That may be, but, on the other hand, there are quite a number of customs posts which are pretty substantial and look fairly permanent. There is one customs post which is very bad, and it is an important one; that is Carrigans. The hut there is a disgrace. It is most unfair to staff. It has been repaired repeatedly. I do not know how much money has been spent on it in the way of repair but I think that no amount of repair could make it into a really usable office. From a staff point of view it is unfair and from the point of view of the public it is atrocious. I do not know what tourists coming into the country from across the Border think when they see that dreadful hut on the side of the road.
Anyone looking at the Estimate might be pardoned if they thought subhead B of Vote No. 9 represents the major efforts of the Office of Public Works. It accounts for nearly half of the total moneys sought; in fact, I think it accounts for very much more than half of the amounts being sought for the two Votes. The moneys under sub-head B represent the work done by the Office of Public Works as the agent for other Departments and by and large I think that was the history of the Office of Public Works—it was to do work for other Departments. They have now, however, on their own hands the major work of arterial drainage. I presume it was given to the Office of Public Works because they were already concerned in some drainage works which had been passed under special Acts, such as the Barrow and the Fergus drainage schemes. I am not too sure that was a wise step as it turned out. We may have been guilty of putting new wine into an old bottle.
I think some evidence lies in the direction of showing that the administrative side has not kept pace with the technical advances that are needed to take on a job as big as arterial drainage. Indeed I am inclined to think we may have made a greater error with regard to arterial drainage than that. I think it is arguable whether or not arterial drainage may turn out in the end, if carried out to its logical conclusion and in the way in which we have been attempting to carry it out, a very mixed blessing. It is late in the day to make any suggestions in the matter now when a great many learned people have examined the drainage question as Deputy Beegan told us last Friday in his discourse on the history of this and when he mentioned a number of distinguished men who had acted on the Drainage Commission.
My own view is that it would be a good step to put all drainage under one authority and not to have arterial drainage done by the Office of Public Works, a great deal of drainage under the land project done by the Department of Agriculture, and then a lot of drainage done in a spasmodic way by local authorities under the Local Authorities (Works) Act. If we are going to tackle drainage as a problem we should have care taken of it by one authority. As well as that a good step would be to take forestry away from the Department of Lands. There is more than one reason for that suggestion. I think forestry should be linked with arterial drainage. I do not pretend to know a great deal about it but as far as I can gather we seem to be concerned with afforestation in this country only from the point of view of providing trees for timber and as shelter belts. Trees come to a great extent into the question of soil conservation and of water conservation problems and could very well be linked from that point of view with arterial drainage. I can quite easily foresee that we might overdrain certain areas where there is no cover by timber. That would lead to more problems in the end than the ones which we set out to solve.
I want to draw the attention of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance to a few instances dealing with arterial drainage, about the way it has been carried out and the policy that apparently has been adopted. As I have said, in spite of what appears on the face of the Estimate the really big job of the Department is arterial drainage. The amounts that are sought in any particular year may not have been as impressive as in some of the other sub-heads, but if we examine what arterial drainage involves in the way of capital investment we shall realise that it is not only big business but very big business. The amount invested in drainage machinery —engineering plant and machinery— is, I understand, somewhere over £1,100,000. The amount invested in engineering stores, according to the Book of Estimates, was approximately £333,000 on the 31st March last. The workshop plant in the central engineering workshop cost £120,000 and the workshop itself is held under a lease from C.I.E. for a term of 50 years beginning in April, 1951, and under second lease of April, 1955, the total amount being £15,250 a year. You then have to add rates and maintenance.
These figures show that arterial drainage is very big business and I think it is only fair to ask if it is being run as a big business. Some of the engineering plant is very expensive. We have two excavators of the Marion 111M type costing £43,000 each. There are two Lima excavators which cost £30,000 each and a great many others which make up quite an impressive sum. An investment of that kind requires maximum use if the State is to get real value for its investment. Are we getting maximum use? Two things are obviously needed for maximum use. One is first-class maintenance and repair, and the other is that when the machines are in use in the fields there will be close and expert supervision and that they will be used to the utmost.
As far as the maintenance and repair system goes there is a main workshop in the central engineering workshop in Inchicore and, as Deputy Beegan mentioned, in October, 1953, the Public Accounts Committee visited that workshop. Their visit came about as a result of some years of queries by the Comptroller and Auditor-General and the committee into the fact that there were considerable delays in taking stock. I should like to point out that the committee did not go there as a right. They were invited there by the chairman of the commissioners, who thought they might get a clear view of the difficulties about stores accounting.
The committee were naturally delighted to accept the invitation and I want to say we found it a most impressive workshop, very large, with a great deal of expensive and probably useful machinery in it. However, an array of expensive machinery does not necessarily convey a great deal to the layman, and since that visit I have been puzzling in my mind what we saw and what it meant and recently I sought to find an answer to some questions which bothered me by way of parliamentary questions.
A series of parliamentary questions is not the ideal way of getting information about anything that is a bit elaborate. However, the Dáil itself is to blame for that. I sought to get an estimates committee appointed which would be the ideal way of getting such information but the Dáil did not see eye to eye with me and so there is no estimates committee. The only means left of getting such information are parliamentary questions and it is only when we come up against an elaborate system such as this, with a great deal of money involved, that we come up against very big difficulties. I am considerably handicapped in making inquiries as to what is happening to all this public money. The questions I asked and the answers I got left me a bit disturbed in my mind on one or two points.
When the Public Accounts Committee visited the workshop I was very much struck by the system of having kept a case history of every machine in use. That, of course, is the sort of thing that obviously should be done. The system seemed to be very efficient on the face of it. There was a graph and a diagram dealing with all the machines and there was a filing system in which were files supposed to contain the history of each machine. I may have been wrong, but I assumed that those histories would show a fairly considerable amount of detail. After all, when you have expensive machinery you want to keep a fair amount of detail as to what has happened it. You would not want a machine coming in for a major overhaul and then coming again in three or four months' time for something else and no one being quite sure when it had had the major overhaul. That is a thing one would expect to find in the case history.
I am surprised that in respect of some of the questions I asked, which I thought would be merely a matter of turning up these case histories and scribbling it down in the course of a couple of days, I was asked to repeat the question in a fortnight's time. For instance, on the 21st June I had the following question:—
"To ask the Minister for Finance if he will state, in respect of each item of engineering plant and machinery being overhauled in the central engineering workshop in May, 1955, and which had been out of service for more than six months, the reasons for the time taken (i) to transfer to the workshop, (ii) to begin overhaul after receipt, and (iii) to complete the overhaul where any or all of these factors are material."
I was asked to repeat the question in a fortnight's time.
I also asked about a particular type of excavator, the Lima 802. I thought the amount of information I asked for was the sort of thing that would certainly have been on the cards but again I was asked to repeat the question in a fortnight's time. That does not give one a very happy feeling about just what is going on.
There was also another question I asked dealing with the type of repairs or what repairs had been made to engineering plant and machinery and I was told that it involved looking up thousands of dockets. If the case histories of the machines were kept, I do not see how they would have to look up thousands of dockets.
Another point that arose more or less out of this query of mine as to what was happening was what was the organisation, what was the system that was used in the organisation of the central engineering workshop and a chart was produced showing the makeup. The chart was reasonably extensive in size but was, I think, a little bit misleading in some points. There was an office described as that of superintendent which was, apparently, on a level with another office, the office of controller and also the office of the supplies manager and the office of chief inspector. It turned out, in reply to further questioning in the matter, that it was not.
Without at all knowing anything about the organisation or how it works myself, a glance at the chart does suggest that there is a lack of balance. To find that a person who is a superintendent and not at all the same rank as a supplies manager or chief inspector has under him almost more men than the supplies manager and the chief inspector put together, while it does not necessarily follow that you can criticise that point, it does look as if the set-up and the number of people of higher grading who are in the central engineering workshop leave something to be desired.
In the course of making some inquiries about that I came on a remarkable fact. I would always have assumed that, where temporary staff was being recruited, one would be prepared possibly to waive some qualification but the Office of Public Works does not do things that way. Where they were looking for a mechanical engineer grade II for temporary work, a university degree or other academic qualification was essential, but when they were advertising, through the Civil Service Commission of course, for permanent posts on this salary basis, a degree was desirable but not essential. Then we wonder why our university graduates leave the country.
I hope the Parliamentary Secretary will look most seriously into this position because I know nothing about what goes on in the workshop or what the conditions there are about work, but I do think it is a most extraordinary position that there is already a difficulty about getting technical staff and that the Office of Public Works deliberately makes it worse by practically telling graduates that they do not want them. Why this country is spending thousands of pounds on university education if this is what is to happen at the end of it I do not know.
Some of the difficulty, of course, arises because the word "engineer" is not registered. I can call myself an engineer, as far as I know. All I need are a few bits of machinery and I can call myself an engineer of some sort. But, anyway, the office was clever enough when advertising, through the Civil Service Commission, for these permanent posts. They did not use the word "engineer"; they only mentioned "certain posts"—without the use of the word "engineer"—"in the mechanical engineering division" but, in fact, the only position that meets the salary advertised is that of mechanical engineer grade II.
If it is found in the running of a workshop that experience is of more importance than technical qualifications obtained through a university or association, I think the Department has a case but I do think that they ought to inform the Dáil as clearly as possible in the Book of Estimates as to what they are doing. I do not think it is just good enough to tuck away under "mechanical engineer grade II" people who are not engineers in the sense that is accepted, whether it is legal or not.
Most people when they see the description "mechanical engineer," whether it is a legal description or not or a legal qualification or not, expect to find an engineer, a qualified engineer. It is not that it is not possible to make the appendix to Vote 8 a bit more clear because the position of works manager is put down as "works manager." I do not know whether he is an engineer or not. I beg pardon. I think, in reply to a question, it was stated that he is, although I am not very sure on that. At any rate, he is described as "works manager" and I think it would have been better if these positions where the person is not an engineer in the ordinary accepted sense of the word, were described in the appendix under the title of the office rather than tuck them away in this way as "mechanical engineer" and give people a wrong impression.
In reply to a question about the workshop, I was informed that it was reasonably equipped. Dealing with the equipment of a workshop, a layman is at an obvious disadvantage because most of the machines do not mean anything to him at all; they are just names; but I did get from the Minister for Finance a list of the more expensive machinery in the workshop and then I got curious as to what some of it was and what it was doing and what use was made of it. One was called a crankshaft regrinder which cost £9,436. That is a lot of money. I had actually seen the machine and the workman on it had very kindly explained it to me. Therefore, I took an interest in it. I asked what work it had done in 12 months. The reply was that it had reground and/or balanced in the 12 months 84 crankshafts of various sizes. The descriptions are all given according to the number of cylinders in the engine— which does not necessarily mean very much because you could have a single cylinder engine with a crankshaft that would be much heavier than that in an eight-cylinder. However, on the basis that you could add on two to the number of cylinders to get the number of journals on the crankshaft, which I think is the utmost that would be possible—in certain circumstances it might do rather less—I find that the machine worked 474 journals in 12 months. Then I inquired from the trade as to what it cost to grind and polish a journal and I discovered that it cost, according to size, from 8/6 to £1 per journal.
Therefore, giving the Office of Public Works and the engineering workshop all the credit I can, and assuming that every journal was of the biggest type and that it cost £1 to get it done in a workshop in town, that brings the work to £474. The cost to get it done outside the workshop would lie somewhere between £250 to £474. Even putting it at the figure of £474, it would not pay the interest on the cost of the machine—£9,436. When a thing like that appears to happen, one is forced to query it. If there is a catch in it, I should be very pleased to hear it. If there is some reason for it, nobody would be better pleased to hear of it than me. However, on the basis that we have bought a machine which is not working to the value it should for the amount of money spent on it—because, naturally, as well as interest on the money invested you would have to write off depreciation which, I am informed, is done in the workshop at the rate of 12½ per cent.—we require some further information. Then, again, there is the labour cost which must be fairly high because, I take it, a skilled workman uses this machine.
When I try to find out what happened about the use of this machine it is not easy to get the information because apparently the turner who works this machine works another machine also and I do not understand the other machine: it is a universal cylindrical grinder. It probably works part-time too. It cost over £5,000. The Minister was not able to tell me how many shafts were ground and polished by this machine. I was informed that that would mean an analysis of a large number of works orders and that it would involve a disproportionate amount of staff time and cost. I can agree that there is a limit to the amount of money that should be spent in answering a Deputy's question.
I asked someone in the trade what a universal cylindrical grinder was. They could not understand how it worked on shafts: they thought it worked on hollow jobs. I am speaking as a layman in this matter. The impression I got from the trade was that it was something to work on cylinders or sleeves of cylinders rather than on shafts. However, these two machines cost a lot of money and I am not satisfied that we are getting a return for the money which has been invested. It is not sufficient to say that they have only turned up in the past couple of years. There has been a good deal of expenditure for something that could be done by the trade here and at much less cost to the State.
I have already referred to what I think is a shortage of professional staff in the workshop. I know that the Department have had trouble recruiting professional staff. It has been a bother for a long time—particularly, I think, in regard to mechanical engineers. It was explained to the Public Accounts Committee that there was a particular difficulty there because there is no great employment in this country for mechanical engineers and it takes longer to get a degree in mechanical engineering. It is natural, therefore, that students will go for something that has better prospects here. However, having heard about the recruitment of mechanical engineers, I would not say that the office is going out to encourage anyone.
There is also this angle: how far does this shortage cause serious delays in overhauls and major repairs? With an investment of £1,000,000 in machinery, as I have already stated, it is essential that these machines should work every possible hour. If there are long delays in getting overhauls done, not only are we wasting time on the drainage but we are delaying it and, as well, we are seriously affecting the use of the machines themselves. I have mentioned already three or four of the very large ones but there is a considerable investment in some of the others. For instance, the eight "Lima 802s" cost over £113,000, and there are 28 "Lima 34s". And as far as I can see, their approximate value would be £240,000. From what I can gather from figures given to me in reply to a question, quite a number of these machines have spent about half their time out of service since 1952. I do not know whether or not that would come under capital disinvestment.
It sounds serious that a lot of valuable machines should be out of service for a considerable time. It is not that there is not enough work, because the Department have taken on various schemes at a fantastic rate. I think that that, in fact, is one of the troubles the office is suffering from. There is the political pressure which puts more and more drainage work on them. From a very small thing in 1947, drainage work has grown to be a very large thing and I think drainage works are beginning to burst a bit at the seams. Naturally, every Deputy, including myself, wants to see any drainage that requires to be done in his constituency carried out as soon as possible. However, I am not sure that the Government should not have resisted a good deal of this and made sure that, when taking on schemes, they had behind them something that would really carry the work out expeditiously and cheaply. If we have machines and are not able to service them then we have wasted money.
Has the Parliamentary Secretary anything to say about the question of delays? I can say for the Board of Works that I got figures for the Central Engineering Workshop for October, 1953, October, 1954, and May last. It is evident that things have improved very greatly in that period of time. I took October, 1953, because it was the date of the Public Accounts Committee's visit. Perhaps I have deceived myself because, in picking out a month here and there, a lot might escape in a net with such a large mesh. However, I think it is reasonable to say that a good deal of the back log work in October, 1953, has now been caught up with.
According to the last information which I received, the number of machines actually in for repairs was down very well in May, none were awaiting transfer to the Central Engineering Workshop at Inchicore and none were there awaiting repair. You would almost begin to wonder what is going to happen that workshop if that rate of progress is kept up and whether or not it will be needed in its present size. I hope someone has a plan worked out as between the facilities made available in the workshop and the amount of plant to be served. I hope someone knows just where it is going, because it is not terribly clear at the moment to me from the details I have got.
I do not find it possible to say much more about the Central Engineering Workshop, for the simple reason that I do not know anything more. There are quite a number of machines there and I do not know much about them at all, but I do know that I do not like the look of what I have learned about one of them, and naturally I am left wondering what sort of history is attached to all the others—whether they are working and what efficiency there is in the workshop at all.
In the field, from the details in the Estimate of the number of technical staff, I think it is possible to worry about whether there is enough technical staff of high enough grade to take charge of all these expensive machines. I have mentioned the two Marion IIIs and the two large Limas which cost £30,000 each. Between them, these machines represent an investment of £146,000. I tried to find out, just as a sort of spot check, what they had been doing. I asked for some details and I suggested that a log of the two biggest should be put in the Library. That was to give the least possible trouble to everybody concerned and I am informed that the Minister does not think it "desirable" that such a log book should be put in the Library. The Minister could have thought of a lot of answers that would have been better than that one.
Am I seriously expected to take it that Deputies are not supposed to be informed on what happens to an investment of State money of £146,000 and that it is not desirable they should know what the log of these machines is? I think that is a very wrong answer. It is clearly the duty of the Minister to inform the Dáil of anything as interesting as that. There is a lot of money involved in it and it only tends to make a Deputy much more suspicious of what is going on, when he is told that it is not desirable that the log of a machine should be open to his inspection. If it was said that there was not a proper log kept, it would have been bad enough. I have been puzzling my mind to think of an answer that would have been worse than to say that it was not desirable that Deputies should know what use was being made of machines at that price and I hope that further consideration will be given to being much more generous with information about this sort of thing.
One of the things that bothers me in all this is: how did anyone decide how many of these particular machines should be got? I tried to find out what happened to some particular machines and the position, as disclosed by replies to questions, is so lacking in clarity that I hesitate to say anything at all. Mind you, I am not blaming the Department for that type of answer, because I admit that it is almost impossible to give a written answer, just as it was almost impossible for me to think of a written question to cover the points I wanted to make. Again, the only sensible way in which Deputies will ever find out details of this type is through an Estimates Committee, where the officials can be present and can explain by word of mouth, which is very much better than attempting to find out in the only way open to me.
These are about the only points I wanted to cover in the way of detail in regard to what I have got in reply to questions. I admit that my criticism of the office is purely destructive, but it is not possible for a layman to be constructive. The minute a layman starts talking to technical people about any constructive suggestion in relation to machinery—that is where he walks into trouble, because he will get a very short answer.
All I am trying to establish is this, that the State has walked in on arterial drainage and has given it to the Office of Public Works—probably naturally enough, seeing that they were already doing some drainage—but I do not think it has worked out as well as it should. Somewhere there is a bottle-neck, though I do not like the word. We have a large amount of machinery and we have a very large workshop. I am not satisfied that we are getting the best out of either of them and I should like to know why they are not working better.
The history of delays on overhauls —the only answer I could get is that priority was given to other machinery. At the time I worked it out, I could not see what other work they were doing because everyone was put on one side to do something else. There were 23 excavators in and, of these, 17 were not being worked on because of priority given to other work, and it makes one wonder what they were working at, so many of them were put to one side because of priority given to other work in a workshop of this size. I am worried about whether there is enough brass—I will put it that way— in Inchicore and how far the place is starved for high-grade—in the Civil Service sense of "grade"—technical staff, and as to how far we have rushed into arterial drainage and a large expenditure and the Department of Finance, the Government or whoever is responsible has taken cold feet.
Personally, I think it should have been done in a different way. There should have been a different overall plan, but, taking it on the plan that has been adopted, we have rushed into a large investment—£1,000,000 worth of excavators and a large workshop—and, having set out on that, I think the Government has not had the courage to work it out to its logical conclusion. They have spent a lot of money on ancillary machines in the workshop for servicing these machines and there does not seem to be quite enough for them to do to earn their pay. Surely some consideration should be given to that.
It also seems to me that we are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. That is the sort of thing which the Department of Finance spends its time being. If we determined that this was going to be done by ourselves and that the whole thing was going to be self-supporting, we should have gone at it baldheaded and should have seen that there was enough supervisory staff to make a thorough-going job of it. As it is, my impression would be that the technical staff are inclined to be overawed by the administrative side. Whether the administrative side are back-pedalling or not, I do not know —it may be the Department of Finance and maybe it is Government policy— but the whole place, without being able to put my finger on exact details, gives me the impression that there is a lack of belief in its future.
What the technical people think, I do not know. I do not know what anybody thinks about it, but if we really mean to go ahead with arterial drainage in the way in which we have set out, if we really mean to have this enormous investment and really mean to do it by ourselves, within ourselves and not by work outside on contract, I think it wants far more supervisory staff than it has got. Organisation, so far, is very bad, in my opinion. The number of engineers could not possibly supervise all this expensive machinery in the way in which it should be supervised. The delays that must take place on a drainage work because of minor things, so far as I can see, are more than expensive.
I should like to hear from the Parliamentary Secretary just what happens when a large and expensive machine breaks down—how fast can it be got back to work; is there any avoidable delay; and does he need more staff? Certainly, the general impression I have got is that someone is half-hearted somewhere. I do not know who is the enthusiast and who the person who is back-pedalling, but the whole thing seems to me to have got a little out of shape. We have given way in relation to the purchase of expensive machinery, on the one hand, and held back on the other, looking for the staff to work and supervise. I hope that if the policy of doing arterial drainage within the Office of Public Works in the way in which we have set out is to be continued, someone will have the courage to go at it baldheaded and do it thoroughly. Nothing could be worse than to see large and expensive machinery underworked. That is about the most expensive thing you can do with expensive machinery.
I know what happened, in another Department, to expensive machinery that was out under the land project. You had an expensive bulldozer working eight hours a day and the trained staff would not be allowed to work overtime, so they went to England where they were allowed to work overtime. That bulldozer was working five and a half eight-hour days in a week. I do not think that was the way to treat such an investment. No contractor could make his living in that way. I think the same thing is happening here; I do not think proper use is being made of the machines. There seems to be no mention of any incentive to workmen to work overtime or get more out of the machines. I have heard nothing about different crews to keep a machine in steady work—perhaps that is done and if so it is all to the good.
There is a lack of information about the whole thing and a lack of interest, which should be got over as soon as possible. I invite the Parliamentary Secretary to make a lengthy statement —if not in reply to this debate, at some other time—and to reassure the House and the country that the amount of money invested is giving a proper return and that the whole business is not being spoiled by someone's lack of faith in what the Department has set out to do.
