I move:—
That, in view of the importance of afforestation to the national economy and of the necessity for securing a rapid expansion of the afforestation programme, Dáil Éireann requests the Government to examine the advisability of transferring the responsibility for the carrying out of the national afforestation programme to any one of the following: (1) a separate Ministry, (2) a separate State sponsored corporation analogous to Bord na Móna or the E.S.B., (3) a specially constituted forestry commission, (4) Bord na Móna; and Dáil Éireann requests the Government to report the result of such examination as soon as it is completed to both Houses of the Oireachtas.
Having, by the last motion, determined what our immediate objectives should be in regard to forestry, we felt it was desirable to ask the Government to examine the advisability of transferring the responsibility for the carrying out of the afforestation programme decided upon from the Department of Lands to one of four different bodies. I would prefer to set up a separate Ministry to deal with it, to set up an independent State corporation, analogous to Bord na Móna or the E.S.B., or to transfer it to a forestry commission somewhat analogous to the British Forestry Commission or, as a final alternative, to transfer it to Bord na Móna.
In dealing with this motion, I want first of all to make it quite clear that this motion is not intended to be a condemnation of either the present Minister for Lands or any of his predecessors. It is a motion which asks that the future carrying out of the forestry programme should be examined by the Government. I will very briefly set forth the reasons which prompted us to put forward this motion. Forestry carried on on a large scale, as we hope it will now be carried on, is really a vast commercial undertaking. As it is, this year there will be some 5,000 men employed in forestry work. The financial turnover will very shortly, I hope, run into over a couple of million pounds a year.
Frankly, I do not believe that the Civil Service organisation was ever intended to undertake the carrying on of a vast business undertaking such as this, nor indeed, I should say, do we consider that the Civil Service organisation is competent to carry out work of this kind. It was never intended that it should. The Civil Service is obviously hemmed in by all kinds of very praiseworthy rules. It has to follow a routine. These rules and this routine probably would not be tolerated in any modern, up-to-date business undertaking. I think it is not unfair to the Civil Service to say that, by and large, the business community would regard the Civil Service as being highly incompetent to carry out commercial undertakings. It is not its function; it was never devised for that purpose.
People are recruited into the Civil Service not because of their interest or ability in any field of Government administration but usually merely because of their clerical competence. Initiative and independence of thought and action are not encouraged in the Civil Service. Naturally, the Civil Service maintains very strict discipline and it would be regarded as harmful to that discipline, I suppose, were civil servants encouraged to display any initiative or to adopt progressive business methods which would be adopted by business firms outside.
I do not want on this occasion to widen the debate by having a discussion on our Civil Service in general, but I think I would be entitled to express the view that our own Civil Service organisation has not progressed with the times as much as in other countries. It appears to me to be hemmed in by many rather outworn and old-fashioned bundles of red tape. Other countries, probably by having had to work under emergency conditions in wartime, and so on, were able to shed many of the cobwebs of red tape and green tape that we have maintained.
Forestry carried on on a large scale of 25,000 acres a year, which means we will be planting 100,000 acres every four years, is a vast commercial undertaking. Apart from the planting of the timber and the maintenance, the question of the disposal of the proceeds from the forests would become increasingly important. Frankly, I do not think our Civil Service is capable of handling problems connected with the disposal of the harvests which will come from our forests. That is essentially a commercial undertaking. A large-scale operation involving the employment of over 10,000 men in a few years' time is not the type of work for which our Civil Service was designed. The Governments responsible for the setting up of the E.S.B., Bord na Móna, Irish Shipping, Aer Lingus, were all wise when they decided to set those bodies free from the trammels of the Civil Service. All the arguments which can be advanced for keeping forestry within the Civil Service could have been advanced in regard to Bord na Móna. It could have been said that the development of our bogs, of our turf, should have been left in the hands of the Department of Industry and Commerce, on the same basis as it could be said, as I presume it will be suggested, that forestry should be left in the Department of Lands.
I want to be as little controversial as possible in putting forward this motion. I would like to see a motion of this kind agreed to by the House and I would like to see an objective examination of what is the best organisation to ensure the rapid and economic expansion of our forestry development; but let me say that the present Minister and, I think, each one of his predecessors, have, time after time, assured the House that the lack of progress in forestry was not due to lack of finance. Over and over again, successive Ministers have told us that. I presume the Ministers who tell us that are truthful men and are telling us what is the truth. I presume they would not come here and misstate the position.
If that is so, what is the cause of the slowness of the progress made? All Parties not only in this Dáil but in every successive Dáil have vociferously proclaimed their adherence to forestry. They said they want to see ie going ahead. They said that the Government was prepared to make all the funds necessary available. Yet the progress has been extremely slow. I cannot help thinking that the progress has been made slow by reason of the fact that we are asking the Civil Service to carry out a large commercial undertaking which it was not fit or equipped to carry out.
After all, put it this way. When a young man decides to enter for the Civil Service, he sits for an examination for writing assistant or something like that, and then it is a matter of the toss of a coin whether he will be assigned to the Department of Industry and Commerce, the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, the Department of Social Welfare, the Department of External Affairs or the Department of Lands. That does not seem to me to be the ideal method of recruiting the business executives of a vast undertaking such as forestry.
Ministers come and Ministers go. We all know in this House that no Minister is permanent. It is probably just as well. You have the different Ministers and again they have not any special training for their task. The Ministers are transient heads of the Department; they are transient political heads of the Department. A Minister may be full of good intentions about forestry, but he is not necessarily a good executive head. I do not think that any of the Ministers who form our present Government claim to have any special qualifications to act as managing director of one of the biggest firms in the country which now employs 5,000 people and which in a few years' time will employ some 10,000 people, so that you cannot say that, even if the Civil Service is not the best machine, at least there is an active intelligent Minister at the head who will see that the work is done. Every Minister has to work with the machine available to him.
Having decided that forestry is essential and that we want to achieve the target of 25,000 acres within the next three years, surely we must now examine objectively what is the best way of ensuring that that afforestation programme will not only go ahead but go ahead in the most efficient and economic fashion possible.
Again, without wishing to be overcritical of the Civil Service machine, I would say this: From my experience as a member of the public, from my experience as a lawyer, as a member of this House and from whatever experience I may have gained as a member of the Government, I cannot conceive of a less economic machine than the Civil Service. It was not devised to be an economic machine. In many respects, I think it can be said to be extremely wasteful. It is hide-bound and tied up with all kinds of rules and regulations which may be extremely necessary in some Government Departments but which can only serve to retard commercial progress and also to increase, probably substantially, the costs of getting commercial objectives achieved.
There is another matter to which I should also refer. I think I referred to it before in this House. It is that afforestation depends very largely upon the technical staff and the proper relationship between the technical and the administrative staffs. Until, I think, 1952, there was a Director of Forestry. He retired in 1952 and we waited, but there was no Director of Forestry appointed. Then I noticed that the usual Civil Service device was resorted to. The post was left vacant, but there was another assistant secretary appointed to the Department. I do not know whether another assistant secretary was necessary or not. Maybe he was, but I do know that we now have no Director of Forestry and I would have thought that a Director of Forestry was absolutely essential to ensure the planning and progress of large-scale afforestation.
Many references were made in the course of discussions on afforestation to the Cameron Report, that is, the report made by an expert sent by the F.A.O. here to examine our afforestation programme and advise on it. I think it has been overlooked that in his report Mr. Cameron advocated, I think, the establishment of a separate Ministry of Forests, which has been adopted in many other countries. I think I should place on the records of this House what Mr. Cameron said in his report in that regard.
First of all, I should say that he emphasised and attached a lot of importance to the need for continual financial support and says at page 26, paragraph 68 of his report:—
"A great afforestation programme requires planning in advance and assurance of continuous availability of the necessary funds. Expenditures year by year cannot be unduly varied to meet the exigencies of passing budgetary difficulties. The yearly financial demands must be judged in the light of requirements for the whole 40-year programme. Temporary setbacks may well jeopardise the success of an undertaking on which the nation is committed to make capital investments over a term of years of the order of £100,000,000. It is particularly stressed that large expenditures will be required as initial outlays for staff expansion, for mechanised equipment, for research, for housing and educational facilities. The situation presents obvious dangers. The best solution would appear to be enactment of legislation establishing at least a minimum financial commitment against yearly revenues to be included automatically in the budget of each fiscal year."
Then at page 27, paragraph 70, Mr. Cameron says:—
"This report has stressed the fact that the issues involved in the Irish afforestation programme are of great importance to the nation. They are political and social as well as technical, and can only be satisfactorily dealt with on the highest policy level. Responsibility for the execution of the forestry programme in Ireland is at present vested in a Forestry Division, a branch of the Department of Lands."
I would like to emphasise the next sentence:—
"A division of a Department cannot be expected to wield the authority, prestige and influence necessary for the satisfactory implementation of a national policy of such far-reaching importance. Obviously a separate organ of Government of major importance needs to be established."
Paragraph 71 reads:—
"Two alternatives suggest themselves. The first is the creation of a Forestry Commission to which would be transferred all the functions now performed by the Forestry Division of the Department of Lands and the greatly enlarged activities which the expanded afforestation programme will entail. There are precedents for this form of organisation in the E.S.B. and Bord na Móna, which are now functioning so satisfactorily in Ireland. There are important advantages in the commission form of administration, including better continuity of policy, flexibility in financial matters, more freedom in staff arrangements, and perhaps better possibilities of resistance to the pressure of special interests. From the technical standpoint of getting ahead with the programme, the commission approach would probably be the best."
Paragraph 72 states:—
"The other alternative is the establishment of a separate Department of Forests with its own Minister as a member of the Government. The advantage of this arrangement would be that the political and social as well as the economic problems developing during the implementation of the programme could be presented directly to the Cabinet by the responsible Minister, who would also be a member of the Review Board proposed in Section 64 above. Decisions reached would be thus at the highest policy level after due analysis of all implications. There would, therefore, be less danger of policy reverses as the result of the clamour of an uninformed section of the public or of the pressure of special interests."
In Paragraph 75, we find:—
"Unfortunately in Ireland as in other democratic countries there are difficulties inherent in a departmental form of organisation which tend to impede the undertaking of a major economic programme. These relate particularly to obstacles imposed on the recruitment of staff, expenditures for capital investment, equipment, etc., because of the requirement for conformity with a multitude of regulations. It is not unusual in many countries for Governments to set up boards and commissions and provide them with block grants as a means of getting ahead with a major undertaking rather than trust it to a Government department with the inherent delays from which departmental action must suffer."
We invited this expert to come over here to advise us on our forestry problem. He came here, spent some considerable time here, had full access to the Government, full access to the administration which is dealing with forestry, and it cannot be assumed that he lightly recommended that the present organisation should be changed, because that is the effect of his report.
He says at paragraph 76:—
"The Forestry Division in Ireland has not been free from the frustrations of departmental procedure. The considered recommendations of technical experts, properly approved by the Minister for Lands, for the implementation of a programme for which funds have been voted by the Legislature are subjected to vexatious delays while the propriety of the expenditure is considered in the Department of Finance."
Do those paragraphs I have quoted really not provide the true explanation of the lack of progress in forestry in the course of the past 30 years? Mr. Cameron is a very highly experienced public official employed by the United Nations, a life-long expert on forestry and on the administration of forestry programmes in different countries throughout the world. We brought him here as an expert to advise us. His advice to us is, in effect, that the present system of organisation is unsatisfactory, that the Forestry Division has not been free from the frustration of departmental procedures, that it has been subjected to vexatious impediments. Possibly in very guarded language, I think Mr. Cameron has said far more than I have ever said against the present organisational set-up in regard to our forests. I do not blame the civil servants involved; I do not blame the Department of Lands for it. I merely say this: I do not think the Department of Lands was ever conceived as a satisfactory type of organisation for a huge business undertaking.
There are four courses open and I have left these four open in the motion which I am submitting to the House. First of all, there is the possibility of establishing a separate Ministry to deal exclusively with forests. By and large, from what I gathered from Mr. Cameron as a result of discussions with him and also from what I can gather from his report, he advises a separate Ministry of Forests. He advises it for this reason, that he says the Minister in charge of the forests then has direct access to the Government for whatever funds are necessary and that, as forestry is his only assignment in the Government, he also has to make his name on forestry. He favours it for that reason. Personally, I am not particularly keen on the idea of a separate Ministry of Forestry. I would prefer it, certainly, to the present set-up. I think that the present position, in which forestry is the Cinderella of our Department of Lands, is not healthy for forestry.
The second alternative would be the setting up of an independent board analogous to Bord na Móna, the E.S.B., Irish Shipping, or any one of the many very successful State-sponsored corporations. A proposal analogous to that is the proposal to set up a forestry commission more or less on the model of the British Forestry Commission in England, which has worked quite successfully. That would be the better alternative. The experience we have had of corporations such as the E.S.B., Bord na Móna, Irish Shipping, Aer Lingus, has been that these have been successful. I cannot for one instant believe that the tremendous job of work which Bord na Móna did in a short space of time would ever have been achieved if the development of turf had been left in the hands of civil servants and Government Departments. A Government Department has not got the flexibility or the freedom of action necessary for a vast commercial undertaking.
The fourth alternative—and, on the whole, that is the one which appeals to me most—is the transferring of the operations of the Forestry Division to Bord na Móna itself. That solution appears to me to be probably the most satisfactory and the most efficient as well as the most economic. In Bord na Móna we have an extremely competent, well-tried, State corporation which has achieved marvellous results, which is accustomed to handling large-scale works, which is accustomed to dealing with problems affecting the moving of earth, the drainage of land, the haulage of turf, the marketing of turf and the many other operations which relate to turf. These operations may be analogous to the operations which our afforestation programme is bound to involve, from a commercial point of view—acquisition and draining of land, employment of seasonal labour, housing of labour, marketing of the produce from the forests.
Bord na Móna already has, if you like, the overhead machinery required and has the technicians on the mechanical side as regards drainage machinery, tractors and so on, but, more important than that aspect of it, the work of Bord na Móna dovetails in with the work of afforestation from a seasonal point of view. Bord na Móna work is at its peak in summer time, when forestry is at its lowest point. Turf work is at its lowest point in the winter months, when forestry is at its peak. By the integration of afforestation with the work of Bord na Móna, we could effect a substantial economy and secure a much greater degree of efficiency in the pursuit of our afforestation programme.
I have absolutely no axe to grind in these things. My only concern is to try to ensure that the very best machinery possible will be secured to achieve the programme which we are trying to implement. In doing that, I must have regard to the lack of progress that has been made in the past and I want to ensure that we shall not tolerate that lack of progress in the future and that we will set up a machinery that will ensure that that lack of progress will never again occur and set up a machinery which will ensure that, from a commercial point of view, from the point of view of the utilisation of the timber, we will have a competent business organisation and not one which is subject to the vexatious frustrations referred to by Mr. Cameron in his report.
I have spoken longer than I intended to, a Cheann Comhairle, but I should just like to say a couple of words about an amendment which has been tabled by Deputy Moylan. Deputy Moylan has tabled an amendment which, in effect, suggests that, instead of my proposal, this whole question should be referred to a Select Committee of the House. I am sure it was not tabled with that intention but, frankly, I regard an amendment of that kind as a side-tracking move, as delaying action. On consideration, I think Deputy Moylan should not move that amendment but should rather support me in the motion which I have put forward.
The motion asks the Government to consider these questions and to report back to the Dáil. It is time enough then, if Deputy Moylan feels that he wants a Select Committee to examine it, to make that proposition, but there is not a great deal of examination to be done. We are asking the Government to consider the matter and to report back to us and at that time we can either accept or reject the view which the Government puts forward.
In introducing this motion, I hope I have not trodden on sore corns. Often, in the course of the years, we have had to engender a certain amount of heat in order to get things done, heat that has often provoked, probably, the Minister for Lands, whoever he happened to be, but that was done for the sole purpose of trying to get progress and I think we have got some progress as a result of it. Now our only concern is to get the best machinery possible to carry out the afforestation programme that has been decided upon and to ensure that we will not be subjected to any more frustration or delays.
