about that money. At any rate, I am informed on reliable authority that some of that money was appropriated by the Government after a certain period.

We have a system in this country whereby we make compulsory purchase orders. A local authority may make a compulsory purchase order which gives it full and complete title to the land which they take from the land owner. There is no obligation on the local authority to find out who has the proper title of that land before making the compulsory purchase order. You can have a person who is a holder of the land, who is liable for rates and who can get his rate demand, his six days' notice, his civil bill as an owner or occupier of a certain holding but that is not good enough for the local authority when they want to pay for land they compulsorily acquire.

You have land held by vested tenants and the Land Commission and it is quite all right for the Land Commission to have a registered owner of that land registered in the Land Commission. It is quite all right for the Land Commission to serve six day notices on the occupier of that land for the annuities. It is quite all right for the Land Commission to demand and receive their annuities on that land because the person is the registered occupier in the Land Commission's register. But when it comes to the question of paying for land compulsorily acquired by a local authority none of these things seems to apply. The local authority does not even have to serve the notice on the owner.

The local authority makes a compulsory purchase order and enters into a field and it does not matter what is in the field. I know of cases where the county council entered a field in which beet was growing and pulled up the beet and started their building scheme. The person has not been paid for that plot yet. It creates great difficulty for members of local authorities when they are going round trying to get further housing schemes.

We go to a certain man. Let us call him Pat Murphy, and we ask Pat Murphy for a site for six houses, a site for a cottage or an acre of ground for a labourer's cottage. The first thing Pat Murphy will say is: "What about the plot of land you took from me in 1948?" or "What about the plot of land you took from me in 1923? I have not been paid for that yet. The land was taken from me when you came to me in 1948 or 1923. I was as accommodating as I could possibly be. I gave you the acre of my farm because I believed in housing the people. I believed that if they asked only half an acre or an acre of land they would want the best ground they could get. I accommodated you in every way possible but I have not been paid for that and now you are here to-day, again asking me for another acre or two for a housing scheme."

This whole system is impeding the housing schemes that local authorities want to develop. I believe that if the principle set out in this Bill is accepted by the Government and the House—I am sure that all Deputies will agree with it—it will make it easier to find housing sites and eventually to house the people of the country who require houses and whom the local authority wish to house as quickly and as well as they possibly can.

The first section of this Bill seeks to extend a value that was laid down in 1906. In the 1906 Labourers Act it was provided that payment for cottage plots could be made without the discharge of equities provided the sum did not exceed £60. In the second section of this Bill I seek to increase that. I mentioned the figure of £500, but if £500 is too high a figure in the opinion of the House I am quite prepared to alter it. There is no doubt that if £60 was a fair and reasonable figure to pay for the land for housing in 1906, the value of the £ has changed since and there should be some change in the amount set out in the Act of 1906. Last December I asked the Taoiseach to give the relative values of the £ sterling in 1906 and in 1953 and the following is the Taoiseach's answer:—

"No official series of price index numbers are available on the basis of which it would be possible to compare the present purchasing power of the £ in this country with its purchasing power in 1906. However, using various sets of unofficial index numbers of retail, wholesale and agricultural prices, it is estimated roughly that £1 at present would purchase the same quantum of goods as 5/- in 1906."

If the £ would purchase 5/- worth of goods now as against 1906, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for increasing that figure to some extent, possibly not to £500 but probably to £250.

The other section asks that the registered holder of land should be entitled to payment. The registered holder is liable for rates and for annuities and he is liable to be sued if he defaults in any of these payments. I believe that in case of doubt and where there is a danger that a person may not be paid at all the registered owner should be paid where there is not another feasible means of ascertaining the owner or where it is not possible to discharge equities easily.

Minister for Local Government (Mr. Smith)

What does the Deputy mean by the registered owner?

Mr. Lehane

The person who is regarded by the Land Commission as being the registered owner of the holding.

Mr. Smith

You mean the registered owner or the man who is paying the annuity?

Mr. Lehane

I mean the person that the Land Commission has registered, the person to whom the Land Commission will send the six-day notice and the person to whom the Land Commission will send the sheriff if he defaults.

Mr. Smith

I want to find this out for my own information. I could be registered as a person to whom a receivable order might be sent on the understanding that I was paying rent on a holding. I could be registered in that sense but that would not mean being registered in the sense in which a registered owner is generally accepted.

Mr. Lehane

I mean the person who is registered in the generally accepted sense. There are a number of cases I have come across where it is very difficult to discharge equities. There is a tradition in certain areas where the land is passed on from one to the other and the eldest son gets it. If there is no intention of selling the holding or part of it and somebody comes along and pays £61 to put a cottage plot on it, equities have to be discharged on that holding and that is a problem that has to be solved. Perhaps there is a large family of six or seven who have scattered—there is a nun in Australia, somebody has emigrated to America, there is somebody married in Dublin and it is absolutely impossible to fulfil the legal requirements that are necessary to discharge equity on that type of holding.

I had hoped to be able to give the House a great deal of detailed information in this connection which I know exists, but unfortunately I found it very difficult to get information. I applied to county councils for information and I was told that county council officials can supply information only to chairmen of councils, to the Minister and to the council itself if arranged at a meeting, and further that it is open to a ratepayer in a particular county to go into the county council office, see the books and extract whatever information he can in that regard. In these circumstances, I am sorry I have not all the detailed information that I would like to present to the House in an official form but I know that in County Cork there are a number of housing sites some of which were acquired over 30 years ago for which payment has not been made yet.

I am perfectly satisfied in my own mind that even the county council office has no record of these transactions because at that time they were done under various boards that had their own individual solicitors. I am not surprised that county councils cannot give the information that I want because I do not believe they have it themselves. However, I am sure the Minister could probably get it from the records of the court. He would find at least the cases in which the money was lodged in court.

I have some little information here which I was able to extract and which may give a small picture of what is happening. In the southern portion of County Cork, which is only a small part of that county, a compulsory purchase order was made in 1948 involving 505 parcels of land, and at the beginning of this year 143, that is, a third of those sites had not been paid for. There were 166 paid for in 1952; there were 143 paid for in 1953, and there are still outstanding 143 from the 1948 compulsory order. That applies to one small section of County Cork.

In the West Cork district there were 45 sites acquired under the 1948 order, and of those 17 had been paid for, and under the 1951 order in the West Cork area four sites had been paid for. In the North Cork area, there were 33 sites acquired in 1949 of which 21 were paid for, leaving 12 outstanding. Under the 1950 (No. 1) order for North Cork there were 198 sites acquired of which 98 have not yet been paid for; under the 1950 (No. 2) order for North Cork there are 20 sites out of 39 not yet paid for.

As long as this position remains, it is going to be very difficult for local authorities to acquire sites. I believe that a number of Deputies in other counties are experiencing similar difficulties. The attitude of the Minister would appear to be that it is the responsibility of the local county solicitor. The Minister mentioned that in Volume 143, column 178 of the Official Debates of the 17th November last. He said: "That is the law agent's job. If he is satisfied you can pay any time you like." But the law agent is tied up by certain Acts of this House. If the sum is over £60, he cannot pay without the discharge of equities, so the Minister is not quite right in that point of view. I am satisfied that a number of Deputies hold the same view as I do.

I will now quote from the Official Report, column 177, Volume 143, No. 1, where Deputy Corry is reported as follows:—

"There is one matter which I am wondering whether the Minister can find some way of rectifying and that is in regard to the payment of farmers for sites taken by local authorities for non-municipal houses or cottages. I can assure the Minister that sites acquired and built on as far back as 1948 are still unpaid for in the South Cork area of the Cork County Council.

Mr. Smith: That is the law agent's job. If he is satisfied you can pay any time you like.

Mr. Corry: I cannot see any sane reason, if a farmer is a recognised tenant, having his rent accepted by the Land Commission and his rates accepted by the local authority, why he cannot be paid for the acre of land that is compulsorily taken from him by the same local authority.

Mr. Smith: Surely that does not prove title?

Mr. Corry: Surely, if he is a registered holder of that land, that proves his title?

Mr. Smith: That is another matter.

Mr. Corry: We have had these cases dragging on for six years. Actually, we have had them dragging on over 30 years, and ordinary elected representatives have been placed in the position that for the third time they have had to call on some of these farmers to get more land from them for cottages, and I propose that in future when we are going around taking such land we shall be accompanied by the legal adviser..."

Deputy Corry was apparently taking a leaf out of the Minister's book. The whole position is quite unsatisfactory and it amounts to sheer confiscation of property. The local authority know in many cases when they are acquiring land that the owners cannot get paid for it and that it is pure confiscation. In many cases the land that has been acquired was productively worked before it was acquired and in some cases after being acquired it has not been productively worked and it has been a loss to the community as a whole.

In addition to the views expressed by Deputy Corry, I think the Minister will remember that when he was in Cork comparatively recently all Parties on the county council pointed out this problem and the various grievances that they were suffering from. I quite agree that this Bill which I have drafted may not be a masterpiece but the only thing that gave me courage to produce it at all was the number of Acts which I have seen coming out of the draftsman's office that were not masterpieces either. I am sure every side of the House will agree that it is necessary that something should be done to get rid of some of the grievances that exist at the moment in the case of people from whom land has been confiscated. I want to make it quite clear that I do not agree with the Minister that the fault lies with the county solicitor in Cork or in any other county. As a matter of fact, I think that if there is fault lying anywhere it lies with the client's solicitor rather than with the county solicitor.

I understand that this Bill has been submitted to the Incorporated Law Society, some gentlemen of which society were not very complimentary about it. I think that if that society put their own house in order and got their members who had had a case presented to them, and who were supposed to be acting for a client, to return the documents that were sent to them by the county solicitor, it would be very much to the point. In the South Cork area, in which I am particularly interested, documents were sent to solicitors by the county solicitor and in 35 cases these documents were not returned. If the Incorporated Law Society would look into that matter I think they would be doing useful work.

It is important that people from whom we take land should be compensated. If a local authority find and know that in taking land from a man or a woman they will never be able to pay for it then I think they should give grave consideration to the whole question. I realise that the money may be lodged in court but that it may lie there for a certain period and then be appropriated at some future date. I think the local authority, in such circumstances, should be prevented from taking that land.

In my view, it should be made as easy as possible for the local authority to pay the owner, after trying as well as they can to find out who is the right owner. There should not be the necessity to discharge equities now on the basis of £60, as is laid down in the Act of 1906.

Mr. McQuillan

I should like to compliment Deputy Lehane on his efforts to remedy certain injustices. I am in a difficulty as far as the Bill itself is concerned inasmuch as I am not in agreement with the Bill as a whole. I fully support Deputy Lehane in his desire to amend Section 11 of the 1906 Labourers Act which relates to payment for land acquired where the amount of money involved is over £60, I think that is something that should appeal to the Minister himself as a perfectly fair request. If we take into consideration the value of the £ in 1906 and the depreciation that has taken place since, I think there is a very strong case to extend and enlarge the figure from £60. I do not suggest or agree that it should be brought up to £500. My own view is that if the Minister were willing to meet Deputy Lehane on a sum of £250 it would be very reasonable. That is the section of this Bill with which I am in complete agreement.

I do not want to say too much but I cannot agree fully with Deputy Lehane that the delays he has outlined as having taken place in County Cork apply to my own county. However, rather than say too much on this particular matter, and perhaps throw cold water on the efforts made by my colleague, I will simply confine my remarks to the amendment of the section dealing with the sum of £60 to whatever figure the Minister and his advisers think suitable.

Mr. Smith

I have no idea as to the extent of this problem in the country, but I do know that it is to some extent a problem. I do not know that it is as large as Deputy Lehane seems to believe. For many years it has been the practice of local bodies, when the need to acquire land for purposes such as housing arose, to endeavour to secure that land voluntarily because thereby they avoided all the legal difficulties and delays that arise as a result of endeavouring to acquire land by compulsory means. As far as my experience on a local body goes, it was only when they found it impossible to get the amount of land they required or the type of site they needed that they resorted to compulsory purchase. My experience has been that if a local authority found that the title was not clear to a suitable site that they intended to acquire by compulsion, with the result that the moneys would have to be lodged in court, they usually went about acquiring a reasonably suitable alternative, if that was convenient. If no such alternative was available, they had to ignore the fact that title could not be shown and proceeded to acquire the site, which to my mind was an entirely justifiable procedure. There are many cases where title cannot be shown.

Mr. Lehane

In cases where there was voluntary agreement about a site, a compulsory purchase order was made and even in cases where there was voluntary agreement about the site payment was not made.

Mr. Smith

Compulsory purchase orders might have to be made in order to meet the difficulty caused by the failure of the person concerned to show title. Does not this question of showing title arise in thousands of ways, not only in regard to the acquisition of land for local authority purposes but in every conceivable way? Whether it is a question of the payment for land acquired by a local authority or a question of the receipt of moneys by an individual, the person to whom the money is being paid has to show that he is the person legally entitled to it and, unless he can show that, the party that is due to make the payment will not make the payment but will proceed to lodge the amount of money until such time as the claimant can show title to it.

I remember the question to which Deputy Lehane has referred and I can recall the reply to the supplementary question by Deputy Corry. The gist of my reply to that supplementary question was that it was the responsibility of the legal adviser to the county council to keep his employers, the county council, safe and it was not a matter of my blaming the legal adviser; it was not a matter of my trying to blame the legal people acting for the landowner. I was merely saying that in all these matters the responsibility for giving advice and interpreting rests with the legal adviser of the local body. I am sure it was in that sense that I made the reply to the supplementary question.

I asked the Deputy an important question as to what he meant by the "registered owner of land." We are not able to make sense out of the use of that expression because, if a person is the registered owner of land, the land can be disposed of by the local body and can be paid for. If he is registered in the sense of merely being the person to whom the receivable order is issued or the demand is made for the payment of rent, that is an entirely different matter and that individual has no legal status whatever. It was because of our confusion as to what exactly was meant by the use of the term "registered owner" that I asked a couple of questions.

With some aspects of the proposals contained in the measure we are not in disagreement. The point made by Deputy McQuillan in giving his limited support to these proposals is quite understandable. On the advice of my officials I was going to suggest that there is a Housing Bill on the stocks, which will be introduced in the course of a month or two and, if this Bill was withdrawn, I would give the assurance that all the matters referred to here would be examined and we would try in the Housing Bill to meet at least some of what is contained in this proposal and maybe go somewhat further and examine a wider field than is actually covered here, to see if we can tighten or tidy up the law in that regard. If the Deputy is satisfied with that, I will give him the assurance that we will undertake that work before the Housing Bill is introduced and try to provide in it what will go some distance at any rate to meet the point of view to which the Deputy has given expression.

Mr. Lehane

I am quite aware that this Bill is by no means perfect. To do what I want to do would necessitate five or six different Bills going back to the Act of 1845. I appreciate the Minister's difficulty in accepting the Bill. Having regard to the Minister's assurance that he will examine these matters fully and probably include in the Housing Bill, which he says is due in a month's time, some sections to cover points that I have in mind, I withdraw the Bill.

Bill, by leave, withdrawn.