I hope that pious resolution will long survive with the Deputy. Outside of bedlam can there be anyone found to defend the proposition that we should levy 12/- a week upon one of our own young people who is seeking to establish a home in his own country by reason of the cost, not of building materials, not of land and not of labour, but of money at a time when we are lending £62,000,000 sterling to the British Government at 2 per cent. and for what purpose? To build houses for their people. I ask Deputies, if they have familiarised themselves with the proceedings of the British House of Commons, to advert to the fact that the Tory Government in England in the course of the past six weeks had it to say that they were not satisfied that people seeking to borrow money from building societies under the local loans administration there were doing it in sufficient quantity and that they, therefore, proposed to introduce legislation to provide that, if a building society was prepared to advance 80 per cent. of the present valuation of a house, the Government would insure them for the remaining 20 per cent. so that they could advance 100 per cent. to a young person desiring to raise money to build a house in Great Britain. It is our £62,000,000 that is going to be hypothecated by the British Government to insure the building society in Great Britain and to enable it to advance 100 per cent. of the valuation of a house.
It is particularly interesting that it should be the acting-Minister for Finance we should have here to-day, because I pressed the acting-Minister for Finance on a previous occasion, as did certain Deputies on the Labour benches, and he professed to be under the impression that members of the Labour Party were persuading him that he had been directed by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer to raise the lending rate from 3½ per cent. which obtained while our Government was in office, to 5 per cent. which he offered for the National Loan of 1953. The acting-Minister said:—
"I want to make one thing perfectly clear. Our Government raised the borrowing rate by 2 per cent. on our own initiative, because we thought the people who were going to lend us money ought to get a fair interest on the money they lent."
As to £5,000,000 of that money, it was provided by the joint stock banks of this country and we have, apparently, accepted this astonishing proposition: that, in order to secure that the joint stock banks of this country will get a fair interest on the money they lend to the Government of this country, a man who wants to build a house in Ireland under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts must pay 12/- a week over and above what his brother had to pay two years ago. I think that is daft.
Is there any form of credit the redemption of which is more certain than the credit provided to a man to build a house? Suppose the man himself fails to redeem the loan. Is the house not still there? A human being is not like a tortoise—he cannot walk away with his house on his back. The loan is charged on the house, and if the present occupier does not meet the loan charges, his successor in title will. Why should a man be fined 12/- a week for 30 years because he wants to build a house for his own family? Is there anybody in the Dáil who does not want to help a young married man to build his own house? If it is true, and I say it is true, that the British Government can borrow from us £62,000,000 of money at 2 per cent. is there any reason why the credit authorities of this country should not make money available to our Government for the same purpose, particularly in so far as our Government wants that money to relend it to our people to build their own houses?
Do Deputies realise that if we could get that principle accepted and made the consequential reduction in the interest rate levied on Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act loans, the rent of every house in Ireland which has been built under this legislation, and about to be built under this legislation, could be reduced by from 15/- to £1 per week? I want to ask the acting-Minister to pause here and to tell the House does he think it right that money should be offered to a local authority at 5¼ per cent. and that they should relend it to people seeking loans under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act at 6½ per cent. Does he think that equitable or fair?
I am going to suggest that there is evidence in the record to prove the acting-Minister knows that that course of conduct is wrong and it is rather an interesting story. In February, 1953, the lending rate to local authorities under the Local Loans Fund Act was raised to 5¼ per cent. and I ask Deputies to give special attention to that, because it is a most significant revelation. The question was at once raised in this House: what was going to happen to applicants in the City of Dublin who were already committed to building houses and who were awaiting issue of their loans? I remember certain T.D.s of the Fianna Fáil Party going with an all-Party deputation to the Minister for Finance and I remember the Minister for Finance, after some deliberation, saying: "Where any person's application for a loan under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act has been filed with Dublin Corporation prior to a certain date, that person will get the loan at the old rate and that makes provision for anybody who has his house half built." Then the case was put forward: "Is that concession not an admission that, if the new rate is charged, a great many people who wanted to build houses will not be able to do so?"
Mark this well, for here was the interesting revelation. The Minister could not resist the logic of that argument and this device was employed. Deputies will have noticed that, under the Local Loans Fund Acts, a local authority can borrow money from the fund for a variety of purposes and not only the purposes of the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act. Dublin Corporation had borrowed from the Local Loans Fund prior to February, 1943, £1,000,000 for another purpose, and of that sum there remained unspent £365,000. The Minister for Finance, in consultation with the Minister for Local Government, told the Dublin Corporation to transfer that £365,000 which they had borrowed at the cheaper rate from the other purpose into the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act fund and to go on issuing loans to applicants at the old rate so long as that balance remained available. That balance has now gone and those who borrow to-day must pay the new rate of 6½ per cent.
I am asking Dáil Éireann now, on the occasion of giving the Government authority to issue a further £20,000,000, to instruct the Government, at least in so far as the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts are concerned, to issue the loan under the Local Loans Fund Acts to a local authority at a rate not exceeding 3¼ per cent. and to take under immediate review the question of whether it might not be made available for this purpose at a cheaper rate.
I am quite certain that, without involving any charge on the Exchequer whatever, we can make the money available forthwith at 3¼ per cent., and I am prepared to make this case, and I think it overdue: the acting-Minister for Finance has justified his Father Christmas Act, the National Development Fund, or whatever cod title he gave it, on the grounds that he was entitled to create a deficit in the Budget without Supplementary Estimates when the unemployment situation was bad. I want to suggest to him that if it is that he has in mind, the relief of unemployment, there is no more effective way to create permanent, remunerative and productive employment throughout the whole of Ireland than to restore vitality to the building industry. If he would proclaim to-morrow that in respect of this £20,000,000, the whole of it, he would appropriate from the National Development Fund a sum sufficient to reduce the annual rate of interest charged to local authorities to 2 per cent., or 1 per cent., on the understanding that they would proceed to advance it to applicants under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Act at 2¼ per cent. or 2 per cent., to allow for their administrative costs, I warrant he would put in employment more men in three months than will be put in employment by all the local authority schemes put forward by every county council in Ireland under the National Development Fund. He is quite welcome to go full steam ahead with the other works he has envisaged. Would the Minister be good enough to remind me how long he expects the £20,000,000 to last at the present rate of interest?
