Deputy Carty's protestations of angelic innocence are edifying and, I need hardly say, gratifying. However, speaking with some experience, I do offer this word of advice to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance. It has been the practice here that members of this House can make their election as to whether they address themselves to the political head or the permanent head of the Department for the ordinary routine inquiries which it is their duty to make as the representatives of their constituency. Certain Deputies habitually address themselves to the political head of the Department and ordinarily expect to receive a letter from the political head or the private secretary in reply. Other Deputies habitually address the permanent head of the Department and ordinarily expect to get a reply from the secretary of the Department giving the information required.
That practice obtains in every Department of State. For reasons which the Parliamentary Secretary proposes to communicate to the House, he has seen fit to suspend that arrangement for the Board of Works, with consequent grave misunderstanding on the part of certain Deputies. I think he makes a mistake to depart from the universal practice. It may be of assistance to him to know that in all my Parliamentary experience, I have never or very rarely addressed a Minister in regard to ordinary constituency representations. I address the permanent head of the Department and ordinarily get my reply from him.
It is quite manifest that if every Deputy corresponded directly with the political head of the Department on matters that it is the duty of a Deputy to raise with a Department, the political head of the Department could not do his work of administering the Department or Deputies would not get a reply. In fact, we know that if the Parliamentary Secretary purports to answer every individual inquiry raised with the Board of Works by every Deputy, it is the merest formality which involves masses of letters being placed before him every evening which he signs without knowing their contents. I do not know why he does it.
I have had experience as a Minister in two Departments. It would have been quite impossible for me personally to investigate every matter raised with me. At the same time, there was a very large volume of inquiries being addressed to the permanent head of my Department. As it was, when any Deputy addressed me personally, my private secretary conducted the necessary inquiries, placed the resultant correspondence before me, and I signed it out of courtesy to the Deputy who had addressed me personally. I felt that was a courtesy to which any Deputy was entitled, if he addressed a personal letter to me as Minister. Of all the inquiries addressed to the Department of Agriculture when I was Minister for Agriculture, 60 to 70 per cent went to the permanent head of the Department, to the secretary, and were dealt with from his office. The ordinary convention was that the Secretary addressed a personal reply to the Deputy who addressed the letter as I did the personal letter to any Deputy who addressed me.
The Parliamentary Secretary may feel this is a desirable procedure. I assure him that his departure is ill advised and calculated to create misunderstanding and unnecessary difficulties. I urge on him, in his own interest and in the interest of proper procedure amongst all in the common discharge of their obligations, that he should resume the practice of leaving it open to Deputies to correspond either with him as the political head of the Office or with the Chairman of the Board of Works, the permanent head. I am quite satisfied that if he reverts to that procedure, whatever his intentions may have been in establishing a new procedure, he will create a better atmosphere and unnecessary difficulties will be laid aside.
A principle is here at stake. Any Deputy has a right to make his election as to whether he will correspond with the political head or the permanent head of the Department. I do not think it ought to be the discretion of the political head of the Department to require Deputies to correspond with him alone. The public service is at the disposal of all representatives of the people, no matter what side of the House they sit upon. It should be open to any Deputy either to avail directly of the service of the Civil Service by writing to the permanent head of the Department or to requisition the assistance of the political head of the Department, at his own election.
I would strongly urge upon the Parliamentary Secretary, whatever his personal opinion may be, to recognise that he is not the only person concerned in the matter. The political head of the Department, which he is, is entitled to his view but there is also an individual Deputy who is entitled to his view. It is not fitting or becoming, if Parliamentary methods are to function smoothly, that the political head of any Department should seek to impose his will in a matter of this kind upon Deputies who do not share his outlook and who elect themselves to have recourse to the permanent head of the Department in preference to dealing directly with the Minister or the Parliamentary Secretary himself.
I could elaborate on that at some considerable length; I do not choose to do so. I think it is important to us all that decent Parliamentary institutions should function in this country. I do not believe that debate in this House should become a childish pastime. I expect it to be trenchant, vigorous and even on occasions violent in its language. That is as it should be. That is the way a decent Parliament functions. Side by side with that, a great deal of public work must be transacted which depends on all of us playing the game according to the rules.
I suggest to the Parliamentary Secretary that one of the well-established rules of the Parliamentary life of this country has been that it is for an individual Deputy himself to determine whether he transacts his business with a public Department through its political head or through its permanent head. It would be a great misfortune if a political head of any Department of State sought to change that arrangement on his own initiative without any regard for the preference of the Deputy concerned.
I am not primarily concerned to speak on this Estimate for the purpose of dealing with the matter which I have just mentioned. There are two other matters, one of which Deputy Carty mentioned, to which I should like to make reference. The replacement of dilapidated national schools in rural Ireland has made considerable progress during the past 10 or 15 years. However, as Deputy Carty says, the progress made does not appear to be sufficient to catch up on the arrears that await attention. I think one of the methods by which we could expedite the solution of this problem would be to change our approach in certain areas.
At present, we seem to be obsessed with the idea that if there is a small school in a remote area in rural Ireland, which has become dilapidated with the passage of years, we must put another small school where the old small school was. I want to suggest to the Parliamentary Secretary that he might with propriety suggest to the Minister for Education that very much more rapid progress could be made if the Minister for Education could agree with the manager that in suitable situations if there were three or four small schools in a parish which were in a state of dilapidation requiring replacement or extensive repairs, instead of attempting their several replacement by individual new schools special facilities would be made available if the manager would consent to accept a parochial school. That would involve the Minister for Education in agreeing to transport the children to the school.
I believe that in a scattered rural parish where you may have five schools at the present time, if the manager would agree to a parochial school with a bus service bringing the children into the centre of the parish in the morning and leaving them home at night, as is the universal practice all over the United States of America, we could get far better schools than we at present can have dotted about the country.
We would have the advantage that instead of having a number of small schools with one or two teachers in them, as is so frequently the case, we would have one parochial school where there would be seven or eight teachers, which would operate to create a kind of academic life around the school. We could afford to give the children far more amenities in the kind of building that would accommodate a relatively large number and the children could be brought in in the morning in the school bus using, if necessary, the old schools as points of assembly for collecting and leaving them back to the old schools in the evening from which they could proceed on foot to their respective homes.
If we do not do that, I apprehend that very large sums of public money will be wasted in building a multitude of small schools where we shall perennially be up against the problem that the number of children attending them make it possible to have only one teacher. It does not matter how excellent the teacher is: he or she cannot teach all the boys or all the girls in all the standards in one school. Yet, in my constituency in Monaghan there are now quite a number of rural schools where there is only one teacher because there are not sufficient children to justify the appointment of more.
I would suggest that the Parliamentary Secretary might discuss this matter with the Minister for Education. I believe that if such a scheme were once embarked upon, a great many managers throughout the country would recognise its advantages. The adoption of such a plan might help materially in catching up on the arrears of school building that at present harass us all.
The last matter I want to mention is one which has been a perennial source of anxiety to many of us. It is the in adequacy of that division of the Office of Public Works which deals with monuments. Everybody expresses benevolent interest in ancient monuments but, when it comes down to the tin tacks of doing something about it, it appears to be nobody's business. There are two problems relating to ancient monuments. The first is to schedule and effectively preserve those that we can see. Unfortunately, in my lifetime I have seen many precious ancient monuments physically disappear as the stones of which they were constructed had been carted away.
I acknowledge that on occasions I approached the Office of Public Works, notably under the Parliamentary Secretary's immediate predecessor and under other Parliamentary Secretaries, and in the vast majority of cases, effective steps were taken to preserve these monuments. The trouble is that the staff of the Office, which itself should be taking the initiative in this matter, is not adequate, never has been and, I suggest, should be greatly strengthened. Some of the most precious ancient monuments in this country are not visible to the naked eye at all. Archaeologists, I understand, believe that this island of Ireland is probably the richest in archaeological sites in Europe and it has the unique quality that it is the only part of Western Europe which the Romans never entered. As such, it has a unique archaeological quality.
When I was Minister for Agriculture, I was anxious to promote an aerial survey of this country primarily for certain agricultural considerations which I believed it would serve. Various difficulties arose and I failed to get it carried out but I asked the Government of that time that apart from the immediate interests I sought to serve, there were very important interests from the point of view of mineral deposits and immensely valuable archaeological considerations which could only be served by aerial survey because without that, their very existence could not be determined.
In the process of presenting that view to the Government, I got certain sample surveys made. One of them was an aerial survey of Croghan of the Kings in County Roscommon. It illustrates most dramatically the point I seek to establish. When the aerial survey of that restricted area had been made, I submitted it to a competent archaeologist and he compared it with the peripatetic survey which exists of the Croghan area and which contains such sites as they have been able to discover. But when you compare the aerial survey with the peripatetic survey, it reveals the existence of some 20 archaeological sites which the peripatetic survey was wholly unable to reveal.
I would suggest to the Parliamentary Secretary that he might, with advantage, consider this matter. I believe that over and above the archaeological value of such a survey, other Departments would be prepared to support him on the ground that it would serve their interests too. The great tragedy of the failure to have an aerial survey made is that with the passage of every year and the more intensive agricultural operations become, the more these sites will be obliterated and lost to history in our time. Every time there is an extension of a town or a village, interesting archaeological sites are obliterated and gone forever.
When the Parliamentary Secretary looks into this matter, he will find that the Department of Defence has an extremely obscurantist approach to it. I was surprised when I found that they wanted to do all the work themselves but later I found that they did not give a damn about the survey. What they really wanted was to get new aeroplanes which the Department of Finance would not sanction. They thought they could wangle the aeroplanes on the ground of doing the aerial survey.
The survey was never made. The objection was made by the Army that if the survey was to be made, it should be made only by the Irish Army as, if it were made by anybody else, our most hidden secrets might be given away. This was the time that the U2 plane was floating over the USSR without anybody being aware of it and, for all we know, a U2 plane may have been stationary over this country. The U2 plane was the one used by the Americans for taking aerial photographs. They said that our secrets might be discovered by an alien Government, despite the fact that our ordnance survey maps have been drawn by the British Government and are on file in London. In fact, if you want some of these maps, you must apply to London for them, but at the same time there must be no aerial survey of this country.
That kind of thing goes on in Governments. If similar representations are now made to the Parliamentary Secretary, I would suggest that he look on them with an incredulous eye. I do not give a fiddle-de-dee, so long as the aerial survey of the country is made. Unless and until it is made, a great wealth of archaeological knowledge is in grave danger of being lost. I would ask the Parliamentary Secretary that he play his part in ensuring that it will be preserved.
I suppose the Parliamentary Secretary is doing his job as well as he can do it. I wish him nothing but good luck. I hope he will be there for as short a time as it is humanly possible for a political appointee to be in power and I intend to do everything possible to dislodge him and his colleagues as quickly as I can but, subject to that, I hope he will do a good job. I think he is competent to do it, if he tries. I sincerely hope that he will try and that no action on his part will stir up any unnecessary opposition which will facilitate neither him nor anybody else in the transaction of public business.