I am discussing it in this way, that at the moment it is the agents of the Minister CIE, who are charging old people on buses when they need not be charged, if only they had these permits. I will direct it to the Minister's attention in this way. In the meanwhile I would ask that the employees of CIE be instructed not to enforce this thing too rigidly and to allow these old folks to travel even if they have not got the travel permit.
I am sorry that I have to complain once again about the unfair activities of the ESB in relation to the provision of favourable financial loans and hire purchase facilities for selected people. The hardware trade is going through a particularly difficult period. For years, they were the sole vendors of soap, soap powders and the like, but that has been taken from them by the supermarkets. There are several other commodities which at one time you got exclusively in the hardware shop but which are now available in almost every other supermarket or store. The result has been to confine the hardware shop to what you might call dry goods, machinery and electrical equipment. What has been happening for some time past is that the ESB have been offering very favourable finances to a limited number of exclusive electrical contractors and refusing to make the same financial accommodation available to hardware merchants. The result has been that people have tended to go to the electrical contractor favoured by the ESB, to the detriment of the hardware merchants.
People might wonder how this could arise. It arises in this way. First of all, hire purchase facilities are offered by the ESB at interest rates which are lower than can be offered by any other hire purchase concern. The principal reason is that the ESB are able to obtain money on the public market and have a Government guarantee but other hire purchase firms have to compete on the ordinary commercial bonds and they must offer a high rate of interest. The ESB, which is a gilt-edged security, a gilt-edged investment, can offer more attractive hire purchase terms at a lower rate of interest.
That is not the most effective advantage which ESB hire purchase contracts have from the point of view of the seller, or the dealer, or from the point of view of the financier. It is this: the ordinary hire purchase finance company can only resort to the goods if the hirer defaults and if the goods are not there, or if they are not worth taking back, the company must go through the ordinary processes of the law to get judgment for the debt and then perhaps through the enforcement of the machinery of the district court for an instalment order, or ultimately a committal order if the debt is not paid. All of these processes increase tremendously the overheads of the ordinary commercial hire purchase concerns but this is the only financial facility available to the hardware traders as distinct from the favoured few who can get ESB facilities.
The ESB, on the other hand, can use any payments which they receive from customers to hire purchase accounts, in the first instance, and this is what they do. If a customer is in arrear, if a customer is unable to pay the full account, the ESB in the first instance use any money received by them towards payment of the hire purchase instalments. That puts the customer in trouble as regards electricity supply because the customer is then in arrear with payment of electricity charges for electricity supply and the ESB disconnects the supply. That is the main weapon the ESB have and the greatest advantage they have in relation to hire purchase. That gives them far greater security for any advances they may make because they can disconnect the electricity supply. It is a far better weapon than any available to any other hire purchase concern.
This is why I plead with the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary to ensure that if the ESB are going to make hire purchase facilities available for the purchase of electrical equipment, they should be available to all suppliers of electrical equipment indiscriminately; not just to the exclusive electrical contractor but to all hardware merchants. This is unfair trading. It would not be proper for me to open up a discussion at the moment on the Fair Trade Commission but it is no answer to my criticism to say: "Go to the Fair Trade Commission."
I am not saying anything that is not unknown when I say that there is serious complaint about the Fair Trade Commission and that probably there will be substantial changes in the Commission, or part of it. I hope there will be. In the meantime, the Fair Trade Commission say that they do not regard this as unfair. That is irrelevant. It has given unfair preference to certain favoured contractors, a preference which is not available to the general hardware trade. Without the goodwill of the hardware trade in general, the ESB in the long run will be the losers.
The strange thing is that the ESB have made some of these hire purchase facilities and finances available to some fly-by-night merchants who go around knocking on doors selling people second and third fridges when they already have one. Some members might be amazed that that should occur but it occurs for this reason. The first fridge is "hocked" or sold and the second fridge is "hocked" or sold, and the person takes on a third. This is done not for the purpose of having a fridge but for the purpose of having an article which they can resell. It may well be criminal to sell goods which are subject to hire purchase contracts but unfortunately this has occurred. The weird situation arises that ESB finance is made available to oil that kind of unsavoury transaction and it is refused to reputable hardware merchants in the city and, I suspect, throughout the land. I would urge the Minister to ensure that steps will be taken to make the ESB finances available for the purchase of all electrical equipment.
May I make a plea in regard to electrical equipment? I hope I will not be silenced on the ground that this is the responsibility of the Minister for Industry and Commerce and not the Minister for Transport and Power. I wish to refer to electric plugs and plug sockets. We have a multitude of designs in this country, but the extraordinary thing is that, as the number of designs increases, the quality appears to decrease. Some of the best on the market are of Irish manufacture, but the ESB have specified in some housing schemes plugs and sockets which are not manufactured here, which are extremely light and which, with average use, are certain to break at least once in 12 months, imposing serious costs on householders. This type is also one of the dearest on the market. The situation operates in Dublin that the dearest plugs and sockets are to be found in Corporation houses because the ESB require them. Therefore, when breakages occur, the people with means smaller than other sections are required to replace with the most expensive type of plug.
I know this is a complex problem which is not peculiar to this country, but efforts are being made elsewhere to have a uniform plug and socket. I would urge the Department, with the ESB, to enter into these discussions and to ensure we would have in our time a uniform and satisfactory type of plug, socket and bulb holder. Certainly the present situation is unfair to electricity users.
That is one aspect of it. The other aspect is this. As a result of the many defective plugs and sockets on the market, there are people using unsafe electrical equipment which is likely to cause serious injury or perhaps endanger life. There is an obligation on the ESB to clear up the mess existing in relation to plugs and sockets. As a matter of law, the ESB have no responsibility for the behaviour of electricity, once they bring it to the meter. If it causes an explosion after that, the ESB have no responsibility. But that is simply not good enough. We need to have a greater appreciation on the part of the ESB of their responsibility in this regard. We would hope therefore that the day is not too far distant when we will have a uniform satisfactory type of plug, socket and bulb holder.
I would also like to make another plea to the Minister to use his good offices with the ESB to ensure that their salesmanship in relation to electrical equipment does not go ahead of the electricity supply. It is a very common experience in Dublin to find the supply unsatisfactory and below the requirements of the neighbourhood. The result is that many people who put in 100 watt or 150 watt bulbs get an output equivalent only to 50 watts or 75 watts. It is a very frequent experience in some suburbs to find in the winter at certain times of the evening, that the television screen is unsatisfactory because the electric power in the area is below what it is supposed to be. The result is that people are obliged to put boosters and other expensive equipment on their sets. Invariably when complaint is made to the ESB, the reason is given that it is because of an increase in the use of electrical equipment in the area and that the substations provided are not sufficient to meet the demand.
The fact is that the ESB are primarily responsible for the increased demand. They spend hundreds of thousands annually on the promotion of increased sales of electrical equipment. If they do this, they have a clear obligation to anticipate the increased demand and provide for it. It may be said that it is difficult to identify any area where sales of equipment will increase demand because it is spread over large areas. That certainly does not apply down the country, where local demand is created by local campaigns. It does not apply in an area like Ballyfermot where the ESB set up a local office some years ago and embarked on an immense local campaign supported by door-to-door salesmen for the sale of electrical equipment. The result was an immense boost to the amount of electrical equipment used, fridges, irons, televisions, heaters and what have you. Ever since, the ESB have been unable to catch up with the increased demand they themselves created.
This is far less than fair. We are told by the ESB, as though it were sufficient justification, that people are not paying for electricity if they do not get it, because the meter will not go around at the same rate if the supply is not up to standard. I have not got sufficient technical knowledge to know whether they are right or not in that; but it is no answer. The people want electricity. If they have a 100 watt bulb, they want to get an output of 100 watts from it. If they have equipment, they want to be sure it will work satisfactorily. There is a clear obligation on the ESB to anticipate demand and provide for it.
I join with several Deputies who complained about unsatisfactory signposting. I have had occasion to spend three very happy holidays in Wexford, but I am appalled by the grossly unsatisfactory signposting there. Signposting is primarily for the benefit of strangers. I would urge the county managers and tourist officials to go around with their eyes open, to pause at every crossroads they come to and to consider whether a stranger would know where the roads were leading to. On the south coast in Wexford there are two very fine bays—Blackwall is one of them and I cannot remember the other at the moment—where thousands of people would love to rest and swim. But there is no signpost at all to give the stranger any indication where these two beautiful strands are.
In Wexford this summer I noticed that seven cars out of every ten bore foreign registrations. With the car ferry between Rosslare and Fishguard, you have cars arriving in Rosslare by the hundred every day. Many of them, as I say, will be from another shore. It is not satisfactory, to say the least, that such people will leave Wexford and go elsewhere when they have some very fine strands within a few miles of where they disembark. Those foolish enough to assume that the strands they see on their maps might be signposted will spend many a weary hour trying to find out where they are. It is extraordinary that the natives in some of these places appear to be as ignorant as to the location of their amenities as strangers, or perhaps I should say they are not helpful, because familiarity does not open the eyes of people. Sometimes the native might well know how to get to a particular place, but he is the worst possible guide, because he knows out of a kind of natural sense, without even thinking, but the stranger has to look out for landmarks and the landmarks are not always available to the minds of the local people. Therefore we cannot spend too much money in improving the signposting of our country in general and, as I say, of County Wexford in particular, and I would hope there would be a vast improvement in County Wexford in the very near future.
The position is bad enough as it stands, but with the new ferry between Continental Europe and Rosslare, it will become even more difficult in the future. If there is a need there already, the need will be very much greater in the not too distant future when cars will be coming through from France, Germany and Italy to the Irish shores. These people will expect that the fine strands of County Wexford and other points of local interest and of beauty will be identified to them with sign-posts, and our old, casual, sloppy ways simply will not do. People who will come that distance will come to Ireland for the miles and miles of beaches with nobody on them which have been advertised. Presumably when they were being advertised, nobody said one of the reasons nobody is on them is that it rains so much. However, the beautiful strands that are displayed in our advertising material will invite people here to come and see them and it would be a tragic thing if they were to pass by many of them without knowing they are there. That is what I am sure will happen in County Wexford and other places unless the roads are better signposted.
I think it is true to say that the main roads and the roads off them are fairly well signposted; you can certainly get off the main roads to other places, but it is once you go to these very remote places that you need the signposting more than on the main roads. At least on the main road, there is a chance that there will be some other motorist, pedestrian or cyclist coming along within a matter of minutes, but when you go on to the outlying areas, it becomes more and more difficult to get assistance from local guides.
The Minister, most unfairly, in his statement sought to blame workers for some of the losses of CIE and other companies in recent times. He blamed them on strikes. I wish to remind the Minister and the House that many so-called strikes in recent times have not been strikes; they have been lock-outs. The two cases which the Minister identified as strikes in his speech were not strikes and do not let us confuse the word "strike". A strike is a withholding of labour, and these interruptions in CIE were due to the company locking men out. The result was the losses which I think the Minister said were over £600,000, and another result was untold hardship on tens of thousands of people who were obliged to walk rather than use public transport.
I think it is fair to say that the people who were responsible for locking out the workers of CIE should be dismissed. The management of CIE who are responsible, on the Minister's own admission, for a loss of £600,000, should be dismissed. That is the taxpayers' money they threw away. It is no answer to say that the lock-out occurred because the management would not allow the men to say at what hours they would present themselves for work or allow some of the workers to say they would not work on one day a week. It would have been far better to operate transport services on six days out of seven than not to operate them at all.
The decision to lock them out, the decision to withdraw the transport service completely from the people was a decision of the Board of CIE, entirely supported by the Minister for Transport and Power. Not only should the management of CIE go but the Minister should go, too. He has confessed here to being responsible for the loss of over £600,000. It is quite clear from the figures quoted by the Minister that if these services were operated on six days a week there would not have been any more than £100,000 lost on the one day. It is a tremendous admission of responsibility here for costing the tax-payer that vast sum of money, not only that but also many painful feet and many hours of hardship which were avoidable if only there had been some degree of sanity and some proper industrial relations in CIE.
I want to commend the provision of farmhouse holidays. This has been a wonderful idea. We have had too much interest in grade A accommodation and too little interest in the kind of accommodation that ordinary people want. The people who will bring their cars here from the Continent or from Britain to Ireland will not be looking for grade A accommodation. They will be people who will be staying a night here or two or three nights there, and the kind of accommodation which these people are looking for is homely, pleasant accommodation, the kind they will be able to get in farmhouses.
If I may go back to County Wexford again. There is a great interest in providing this type of accommodation there. One cannot travel any distance without seeing a bed and breakfast sign outside. I saw two such houses which were not completed by the contractors but still had the bed and breakfast sign outside. I was talking to some of these people and they said they had not a bed vacant at any time. That is the kind of accommodation that gets money spent here, and I think that was said by other speakers. The people who will be coming here will be spreading the money around because they will stop here and there for a few nights. They will want their bed and breakfast and will then go to the local shops for their provisions. They cook their meals by the roadside or go into hotels and restaurants on the way. There is a very small capital investment involved in this kind of accommodation on the part of the State. It is the kind of sensible family approach which will provide new wealth for our people.
There is the danger that we would have thought that such improvements as have occurred in our holiday traffic are due to Bord Fáilte or to the Minister for Transport and Power. I am not decrying their efforts. What they have done has been good and we need more tourist promotion. It is interesting to note that in the average of increased tourism in Europe in the past five years, we are second from the bottom. The major part of what we have managed to get is simply evidence of the general development of tourism in the world. There are far more people travelling further than ever before. We all know that from our own experience. There are more people from Ireland going abroad than ever went before. The horizons of the world are disappearing because we can see over them, and Ireland could not fail to soak up some of this increased tourism. The fact that we have such emphasises immediately the physical obligations on us to provide the facilities so that we can take the tourists when they come. Anything done in that regard is good but I think we have no reason to feel smug about what we have achieved. We need to do a great deal more if we are to do no more than come up to the average of increased tourism in Europe.
A great deal of the credit, indeed, for such increase as we have had must go to Aer Lingus and it would be only proper that we should voice our unqualified praise of all that Aer Lingus is doing, not only in relation to promotion of traffic for itself but also for the improvement of the image of Ireland abroad. It must, however, cause us considerable concern that the ownership of Aer Lingus is moving away from Irish hands into the hands of foreigners. The Government have told Aer Lingus that they will not allow Aer Lingus to seek money on the Irish market. We know that Aer Lingus is thought very highly of by the Irish people. We know that Aer Lingus is a success. We know also that there is more capital available in this country than we are using. We know that we have hundreds of millions of our money invested abroad because of lack of opportunity to use it here. It is indefensible to prevent Aer Lingus from getting money on the Irish money market. The money is there and Aer Lingus should be given the opportunity of getting it.
What is happening at the moment is that Aer Lingus is being forced to go to New York, Zurich and elsewhere to get money for the purchase of new planes. Nominally, of course, the money will be borrowed by Aer Lingus and Aer Lingus will be indebted to the people who lend the money but the people who lend the money will have a lien on the planes. That will be their security and until such time as Aer Lingus pays every penny or every cent of what is borrowed, these planes will remain the property of whoever lends the money. That is very bad. But, Aer Lingus will not borrow the money on charity. That will not do. Those who lend the money will only lend it because they are satisfied that Aer Lingus is a paying proposition. They will be satisfied that Aer Lingus is a solvent company. They will be satisfied that Aer Lingus not only can borrow the money but can repay it with substantial interest.
That means that the enterprise of Ireland, the skill of the men in Aer Lingus which has gone into the building up of Aer Lingus, which is operating Aer Lingus, will be making money, not for Ireland, but for the foreigners who lend the money to Aer Lingus. That is clearly bad. This is bad economics. We will not have the benefit of the interest which would be earned by this capital investment. Instead, we are allowing somebody else to invest their money in Ireland so that we can pay them back their money with interest and the interest, of course, will represent the brains, brawn and skill of Irish people using their money. Admittedly, if they lend their money, these people are entitled to their profit, their interest, but we say it is wrong that we should oblige a company like Aer Lingus to stay off the Irish money market, to keep away, to seek their money elsewhere. No doubt, the argument for this is that Aer Lingus, if they came on the market, would get the money and by getting the money here at home would, perhaps, undermine a national loan or the ESB or somebody else in looking for money for other projects here.
As I said earlier, we in Fine Gael are satisfied that there is sufficient money available in this country to finance all these things and more and that when there is a worthwhile investment such as an investment in Aer Lingus then it is on the Irish money market that Aer Lingus should be looking for that money. That is where they want to look for the money. That is where they should be allowed to look for it. I would hope for a change of heart on the part of the Government.
I think Deputy Mullen of the Labour Party was not quite right when he was dealing with the leasing of Irish planes during the winter months to South America and other foreign countries. Our planes do certainly go abroad in the winter months. It is a good thing that they do because they are very costly items and it is only by using a plane to its full capacity that you will be able to repay what you borrowed to buy it and build up sufficient money to replace it. But, as I understand it, Aer Lingus is sending its planes abroad but with the planes Aer Lingus also sends Irish pilots, Irish crews and Irish maintenance staff to look after the planes while they are flying in foreign countries. This is an excellent operation and Aer Lingus should be congratulated on their enterprise in this regard. It is essential. In fact, it is the only proper use of this equipment. As I say, it is not only the equipment but also the staff.
Deputy Mullen expressed a fear, which it would be proper now to quash, that the planes might be overused. There is no risk whatsoever in this regard. As I understand it, and I am perfectly satisfied about it, the manufacturers of these planes have a very rigid programme and Aer Lingus not only sticks to the programme of examination and stripping down recommended by the manufacturers but, in fact, exceeds the safety precautions specified by the manufacturers of these planes. Not only are the planes properly maintained when they are away from our own shores but when they come back they are stripped down and re-built from the ground up. It would not be proper that there should be any notion as a result of anything said here that Aer Lingus is taking risks with its planes during the off-season period. Far from it. The planes are maintained in the peak of condition and perhaps all the better for being kept in use and, certainly, the crews are all the better for being used.
The fact that I have not referred to other matters that the Minister has referred to is not to be taken as showing lack of concern for them but rather the consciousness that many of my colleagues have other matters which they wish to discuss on this very important Estimate. One of the most important Estimates that come before this Dáil is the Estimate for Transport and Power. It affects us intimately every moment of the day and it is on that account, as said earlier, that I make no apology for dealing with some minute matters which may seem beneath the sophisticated intelligence of the Minister. This is the only opportunity we get to deal with the day-to-day operations and we can only hope that whatever we say on this occasion will percolate through to the right quarters and be considered and bring about benefit as a result.
