We hope to give a service to the people building their own houses which will be as fast as our administration and procedure allows. This has always been the endeavour of my Department. There has been much talk about red tape which surprise me because there is not a great deal of red tape that is unavoidable very often by people outside rather than inside. We get applications in respect of houses that are already being lived in. We get applications for grants to do reconstruction that has already been done. The work is covered over and plastered. We are told they had to put in this and that but it is very hard to know at that stage. We want to be fair to the people and we do not disbelieve them in any case. We go out in the belief that we are there to help them pay for the very necessary work they have done in building a new house which they badly need long after they have done the job.
In these cases, undoubtedly, there will be delays. Inspections are necessary. Their plans may have been wrong in some respect and their standards may not be standards with which we can agree and which will cause loss to themselves later on. We see if we can get these matters remedied if it is possible but sometimes the cost is beyond the capacity of the applicant. Therefore, we have to pay him nothing and leave him in a worse condition or pay him less than he would otherwise be entitled to get for a job which is inadequate. These cases can continue to come in. Other Departments say: "If you do not apply and get approval beforehand you will not get any grant." I agree that is the neat way of doing it but in our case we take into account a job that perhaps started four of five years ago and for some reason was stopped and then they re-apply. Things have changed and they come in again. We go to any lengths to try to accommodate these people because we believe our primary purpose is to help people to build or reconstruct houses. Anything we can do, we wish to do it, if it is within the law.
If there are delays that appear to the applicant as niggling matters it may be found that if the people had a full understanding of the situation, we are delaying their cases in an effort to find a way around the law so as to help them to get grants that otherwise perhaps they would not be eligible for. These delays do happen, especially in a Department as large and wideflung as the Department of Local Government. Files are occasionally mislaid and documents that should have gone into one file inadvertently find their way to another in some cases. These things will happen and will continue to happen but, we hope, in as few cases as possible.
When criticising the administration of these grants in these cases we should realize that we are dealing with a situation where there are probably the bones of 37,000 cases of one kind or another — over 27,000 I think in the past year. All these various cases entail at least two inspections, possibly three or four or five. In some cases we are notified that the work is finished and when the inspector calls the person is not at home or he may be at home but the work is unfinished which he said had been finished. I have seen cases where the applicant says he has finished the job but he leaves some things unpainted or he has not put on door knobs or put glass into some of the windows. He intends to have this done by the time the inspector gets down to make the inspection but something else turns up and he does not do it. It may be that the inspector is on a circuit near the applicant and is with him very quickly when the file goes down but the fact is that if the job is not finished the applicant has wasted the inspector's time and his own. No grant can be made, he must still finish the job and he must still notify us. Only when everything is nearly right can we pay the grant.
I do not claim that we are infallible in the administration of these grants or in doing these inspections but we claim that we try to make as few mistakes as possible and give the benefit of the doubt to applicants in every possible way within the law. I would ask applicants, of whom there are thousands, to take a little more trouble in trying to do their part in regard to submitting applications, getting approval of plans and doing things a little more in the order that would help us in the Department to help them. If they do that we will give an even better service in the future than we have been able to give in the past. I cannot say more than that about the talk of red tape.
Section 24 of the Housing Act of 1966 has a bearing on the question of dower rooms in local authority houses because in that section provision is made in respect of local authority houses for an additional room to be added. This may not be the entire answer to what is advocated here but it is certainly a very big improvement in regard to local authority houses. It was suggested finally that we should give more advice to intending house purchasers. All I can say is that this is something we would be eager to do and we have been looking into the matter to see what we can do. An explanatory booklet is, in fact, at present being prepared.
In regard to group water supply schemes the points raised generally were in regard to the inadequate supplies of water and in some cases that has become only too evident. In this regard I should say that yield-testing at source—this is now being carried out; it was not done in the early stages which I think was a mistake as was found to the cost of all concerned, not in a great number of cases but in quite a number — will, I think, take care of 99 per cent of cases in the future. We may still have an odd one where the supply dries up or disappears without any explanation but I think we can look forward to a fairly trouble-free operation in regard to adequacy of group water schemes in the future.
The specific case of Ballinabreana, Co. Carlow, was mentioned and I agree that the delay complained of is too long but the selection of a suitable source of supply took more time than one might expect. I see that the design of the scheme has now been approved by Carlow County Council and the people who are pushing the scheme are making satisfactory progress.
Subsidies on local authority houses were mentioned by quite a number of Deputies. There were complaints also that the subsidy had been reduced in respect of the rehousing of subtenants. Another complaint was that housing authorities are reluctant to rehouse subtenants. That was from Deputy Cluskey, of course. It was said that local authorities were not allowed to rehouse subtenants. That suggestion came from Deputy Coughlan. The first man to raise the matter was my old friend from the deep south, Deputy Corry.
Under these general headings — other Deputies spoke about them — housing authorities must let their houses in accordance with the statutory priorities and not in accordance with the subsidy payments allowed. This means that they let their houses without question of the subsidy coming to the houses. That is what determines how A or B gets a house. This is probably not clearly understood but it must be understood as being the actual position. I wish to emphasise that I have told housing authorities time and again, and I wish to repeat it now, that we in the Department do not prevent the rehousing of subtenants who are overcrowded. The rehousing of subtenants at the moment qualifies for the higher rate of subsidy if, (a) the tenancy was created in a rural area before 1st July, 1964, and in an urban area before 31st January, 1952; or, (b) the family concerned qualify on compassionate grounds and are unable to pay more than the minimum or the near minimum differential rent. Compassionate grounds or inability to pay the lowest or near lowest differential rent——
