I move:—
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £10 be granted to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1958, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, including certain Services administered by that office, and for payment of certain Subsidies and sundry Grants-in-Aid.
The purpose of this Supplementary Estimate is to inform the Dáil of the present financial position of Mianraí Teoranta and to obtain authority to write off certain undischarged liabilities to the Government which the company has no funds to meet. The House will recollect that this company was set up in 1947. It took over the assets and liabilities of two other companies which had been established under earlier legislation, the Slieveardagh Coalfield Development Company and the Minerals Exploration and Development Company. It resumed the exploration and development work at the Slieveardagh Coalfield and it began the exploration work on the copper deposits at Avoca. It also carried out some smaller scale exploration work for minerals in other parts of the country.
For the work on Slieveardagh, the company was financed by means of repayable advances from the Exchequer. These amounted to £104,614. Perhaps I should mention that the limit, fixed in the statute which set up the company, to finances for that purpose was £88,000; but by a Supplementary Estimate, which was passed in the Dáil in July, 1952, extra statutory advances amounting to £21,000 were authorised, of which £16,614 were drawn. It was intended then to regularise the position by the introduction of an amending Act, but that was not done because of doubts concerning the future of Mianraí Teoranta.
In 1953, as Deputies may recollect, Mianraí Teoranta, on my instructions, sold its interest in the Slieveardagh Coalfield and the Ballingarry Colliery to private interests for £50,000. It had liabilities amounting to £29,250, mainly for workmen's compensation. These were discharged out of the receipts on the sale of the property and the balance was surrendered to the Exchequer. Repayable advances made prior to 1947 amounted to £74,288 and that sum, when added to the advances of £104,614 made since the company came into existence, bring the total liability of the company to the Exchequer to £196,320, after allowing for the repayments which it made and for the interest due upon these advances.
Mianraí Teoranta also spent approximately £543,000 on exploration work at Avoca. That work was financed by means of non-repayable grants. The moneys so advanced were, therefore, not brought to account in the Estimate, but, of course, the Dáil is aware that, under the provisions of the lease to St. Patrick's Copper Mines, the sum of £542,996 is repayable and is a first charge upon the profits of the St. Patrick's Copper Mines Limited. As a result of those activities, therefore, Mianraí Teoranta were not only directly responsible for initiating the development of two important mines which are now exploiting or which will in future exploit our national assets in a quite substantial way, but are also indirectly responsible for giving a considerable fillip to mineral exploration by private interests in general.
My predecessor decided in 1956 that the activities of Mianraí Teoranta should be terminated. Its assets were disposed of and its office closed down. The financial position of the company now is that, taking into account assets and liabilities which it took over when it was set up, the advances which were made to it subsequently and the amount realised by the disposal of the assets, the company owe the Exchequer a net total of £196,320, which includes a sum of £52,203 in respect of accrued interest. The company is out of business now and has no funds to meet the liability and the purpose of this Estimate is to secure Dáil sanction to write off this sum.