I move:—
That Dáil Éireann is of opinion that housing legislation should be reviewed with particular reference to the following matters: (a) the hardship caused by the operation of the differential renting system by Dublin Corporation; (b) the need for a scheme of rates remission for S.D.A. house purchasers which will ease their burden for a period of not less than eighteen years; and (c) the need for continued maintenance of county council cottages during the periord when tenants are purchasing.
It is something of a coincidence that almost exactly ten years ago, on 31st October, 1951, I moved a motion in somewhat similar terms. It dealt with the differential rent scheme applicable to the tenants in the Ballyfermot area. Since then, not much change has taken place, except that the position of these tenants, so far as the differential renting system operated by the Dublin Corporation is concerned, has, if anything, worsened. In the course of that debate my chief antagonist was Deputy Briscoe, the Lord Mayor of Dublin. I am sorry he is not here tonight. I understand he is interviewing the Mayor of Southbend, Indiana, and possibly will go on to Moosejaw in Nebraska. We here must consider the problems of our people in Ireland and one which concerns upwards of 50,000 people living in Dublin City.
There are some 18,000 houses rented by Dublin Corporation under the differential rent system. I am sure that in most counties throughout the country there is some form of differential rents or a graded rent scheme so that Deputies will be aware of what is meant in general terms by "differential rent." The idea of differential rent originated in progressive minds, notably in the mind of one of the greatest men this country has ever seen, the late James Larkin. I think it was he who first propagated the idea, with which any reasonable man would agree, that a tenant living in a local authority house whether under Dublin Corporation or any other local authority who was in difficulties, who was ill, unemployed or an old age pensioner or a widow, should not be required to pay as high a rent as a tenant who was employed and whose income could be said to be fairly substantial.
That was the basic concept underlying the proposal of differential rent. But that concept has been corrupted and twisted out of recognition so that we have to-day in Ballyfermot—which is the largest housing area in Ireland, North or South, 5,000 Corporation houses and a population of some 40,000 to 50,000 men, women and children— a differential rent system which has come to be hated by every person in that scheme.
It may be said that on previous occasions when I was associated with the official Labour Party that I defended—as I did—the principle of differential rent but the principle I sought to defend—and I am sure others also —when we were first trying to implement it was that to which I have adverted, the simple idea that persons who are needy or badly hit should not be required to meet the same charges in respect of housing as persons in better circumstances. But over the years it has developed in such a fashion that it has been manipulated by those represented in Dublin Corporation as they are represented in every local authority throughout Ireland whose sole concern is not the overriding drive or thought to house the working people at the lowest possible rents but whose sole concern is entirely different—to maintain rates at as low a level as possible. This differential rent system has been developed in such a way that the working class people of Dublin, in that huge reservoir of labour which keeps the wheels of industry turning in this city, that huge mass of workers living in Ballyfermot, are literally suffering as a result of this system.
What are the main objections to it? The first is the inquisition that the system entails. The tenant who applies to Dublin Corporation for a house— if he qualifies for it and gets it after the long and difficult period through which he must go—before qualifying must have a certain number in family, be living in a slum or in overcrowded conditions or be eligible on health grounds or in some other way. He is provided with a form which he fills in and he must undertake in signing that form that he will do either of two things—pay the maximum rent or tell the Corporation every single detail of every halfpenny that he earns and that every member of his family earns. That is the inquisition and that is what goads and troubles the people.
In my view there is something unconstitutional about it. There is something about the whole idea of probing into the very innermost secrets of family income that savours—smells, I should say—of invasion of privacy and if our Constitution does not protect the privacy of the home and the individual it is of little use to us. But that is a matter which I hope soon to test outside this House.
I want to suggest to Deputies who may be interested in this problem an undesirable situation that can be created by the operation of this system. The Corporation system is based principally upon the assessment of rent in the first instance on the income of the principal earner or, as he is described in Corporation documents, "the income-producer." I should like to quote, with your permission, the following passage from this circular which was issued to tenants by the Corporation:
Within the maximum and minimum limits rent will be assessed at one-sixth of the combined family income and will be rounded off to the nearest threepence in every case. The rents of tenants who have been allotted dwellings under the Newly-Weds-Scheme will be assessed at one-fifth and rounded off to the nearest threepence.
The combined family income is arrived at by taking that of the principal income-producer——
This is a point I should like Deputies to examine
——(whether father, mother, son, daughter, etc.) and reducing it by 10s. To this is added the income of every other member of the household, ignoring the first 5s. in each case, and subject to a maximum of £2 in each case. State and other allowances, with the exception of Children's Allowances, are taken into the calculation.
I do not expect Deputies, who have not had an opportunity to examine that in detail, to grasp how it works out in the ultimate. The mere summary that I have given of how the assessment is arrived at shows the stage of perplexity to which the system has developed but I should like to stress the point that the principal income-producer may be father, mother, son, daughter, etc. It could even be somebody who is a brother-in-law or sister-in-law living in the house. I want Deputies to visualise the unbalance of family authority such a situation can create and to my personal knowledge has created in Ballyfermot at any rate, where the father of a family falls sick and becomes unemployed.
Say the father is a labourer earning about £8 or £9 a week and the son a tradesman earning £10 or £12 a week, the son becomes the principal income-producer and thereby the head as it were of the household, or it might be the daughter. That situation can, as any reasonable person will very well appreciate, lead to difficulties, family disturbances and unpleasantness. These are things for which no Dáil, no Parliament and no authority can ever legislate to determine. The Constitution says the family is the principal social unit upon which the State is built but here Dublin Corporation, or any other authority which is similarly trying to operate such a scheme, is creating a situation whereby the traditional authority of the parent may be subordinated or upset and families may have difficulty and do, in fact, have difficulty and trouble thereby.
The time has come for Dublin Corporation to examine this whole scheme and take into account the hundreds of complaints which they have received since they first introduced it. I have been forced to the conclusion, from contacts with people and from their explanations and complaints to me and I am sure to other Members, as to how this scheme works, that it is anathema and hateful to them and must end.
Take another aspect of it. For a four-roomed house the maximum rent charged is 33/- a week. For a five-roomed house it is 36/6d. and for a six-roomed house 40/-. The 40/- rent applies to a very limited number. The 36/6 rent applies to not so large a number but the rent of 33/- which is the average maximum, if I may use that expression, applies to a very large number. How is that rent arrived at? Coming up to Christmas time, many firms in the city have developed a custom of paying Christmas bonuses to their workers. It may be a production bonus or it may be something in the nature of an expression of appreciation of the service given by workers to their employers. At any rate, a number of workers get what are known as Christmas bonuses in order to help them and their families over Christmas. They do not amount to a whole lot. It may be £10, £20 or £30. You can imagine that, while they are welcome, these bonuses do not go very far towards creating a too joyful spirit for, say, a man, his wife and five or six children.
These bonuses are a help but what do Dublin Corporation do? One would think if normally under the differential rents scheme a man's rent was based on one-sixth, that after all these actuarial calculations, and so on, are made, and when the rent is normally 25/-, Dublin Corporation would be content to say during Christmas week when the man gets the bonus: "We will put your rent up to the maximum of 33/-" They do not do that. They say: "We will average it over the year and we will put it up to the maximum for so many weeks as we can average it out for."
I have a communication from Dublin Corporation. I sought to inquire from the Corporation what standard they used in this business of averaging Christmas bonuses, production bonuses or overtime. The man may earn overtime for one, two or three weeks in the year and the Corporation say that wherever possible tenants are assessed on their total annual income expressed as a weekly average. Some tenants are on quarterly or half-yearly averages in accordance with their individual circumstances. In other words, if a man earns overtime for one month in the year and if it suits the Corporation they will average out the overtime to ensure that they receive from that man a maximum rent.
Let me take an example of what the differential rent means, and this is not by any means a bad example. It is just a typical one of a father who is earning £10:13:10 as a tradesman, who has served five years in order to learn his trade and who is married with six children of whom the eldest is fourteen years. He pays £1:9:0 a week rent. He pays 17/- a week in travelling by bus from Ballyfermot to his work in Blackrock. It takes no account of the bus fares paid for his children if they have to go to school into the city or bus fares paid by his wife if she wishes to go into the city to shop where she will get things cheaper than in the suburb of Ballyfermot.
The document which the Corporation provides gives information as to how much it costs to build houses. I notice the figure of £1,500 is mentioned as the cost of a house. There are many hundreds of tenants in Ballyfermot paying the maximum rent of 33/- and in twenty years they will have paid almost £1,700 without any ownership rights, good, bad or indifferent.
I want to put this point to those economists who worry about wage increases and who accuse the workers of creating all sorts of trouble by looking for wage increases. For every pound a worker in Ballyfermot receives he must pay 3/4d. in rent. Is it not reasonable to think that workers in that area, when they go to their union meetings and consider wage increases or wage demands, will try to get the maximum amount having in mind that they must pay that amount at the beginning before they can get a shilling to benefit their families? In other words the system, as it is operated, has an inflationary tendency. It may be a side effect but it definitely creates an inflationary effect and, from that point of view, can be criticised as well.
These tenants are not even in the position of tenants in council cottages who at least are given the right to purchase. After a certain number of years, they can be said to have established a certain interest in their cottages which may be saleable. That does not apply at all to the tenants in Ballyfermot, Finglas, Rathfarnham or anywhere else. It does not seem that the Corporation have any plans in that connection. In the particular debate of ten years ago to which I refer, Deputy Briscoe suggested that the Corporation were taking steps to enable tenants to purchase. It has not been done. Ten years have elapsed; the rent has increased; and nothing has been done. The Corporation maintain that if the tenants own the houses, they would have to maintain them. I have the case of a man who asked to have a maintenance job done two and a half years ago. Each year he reapplied to have the job done but it still remains undone. The position as far as maintenance in the Corporation is concerned is behindhand. It may well be that this is due to an inadequacy of staff. But the problem is there, anyway. The point is that while tenants are paying these high rents, they have not the compensation of a speedy and adequate maintenance section.
It is interesting, too, to consider that, in 1960, the housing estate of Dublin Corporation, by which is meant all the houses from which Dublin Corporation receives income, contributed almost £2,000,000. One would think that, having regard to that huge amount of revenue, some consideration might be given to the unfortunate people who live so far away from the centre of the city in this huge concentration of working-class dwellings. Every effort should be made to try to make life as easy for them as possible. That does not seem to be the attitude. The attitude seems to be to get as much as possible from the tenants.
What I ask for in so far as this section of my motion is concerned is that this House should look upon the matter sympathetically. When differential renting was first introduced, it was introduced with the best possible intentions and by well-intentioned people. The city manager, Mr. Mahony, is one man who contributed more to the solution of housing in this country than any other man, with the exception of the late Deputy T. J. Murphy. It is being administered with the best intentions. The time has come when we should review, as I ask in this motion, housing legislation generally.
The body of legislation which is now on the Statute Books has more relation to a situation which has largely passed than to the present position. Anybody who was a member of a local authority in 1948 or in the immediate post-war years will agree that the situation now is not at all comparable. In those years, those of us who were concerned with trying to get houses built in the terrible back-log of demands built up during the war lived night and day with the housing problem. The legislation of those days reflected that problem. In many cases, that is now out of date. Ideas which were beautiful in their concept then have not workerd out in practice. Differential renting is one of these.
I should mention, too, how out of date certain regulations are in Dublin. There still exists a priority under the housing regulations for people who suffer from tuberculosis. Tuberculosis has, thanks be to God, been pretty well got under control in Dublin. I assume from what I heard here today that a similar situation exists in the rest of the country—thanks largely to the efforts of Deputy Dr. Browne when he was Minister for Health. It is universally admitted that that situation still remains and that tuberculosis sufferers have priority over others who, perhaps, in these modern times are more deserving. I am asking that this whole question of the housing legislation should be reviewed so as to bring it up to date. How that may be done, I will suggest in a moment.
I understand that my time is somewhat limited as mover of the motion. I do not want to trespass on the rules of the House. At the same time, I should like to mention the various matters contained in this motion. I think it is very essential to strike at the roots of many of the problems.
I should like to come to the question of the proposal for the remission of rates for people who are house purchasers. In the Dublin suburbs, there are some £12 million invested in houses built under the Small Dwellings (Acquisition) Acts. This amount was provided by means of loan by Dublin County Council, in the main, and by Dublin Corporation as well. Anybody who journeys through the suburbs and sees the vast housing areas, which are a credit to the people who live there, will appreciate that herein is a colossal number of people who have been housed. They are people who are striving as best they can to purchase these houses.
Most people who avail of the Small Dwellings Act loans in Dublin can be said to fall into the category of newlyweds. Under the present dispensation of the corporation and the county council, they get a remission of rates which works roughly on this principle: they pay one-twentieth of the rates in the first year; two-twentieths in the second year and so on until 10 years elapse and then they have to pay full rates.
I suggest that when they come to pay the rates in the tenth year, that is the time of greatest difficulty for the family because the children are in the neighbourhood of eight or ten years of age. The people I speak of are people who believe, and rightly so, in large families. These families in the tenth year could be said to be reaching the most expensive stage. I am thinking in terms of the cost of education and the cost of clothing. Everybody knows that children of that age are possibly less careful of their clothing than they are at a later age.
My suggestion is that the Minister should try to provide some help to the local authorities, Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council. The period when the people in these purchase estates who avail of the Small Dwellings Act loans most need help in the form of a remission of rates is from the eighth to the sixteenth or eighteenth year. That is the time when the children are growing up; that is the time when they are most demanding. Life is most demanding in every possible way and ever consideration and help should be given to the families concerned.
