I heard that suggestion recently. At a committee of the Economic Council of Europe, which I attended, that matter was discussed. I raised that question there and I was told that the vested interests in the transport industry on the Continent were too powerful to get a general ordinance throughout the whole of Europe to put an end to the practice. But, whatever the vested interests are on the Continent of Europe, it seems to me that, here in Ireland, in our circumstances, we ought to be able to face that problem and put an end to it.
Naturally, it is not something one would do at 24 hours' notice. However, I do not think it would be unreasonable to prescribe that, after the lapse of a suitable period to allow people to adapt themselves to the new regulation, articulated vehicles of that character would no longer be allowed and that there would be a certain maximum limit which I believe at present exists for any lorry trading on the public road, at least in respect of width and length.
I have also mentioned in this House that the availability of modern earth-moving machinery seems to exercise a kind of mesmeric effect over county engineers. Hills that nobody thought of cutting through suddenly become cuttable. Corners and obstructions which were physically irremovable heretofore are no longer there. With the arrival of powerful road-making machinery, that is understandable but we ought to face this fact. It is much more important to maintain in perfect condition the surfaces of the roads we already have. I suggest to the House that if you travel from here to Ballina or Sligo, and indeed on certain parts of the roads from here to Cork and Limerick, you will find immense projects in progress for shifting corners, rooting up hills, altering gradients, while the surface of the road is breaking up under the traffic upon it. It seems to me to be the acme of insanity to allow the surface of the roads to break up while you engage in vast expenditure on improving the contour of the roads.
Deputy Esmonde referred today to the autobahnen. I inquired into that when I was in Germany recently as to whether the creation of the autobahnen had reduced the number of accidents. I got the rather chilling reply: “Yes, the actual number of accidents has been slightly reduced, but they are all fatal now.” I understand the experience in Germany is that, whereas in the past the number of road accidents involved a relatively small minority of fatal cases, now there has been some slight reduction in the total number of accidents on the autobahnen but the fatal element in these accidents has skyrocketed. That is largely as a result of the increased speeds which the autobahnen make possible, and indeed make obligatory, in order to keep the traffic flowing. I do not object to improved roads. To see our roads widened is a most admirable thing. I am certainly glad to see on the road from here to Sligo, that in a variety of instances what we used to call in the country the “long acre”, is being incorporated into the road in order to widen it. But these works should not be promoted at the expense of maintaining the surface of the existing roads. It ought to be possible to do both, because when you look at the Road Fund figure, you find that in 1957 it was £4,850,000 and in 1961-62, around £7,696,000.
That is largely because of the transfer of the rail travelling public to the roads in their own cars and lorries. All this additional money should make the task of the Minister relatively easy in providing increased grants for the road-making authorities, and in providing special inducements to them to ensure that a correct and prudent priority in their work will be preserved and that the roads we have will not be allowed to crumble away under the traffic they are carrying, while we build vast new improvements in restricted areas of the existing road system.
It is a great pity that the Local Authorities (Works) Act has ceased to function. I hear Deputies continually deploring the fact that this and that useful work cannot be undertaken because there is nobody charged with the responsibility for doing it. I recall that in 1955 we provided £300,000 for the Local Authorities (Works) Act. In 1956, we provided £749,000 and in 1957, £602,000. For the past three years, we have provided an average of £5,000 a year. Every rural Deputy knows of the valuable work it was possible for a local authority with an intimate knowledge of their own area to do with the assistance of this Act. The decision to suspend it was a political decision—a political decision to do away with something the Government's predecessors had established.
It was a bad political decision. It has resulted in unemployment of the most undersirable kind, because the Local Authorities (Works) Act used to provide employment primarily for small farmers at periods of the year when they had no other work to occupy them or provide them with an income. It also enabled local authorities with an intimate knowledge of their own area to do valuable work it would be very difficult for any other authority to undertake. If the Government would restore the moneys which formerly were made available for this purpose, I believe a very valuable contribution could be made to the resolution of a number of rural problems which at present are being left on the long finger because there is no source of revenue to deal with them.
I have heard reference made to the housing of the aged. According to the Minister for Health, we are just about to embark on an immense programme and to spend oceans of money on the rehabilitation of the workhouses. You can call the county homes whatever you like, but in the minds of the people, they are the workhouses. I want to renew an appeal I have made in this House repeatedly. It is a barbarous last resort to take elderly people out of their homes, however humble, and move them 20 or 30 miles from the place they were born and reared and put them in an institution where they never see a friendly face again.
I know of no more painful tragedy in rural Ireland than to attend at the final crisis of old people's lives, when they are no longer able to look after themselves, when they have, possibly, fallen in the fire and have been salvaged from serious accident. The neighbours finally say it is no longer possible to look after them and see that they are properly fed. They say: "We have helped them for a long time but, in conscience, we cannot say it is safe for that old body to be left alone any longer." Then the ambulance turns up and the old person is carted out and carried away. Maybe for the first month or so, a couple of neighbours make the pilgrimage to the county home to visit them and comfort them, but in the course of time, they are forgotten. One of us, perhaps, whose duties, bring us to the local authority institutions calls in there on some other business. You are passing along a dormitory and some old body speaks to you out of a bed. Suddenly you remember that that is old Pat So-and-So and, if the truth were told, you thought he was dead. But he is not dead. He is lying lonely, thirsting for the sight of a familiar face.
That is a very tragic thing, and the odd thing is that none of us wants it. I do not believe there is a single person in the House who does not feel with me in the story I seek to tell. But we suffer from a kind of paralysis. What can you do about it? I think there is a remedy ready to our hands.
The queer thing is that our grandfathers and our great grandfathers knew the remedy and applied it, and, if you go down and look at the remedy devised by them operating, it warms your heart and you feel at once that these people knew what they were about. These are the old charities that were established, some of them as far back as the sevententh century. There is one in Castleblayney; there is another in Armagh. There are some scattered about all over the country. They were established by old ladies and gentlemen leaving bequests to endow a row of houses in which there is accommodation of various kinds, usually with a lady superintendent to act as housekeeper and co-ordinate the charities provided. The people who get into these houses have not only a home but very often a little pocket money as well. All provide the old person, or the old couple, with a room, some of them with a little flat, in which they can live to themselves. Some have not only a little flat for the old couple but also have a communal room to which they can come for meals.
Recently Guinness built such a charity. It was opened within the last couple of months. They have provided not only a little flat but two or three spare rooms as well to which the old people can invite their friends to come and spend a couple of nights on the payment of some modest sum like 5/- or 6/- a night while they are there as guests of the old people. Such a plan has the advantage of not only eliminating the whole horror of isolation which blasts the declining years of so many old people but it gives them an occupation, because, if they have a wise and prudent administrator in the form of an almoner of some kind living in the establishment, she can get the old people to help one another. They are delighted to do so because it gives them a sense of being wanted. They are no longer flotsam and jetsam. They are able to help a neighbour. If one is laid up, a neighbour can come in, help to clean, and make a cup of tea. They have a purpose in life. Over and above that, when circumstances will allow them, they can walk down the streets of the village or town where they were born. They can meet their neighbours and they have some place where they can offer a friend a cup of tea.
I urge on the Minister there is no greater blessing that could be conferred upon the people of rural Ireland than that of the establishment of what I shall describe, for want of a better word, of local charity to accommodate old people. Mark you, they need not all be based on the assumption that the old people can afford to pay nothing. We could have an adaptation of the differential rent system for such establishments. Certain old persons would not be able to pay anything; other old people would be willing and glad to pay something. Still others would be able to pay a relatively economic rent for such accommodation.
Here there is a possibility for an immense benefit to be conferred. We would, I hope, gradually eliminate the need for what is known as the county home, having as our county institutions medical and surgical hospitals designed for those sick to the point of requiring hospital treatment. For the aged and for those in the state to which we all aspire to arrive, decrepitude, for it is only the saints who desire to be gathered to Heaven before their time, there should be the same sense of security that we have in our prime. The only privilege I bespeak for these people is that they should have the right to die at home. When I say "at home," I mean no more than amongst their friends and that the rest of us should be spared the perennial woe of seeing an old friend carried away in the ambulance in the grim certainty that we will never see him again until he comes back in a hearse.
That is one of the things I believe every Deputy wants to see done. Can we not shake off the paralysis which prevents us from doing it and put our hand to the task of eliminating this problem as quickly as we can with the resources at our disposal? If we start, I do not think we will find it impossible, and countless thousands in succeeding generations will bless the Minister who put his hand to the task.
I am very much troubled about this whole question of piped water supply. I heard a Deputy from Kerry announce to-day that for a restricted area in Kerry a piped water supply had been formulated, the capital cost of which was £2,500,000. He went on to say that the rates are already almost £3 in the £ and he foresaw some difficulty in accepting this proposal. I am, I am quite convinced, as radical as any Deputy, but surely there is some sanity left amongst us. Does anybody who knows rural Ireland, and the way the houses are situated there, seriously believe that an effective way of bringing water supplies to the houses of rural Ireland is by laying mains along the main roads? Sixty per cent. of the houses in rural Ireland are within 40 yards of the main road. I have never heard anyone suggest that you should bring water mains up and down every boreen in the country. If we are to build water mains along every main road in Ireland, we will leave a blister on the rates, a blister of very formidable dimensions, as the Deputy from Kerry indicated, and the man who gets the water will be paying for it for the rest of his life, provided the water main and the pipe from it to his house is fully maintained and repaired.
My experience of water mains in rural Ireland is that, the longer they get, the harder it is to find the leaks. The usual remedy for a chronic leak is to ration water at the time one most wants it because the cost of tearing up miles of country road to find where the leak is daunts the most enterprising county engineer. It is much easier to say: "We will cut the water off from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Do the best you can in the intervening period," hoping that the point at which the water is cut off is above the leak, which it very frequently is not, and the only effect of cutting the water off is that the water now goes down the drain, nobody draws any in the houses, and the leak gets bigger because the pressure of the water grows greater.
Surely we can get a sane approach to this whole business. We all know there are certain restricted areas where you cannot find a well, owing to the structure of the subsoil. It is usually a fractionated limestone subsoil, through which the water flows away and wells do not form. Nobody complains if in those areas the local authority gets a special allowance to provide a water main which will facilitate the supply of water to groups of houses and to areas where otherwise no water would be available, except by carrying it from rivers or by long journeys from adjacent lakes. But take the country as a whole. The annual average rainfall is 42 inches and there are large areas in the West of Ireland where the average annual rainfall goes up to 60 inches. Outside of Bedlam, would anyone propose to lay down on all the roads in all these areas water mains which, according to the calculation of the Deputy from Kerry, are liable to involve a capital cost of £2,500,000 for one very relatively small area covering an area of 25 miles all around the shortage of supply? That, in effect, is only the main roads within that 25 mile area. There are very few parts of Ireland, except the special areas to which I have referred, in which wells cannot be sunk with modern well-sinking machines.
We have carried electricity into practically every small house and if you have electricity, and a well, your problem is resolved. A man can then instal a pressure tank in his house with an automatic pressure gauge which operates the pump whenever the water goes below a certain level in the tank. He has an effective hot and cold water supply, if he wishes to use it, both for his house and for his out-houses and farm buildings, if he wants to extend it, and if he wants to carry water to his fields, there is no difficulty either and with an adaptation, an average supply of water can be made available. Once that has been done, apart from the cost of the electricity to run it, he has free water for the rest of his days. There is no question of an annual water rate or any charge of that kind. If a pipe bursts or if there is a leak, with modern methods it is almost unnecessary to have any underground pipes at all so that the leak can be easily detected and repaired and those problems do not arise at all.
In most areas, it is possible for a group of farmers to have one pressure tank or gravity feed for their respective houses. I would urge on the Minister that steps should be taken to bring to their attention, with much greater vigour than has been done heretofore, both the scheme under his Department and that under the Department of Agriculture, so that we may maximise the number of houses providing their own water supply, either for themselves or in colloboration with their neighbours, and that we should not urge or encourage local authorities like the Kerry County Council, which has a rate of almost £3 in £ already, to engage in a capital outlay of £2,500,000 to carry water mains along the main road in a strictly limited area of the county, in the belief that that will go any distance towards solving the problem of providing running water for the majority of farmers in the county.
There are two other matters to which I wish to make special reference. One is the provision of swimming pool facilities, not only for rural towns but also for the city of Dublin. If we want to contribute to the control of juvenile delinquency which, thank God, in this country has not as yet assumed alarming proportions, but it is before it has assumed alarming proportions that a prudent Government will take appropriate steps to ensure it never will— a necessary step is to provide healthy amusement facilities for young people so as to rescue them from the temptations of delinquency into which they so easily fall in the absence of such amusements. One of the most desirable and urgent and easily provided amenities are decent swimming baths.
I know when I was young in this city I used go to the Tara Street baths and to the Iveagh baths in the Coombe. When I look back now to those distant days of bathing in the Tara Street swimming pool, I recall that they changed the water twice a week. I always remember that if you went down to the baths on the day they changed the water, you could see the bottom of the pool but if you went down towards the end of the period before they changed the water, you could not see the bottom of the pool. I often look back with admiration both on the excellence of my own health and the valour of youngsters that they went into that water and it did not kill them. The Iveagh baths changed the water much more frequently and anyway the bath was lined with white tiles but living on the north side of the city, it was not always possible to get to the back of the Castle where the Iveagh baths are.
Those are the only two pools in the city and they were functioning 40 years ago. One was provided by the charity of Guinness's Brewery, that is, the clean one, and the other by the diligence of Dublin Corporation, the dirty one. I do not know what it is like now. I have not been in it for 35 years. I have no doubt that it is admirable and that there will be a loud explosion from Dublin Corporation as a result of my reference, but dirty it was 40 years ago and I can state that on my own personal authority. I do not know if the Iveagh baths are still in existence.
