First of all, I must sympathise with the House in the Whips they have. Neither the Fine Gael Chief Whip nor the Labour Chief Whip knows the rules of this House.
This afternoon I asked the Minister for Local Government a question in regard to local improvements scheme grants given to Cork County Council. For the past 40 years local improvements scheme grants were given by the State. This year the county council were invited to take them over. We were quite prepared to do so. What we were not prepared to do was to take over the neglect by the Department of Local Government represented by the three years' backlog. Schemes were sent down to us with a £25,000 grant to do them. Mark you, I have a far higher opinion of our county engineers than I have of the geniuses of engineers in the Department of Local Government. When we handed the schemes over to our county engineers, we found that a backlog of 124 schemes which had been lodged with the Department of Local Government over a period of years was sent down to us to be done, in addition to the proposals from our local people.
My question asked the Minister whether he was prepared to give us the amount of money necessary to cover the backlog due to the neglect on the part of his Department. That is what this matter rests on. I am in a responsible position as chairman of the largest county council in this country. I fully realise the honour conferred on me by my colleagues in the county council. A couple of years ago I had to prove how much I prized the honour that had been conferred on me in that respect and I did prove it.
It is a straight question. The only thing that I can advise my county council to do if the Minister refuses to do as I have asked is to return the schemes to the Department and let them carry them out. What I am not prepared to do is to have the representatives of the ratepayers in Cork County blamed and held responsible by the ratepayers whom they represent for not having the proposals carried out. If I cannot get some reasonable agreement here with the Minister this evening, my advice to Cork County Council will be to return immediately to the Department of Local Government the backlog that exists and let the Department do the work. I am not going to have the blame for the failure to carry out these schemes transferred from civil servants in the Department of Local Government to my engineers and my comrades in Cork County Council.