I have decided to intervene in the debate on the Estimate for the Office of Public Works for the first time since I left the exalted position of Parliamentary Secretary. I want to make a few remarks which I hope will be effective in getting the Parliamentary Secretary to do things which have not as yet been done by the Office of Public Works.
First, I would ask the Parliamentary Secretary to put a case to the Government for the complete overhaul and modernisation of the Office of Public Works and that it should be given a completely new role in the context of modern affairs.
There is a great deal of talk now about the environment and people have been advocating that there should be a ministry for the environment. I thought the Department of Lands could take on that role at one stage—they have not much to do— but the Office of Public Works would be more competent to take on such a ministry and to co-ordinate its plans in relation to work for which the Office are responsible and are held to be carrying out.
I felt a certain amount of frustration in the Office of Public Works when I was there in that work was carried out piecemeal without proper co-ordination. I found myself building schools that would soon become vacant and derelict. This was due to lack of co-operation with the Department of Education and lack of co-ordination of Government plans. There should be advance programming. I do not want to have a swipe at the Government now; they have trouble enough; but in view of the absence of a programme at present it would be difficult to have the type of thing I am advocating, namely, co-ordination of Government schemes for which the Office of Public Works would be responsible. That is a policy which I would hope would be adopted one day and that the Office of Public Works will be brought into the confidence of the Government in relation to Government plans and Government policy so that the office will know the direction in which they should move, the preparation they should make and the preliminary work which must be carried out.
I referred to the frustration that I felt in regard to school buildings in my time in order to illustrate the importance of co-operation with all Government Departments. The Office of Public Works should know what plans the Department of Education have at any given time, whether it is intended to have community schools, larger schools, fewer schools or more schools. The Office of Public Works in that case would not build schools in places where amalgamation would shortly take place which would render the new schools redundant and derelict in a short time while other buildings would have to be erected or additions made to existing schools. The same applies in regard to building carried out for other Government Departments.
I do not like to hark back to the period of the war but it is good to remind ourselves of the short sightedness and misdirected propaganda from which a Government sometimes suffers. In the early days of the war we foresaw a post-war period when there might be a good deal of unemployment. The late Seán Lemass urged that a programme be prepared of works that would absorb any slack that might occur when hostilities would cease and an effort would be made to return to normality. A very ambitious programme was drawn up in which the Office of Public Works were involved. The projects included a dual carriageway to Bray, the building of Parliament Buildings in the Phoenix Park and other important works, all of which were derided and laughed at by the then Opposition and pointed to in the 1948 election as an example of the squandermania of the Fianna Fáil Government. In fact, it was good forward planning, the necessity for which has since been recognised and there is regret that the works were not carried out. I listened to the proposed dual carriageway being described from platforms as autobahns for plutocrats. The Opposition have the right to question Government plans but this was a case where we can see in retrospect how wise the plans where.
I mentioned that in support of the suggestion that the Government should consult the Office of public Works, which is the construction Department for the Government. It is essential that the Office of Public Works should know what the Government programme is in relation to building. As Deputy Cunningham advocated, there should be liaison between the planning authorities and the Office of Public Works. There is not enough liaison. Very often planning offends against some of the monuments and works generally that the Office of Public Works are trying to preserve or restore. There is a definite need for more liaison between these two. Indeed one might advocate that the new planning authority to be established should work in complete co-operation with the Office of Public Works. If the Office of Public Works had the engineering and architectural staff—I know they have not—they would be the people competent to advise any planning authority as to the acceptability of certain types of planning which is becoming a farce at present. I advocate this, so that the Office of Public Works would not be pushed hither and and thither because of pressure from one direction or another, doing things today that are out of date tomorrow, that are not required or are rendered obsolete as a result of change in policy and programme, which was one of the most frustrating things I found when I was in the Office of Public Works.
The Office of Public Works never had enough money or autonomy. They are an excellent Office. I do not say that for the sake of praising them. Everybody has been contributing a little bit of praise. They were a much-maligned body with not sufficient personnel to carry out works sufficiently fast. For that reason they got a reputation for being slow, and there were many jokes told about them. There was the story about the parish priest who came looking for the architect about his school. He was told the architect was at home, and he was very annoyed. He said: "How can I get my school built when the man responsible is not even in the office?" The answer was: "He is having a child christened today". The parish priest said: "That is not sufficient reason for his being away from his office when there is important work like building my school to be done". They said: "It is not quite a normal case. He is married for 12 years and this is his first child," to which the parish priest replied: "That is a typical Board of Works' job".
When we went to functions someone always told jokes like that. It used to annoy me because the number of architects or engineers on the staff were dealing with more work at any given time than five times the personnel numbers could possibly deal with. If work is to be done expeditiously by the Office of Public Works, if plans are to be prepared and brought to the operational stage in the time that people would wish, then the professional personnel in the architectural and engineering sections would need to be trebled.
I have deviated from what I was setting out to say, that the Office of Public Works should be given more money and greater autonomy to carry out themselves what they know to be the essential works. They should not have to await sanction for all the minor works they do. They have authority to carry out certain maintenance work as a continuing operation, but there are many works for which they must await sanction by the Department and sometimes pressure from the public before they can carry them out. In the area of national monuments alone the Office of Public Works could absorb three times the amount voted to them in any year. This country has a wealth of national monuments, many of them disappearing for all time. I could name hundreds of them myself. We have visitors coming particularly from America and, in recent times, from the Continent. They have been reading about monuments and when they come these monuments cannot be traced. There are old graveyards that are being obliterated. What immediately comes to my mind is the old graveyard on Inishkeel Island where St. Conall had a monastery. The cattle are just grazing over it without even a preservation order on it. The county council are supposed to have responsibility for certain derelict graveyards, but there is a divided allegiance here and what is a number of people's business is nobody's business. If the Parliamentary Secretary would do something now really worthwhile about the preservation and resoration of national monuments, he would be doing a great job for posterity and would be automatically creating a monument by which he would be remembered for all time.
I had the pleasure of seeing Bunratty Castle restored in my time. We had moved into a few other places where restoration work was being carried out. It was such a perfect job that it made everybody want to see the castle in his own locality restored in the same way. But unfortunately we had not many Lord Gorts or any finance coming from an outside source, and the amount of money available from Departments for the work was negligible and could not enable a fraction of this most interesting and nationally important work to be carried out.
In the Office of Public Works there is compiled a huge list of monuments and many of these are now almost obliterated. However, there is yet time to retrieve some of these that have gone underground, that have become practically invisible, and there is time to restore some of those that have not crumbled to a serious extent. Preservation Orders should be put on all of them and the local police notified that anybody who interferes with the preservation order placed on the monument will be subject to the full rigours of the law. I would be ruthless in this, because another generation would blame us very much for allowing these objects of antiquity and of our great ancestry and civilisation and, indeed, our pre-civilisation period, to go into complete ruins and be obliterated.
Other matters for which the Office of Public Works are responsible give an opportunity to Deputies to be slightly parochial. I would like to mention, without being accused of being too parochial, that the Parliamentary Secretary did not please me as much as he seemed to please others in the way he handled the proposed improvements in the Finn River in Donegal. We sought some assistance from the Office of Public Works in support of local community effort to do a job that would save many houses, that would not be at all up to the standard the Board of Works would require on that river but would be sufficient to save a lot of personal property, many residences as well as land and woods. It would do an important holding job until one day the Office of Public Works could proceed with works under the Arterial Drainage Act. It is very far down on the list, unfortunately, but we had got an undertaking from the Office of Public Works to provide at a nominal fee machines they had which were lying idle. We had procured necessary moneys locally from voluntary effort and from the Donegal County Council, but I think it is fair to say that the Office of Public Works, and the Parliamentary Secretary in particular, ratted on us. The Government changed in the meantime, and the co-operation that was anticipated at the time we first made the arrangements was not fully honoured. This was a pity because it would have done a very important job. This is an ongoing problem, still being dealt with by the local community. If the Parliamentary Secretary would provide the necessary co-operation even at this stage they will do more work than would be done in any other way because those carrying it out are seriously interested in getting a good job done.
Regarding arterial drainage, time must have shown the Parliamentary Secretary that one thing is necessary. Arterial drainage moves slowly, requires much expertise and a good deal of money. It is very easy to apply the brake of scarcity of money; men can spend weeks on preliminary surveys and cost benefit analyses and the necessary preliminaries preceding official openings such as I had the pleasure of seeing in the case of a few important schemes in my time in the Office of Public Works. We are moving too slowly in regard to arterial drainage. I introduced the intermediate scheme to deal with rivers lying in the area between agricultural responsibility under the grants scheme and arterial drainage under the 1945 Act. A few such schemes, all around the £50,000 mark were carried out. I believe this scheme, which was excellent, is now discontinued; I hear of no activity under it at present.
Pending taking on all the rivers on the priority list for arterial drainage, would the Parliamentary Secretary, instead of appointing maintenance men after a scheme has been completed, put maintenance men on all the rivers held to be suitable for arterial drainage? This would be in keeping with our environmental proposals. They could be given the task of keeping the river banks clear. It is very difficult for a couple of maintenance men such as are employed when the job is done to maintain a river up to the high standard to which it has been brought by the Office of Public Works. They do perfect drainage; my only criticism is that the standards are too high, if anything. I advocate maintenance even before drainage is carried out. Power saws could be provided to enable the men to keep the river banks clear of trees that jut out over the water blocking the farmers' hay floating down and causing silting and flooding. Much of the trouble could be eased and the flooding relieved or avoided by putting maintenance men on every river due for arterial drainage at some future date.
As maintenance men look after the roads these men could look after the rivers that tend to flood. In most cases it is torrential flooding that is involved and engineers will agree that a river subject to torrential flooding can never be guaranteed to be free from flooding no matter what drainage work is carried out on it. This type of river could be greatly relieved and much property saved if certain minor works were carried out, the banks kept clear—a suitable job for anglers—and much of the river bank growth that causes silting removed. The ultimate drainage could then be more easily carried out. One of the requirements of the 1945 Act is that when work is carried out it must be properly maintained afterwards and this means appointing maintenance men.
