This Telephone Capital Bill is the seventh which has been placed before the Oireachtas since 1922 that is since the transfer of Services. The functions of the Bill are the extension, as distinct from the operation and maintenance, of the telephone system. It follows exactly the form of the previous Telephone Capital Acts. It authorises the Minister for Finance to invest a stated maximum fund in the telephone service for extensions. The security, so far as the Minister for Finance is concerned, is the apparatus, the plant and the property of the telephone service.
The sums provided under this Bill are repaid by terminable annuities over a period of 25 years and a sum is voted in the Estimate for Posts and Telegraphs each year to defray the annual charges, including repayment and interest. Naturally, those charges can be measured against the earnings of the service. The Telephone Capital Act, 1946, provided £6,000,000 and this was meant to be sufficient for telephone development up to the end of the financial year ending March 31st, 1951. Of that sum, £1,170,000 has not been spent and it will be sufficient for, roughly speaking, half of this financial year which ends on March 31st, 1952. The under-expenditure is due to a number of factors. There was a continuous shortage of electrical engineers in the Post Office service, which delayed to some extent the making of long term plans, and the making of plans for new exchanges and circuits. There was also delay in connection with buildings. It was very difficult to find suitable sites on which to erect larger exchanges. Very often it was difficult even to extend existing Post Offices, having regard to all the technical problems involved.
There has been a great concentration on the joining of subscribers' lines, as a direct policy of the last Government. That involves in some ways a delay of a greater magnitude in the construction of important telephone trunk services.
Wages and salaries naturally have increased in the period since 1946. Materials and stocks of all kinds have gone up in price. There has been an anticipated extension of the Dublin Telephone Exchange but this extension is still far from what is desirable. That took a sum of money larger than was anticipated. The stocks of engineering stores have been increased by £394,000 over what they were in 1946 to anticipate a possible emergency.
The greatest progress that has been made in general is in the joining of subscribers' lines. The number of subscribers' lines has increased and the figures should interest the members of the House. In 1923, there were 18,000 and by 1932 the number had increased to 30,000. By 1939, the number had again increased to 43,000. To the very great credit of the Government of the day, and certainly to the very great credit of the officers of the Department and in spite of a war and all the difficulties connected with a war, the number of subscribers' lines increased from 43,000 in 1939 to 60,000 by 1948. This shows an increase of 17,000 subscribers' lines. Since then, progress has been extremely rapid and this year there are now 83,000 subscribers' lines. That is a very considerable increase since 1948.
I should make it clear that a great part of the work of telephone development was planned by the Government of the day in 1946. I give every credit to my predecessor for having made use of these plans, for having examined them, for having extended them in certain instances and for having enabled them to be put into operation. I say that much because, in the course of previous debates, there has been a suggestions that the whole thing was done by the last Government. There were 6,000 subscribers' lines joined in 1948, the planning for which took place in the previous year. I am naturally willing to give due credit to the previous Minister for having carried on with our plans and for having developed them in his own way.
There is one telephone to every eight dwellings or one to every 36 persons, but we are very far behind in telephone development in this country in relation to our income or in relation to any other factor. Using the telephone is a habit that has grown very slowly among the Irish people. In 1939, telephones were attached on demand and with very little delay. I have some interesting figures about telephone population in this country. We have about one-fourth to one-tenth of the telephones per 100 of the population as compared with the whole of the U.S.A., Great Britain, the Commonwealth nations and Scandinavia. We have about one-half of the telephones per 100 of the population as compared with France, Belgium and the Netherlands. It is quite obvious that the habit has been growing very rapidly, particularly among the younger generation who do not like to be isolated. Whether that is good or bad, there is going to be a considerable demand for telephones in the future.
As distinct from subscribers' lines there were in 1923 1,000,000 trunk calls. By 1950 the number increased to 4,500,000, a tremendous increase. From 1949 to 1950 there were 500,000 more trunk calls. If you relate that to 83,000 subscribers you will have some idea of the demand placed on the service. As far as local calls are concerned, the number of local calls in 1923 was 16,000,000, and by 1950 this had reached 68,000,000. That is double the figure before the war, when there were 32,000,000 local calls. In the period from 1949 to 1950 the number of local calls increased by no less than 5,000,000, that is an increase of 5,000,000 in one year. Since 1946 we have installed 12,000 circuit miles of telephone wires, but even that, as the House knows, is grossly insufficient to cope with the traffic.
A very important co-axial cable has been constructed to Cork via Limerick with spurs from Portlaoise to Waterford and Athlone. When the necessary equipment is installed, telephone delays should be reduced considerably, first of all in respect of places on the main trunk lines and, secondly, in respect of towns adjacent to the junction points of the main cables. The number of circuits on the cross-Channel route was increased from 16 to 48 but this is till grossly insufficient for the traffic on that route. The whole of the transport machinery of the Post Office has been enormously improved since 1946. About 1945, there were a total of some 40 vehicles in the telephone service. There are now 276 vans, trucks and vehicles of various kinds all brought into operation with a view to expediting telephone development. Delays in buildings have reduced the rate of progress. There is a great deal to be done in the way of planning for future service, the acquisition of sites and the erection of buildings themselves. New automatic telephone exchanges have been constructed in Bray, Malahide, Swords and Castleisland. A large new automatic trunk exchange has been constructed and is now in operation in Cork City and a similar exchange will be opened in Dundalk this months. All these improvements help to improve the service. Thirteen main trunk exchanges have been enlarged. There are 3,460 people employed in the telephone service, an increase of 1,650 since the war.
I thought that at this point I should introduce a slightly flippant note by trying to answer some of the more outrageous criticisms made against the telephone service. I frequently hear business people say in connection with the delays in trunk calls that the operator was taking tea and that in certain instances the delays were deliberate. I wish to state that that is not the case. There are relief operators who come into the exchanges and operate the switchboards while the others are taking their tea. The whole operation is done in rotation and the service does not suffer at all. Another complaint concerns understaffing of the exchanges, but that is not a fact. If anything, there is always an excessive staff working on the switchboards. Delays are due to the overloading of the system and to the many demands for calls in relation to the number of switchboards available and also in relation to the number of main trunk circuits that can be carried.
We have increased very largely in the last ten years the number of exchanges in continuous operation. There are now 92 stations where the service is continuous throughout the night. I was asked a question in the Dáil about the extent to which we have developed the all-night services in tourist districts and I find in the vast majority of tourist areas the telephone service either operates until 10 o'clock or all night and that hotels, on making a payment of a reasonable charge, can, by arrangement, have their telephones operating all night by having their lines connected.
Since 1947, 140 kiosks have been erected. Over 130 ordinary circuits have been constructed since 1946.
These are figures that may be of interest to the House as indicating the purposes for which the capital is required. For the extension of the number of subscribers' lines, £3,250,000 of the total of £8,000,000 will be required. There is a waiting-list of 5,500 people wishing to become subscribers, of whom 4,000 are in Dublin, so that the greatest pressure is in connection with the Dublin metropolitan area. Recently the number of lines joined has been nearly equal to that of the annual demand in the country as a whole. The system is hopelessly overloaded at the moment.
I want to make it clear that the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the last Government deliberately and advisedly adopted a policy of connecting up subscribers' lines at the expense of fundamental development. There may be some reasoning in support of that. That policy is being effected at the expenses of the long-term policy because the previous Minister was unable to increase sufficiently the number of electrical engineers and it takes time to plan trunk circuits. It takes time to plan where, for example, you want to extend some automatic exchange and decide when and how best some minor link exchange will be joined up with it. All that takes time and consultation, as was seen in the planning of the co-axial cable from Dublin to Cork.
There has been delay in carrying out maintenance work and the fundamental development policy. I am not saying what the policy of the present Government is in these matters, or what my own policy is, but I do say that the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs at an early date will have to give serious consideration to this matter of electrical engineers. The day must come when we either secure more engineers or, remembering our duties to those who succeed us, slow down the joining up of subscriber lines and speed up the planning of exchanges, new circuits, trunks and so forth. Some Minister will have to write to the waiting subscribers and tell them that the work of joining up will have to be halted until the fundamental works have been undertaken and completed.
There has been considerable complaint of delays in getting replies to "zero", "30" and "31", but no scientific system has been devised whereby such calls can appear on a switchboard in rotation. The result is that some subscriber may experience inordinate delay in getting a reply, while another may get an immediate response. This is due entirely to the fact that the only indication to the operators is the flashing of lights on a switchboard and the operators do their best to keep up with the calls, but they have no means of knowing in what order they were made. So far as I know, no system has been invented to show the rotation in which these calls come, and that is probably because the people who manufacture equipment do. so in the belief that there would be just sufficient subscribers for the needs of the apparatus. In connection with the Dublin switchboard, for example, the number of units to enable callers dialling any of these three numbers to be answered more speedily has been increased from 90 to 140, and all subscribers know that even that is grossly inadequate, having regard to the number of calls made and the vast increase in the number of local calls in Dublin since 1939.
Of the total moneys sought, £3,170,000 is required for fundamental construction works which we hope to carry out. These include the co-axial link to Newry, linking Dublin with Belfast, work on which has just begun. It includes also a circuit from Athlone to the West. There have been various complaints about the insufficiency of the circuits to the West and improvements have been made in some areas by the new cable from Portlaoise to Athlone. We hope, if possible, to construct an independent cable to the North-West.
There is a great deal of work to be done in connection with minor circuits. This is evidenced by the fact that it is very often more difficult to get a call from parts of the West to a town 25 miles away than it is to call Dublin, London or Belfast.
It is proposed to increase the number of cross-channel cables from 47 to 106 in the course of the next two years. That is work which is being done jointly with the British authorities. A joint arrangement has been made and the equipment has been on order for some time; there is the inevitable delay. In the meantime, the London-Dublin service is overloaded at some times of the day as compared with other periods when calls can be put through in a few minutes.
A sum of £1,705,000 is to be expended on exchanges. It is proposed to have ten more automatic exchanges of the same type as those already operating in Bray, Malahide, Castleisland and other areas. Part of this money will also go towards the new exchange in St. Andrew Street, and other Dublin exchange extensions are contemplated. I do not want to give any undue hope by reason of the fact that the work on the St. Andrew Street exchange will be completed in the course of the next 12 months. My own belief is that any improvement in the service begets a further desire for making telephone calls and for subscribers' lines and it will be a long time before we catch up because, as I have said, the telephone habit is growing so rapidly.
There is a sum of £625,000 for buildings of all kinds, and £385,000 for the construction of call offices in post offices. There are 700 to be completed in the programme of which 152 will be completed this year and these offices are planned according to strict engineering design principles. The location of these call offices is related to what is considered best from the engineering standpoint.
There were many observations made in the Dáil. People asked why a particular call office was not joined. I am glad to say that there is no political interference with the establishment of call offices. It is based rigidly on principles of engineering, of getting the largest number of call offices established in the most convenient way, having regard to the demands in the way of calls from a particular post office, estimated in advance, and the amount of wire, poles and equipment required. The plan for next year will be in course of preparation. The only step I have taken in the nature of what might be called ministerial interference is to have the whole list examined again to make quite sure that there are no grievances of an undesirable kind and, also, I have asked that the tourist areas be specially considered, and later on we might consider doing proportionately more for the congested areas than has been done up to date.
In general, it will be planned according to engineering principles. The total of all those sums comes to £9,135,000 and, with the amount on hand, £1,170,000, the net amount required is something short of £8,000,000, and is being made up to £8,000,000 for the purpose of this Bill. It is a very large sum. We reckon that £14,000,000 will have been spent on the service in the ten-year period, 1946 to 1956.
The cheap pre-war stocks are vanishing very rapidly. Operational costs are mounting all the time. Stores have gone up in price by an average of 180 per cent. since 1939, and the cost of many important items is up by as much as 600 per cent. Twenty-two foot poles cost 7/- each in 1939. They now cost over £2 5s. each. The House well knows the price of copper and of other metals used in electrical installations. All those prices have bounded. The wages and salary bill has gone up by 139 per cent. As the House knows, the telephone charges were increased by 5 per cent. at the end of the war, and it brought in a certain amount of money.
I now have to deal with the general financing question. Profits in 1945-46 in the telephone service were £298,000 —a record figure. By 1950-51 the profit had been reduced to £92,000, this sum including a proportion of the arbitration award to civil servants, namely, the amount of a retrospective character required to pay salaries back to January 15th. We anticipate a loss this year of £40,000 on the telephone service and that will increase very markedly unless telephone charges are increased. The cost of depreciation and maintenance of the larger plant, the increase in annuity charges will all help to swell the loss unless we take action to bring the position back to normal. So, as the House knows, the telephone charges will be increased by 25 per cent. by warrant which lies in the power of the Minister and it will have the effect of reducing the loss and, we hope, of producing a slight surplus.
As the House knows, the Post Office service should pay for itself. You can argue as to whether each branch should pay for itself, or that the whole service, postal, telegraph and telephone, should pay for itself. It would be very unfair to the community as a whole to make the general taxpayer cover any large deficite on any part of the service because, if there is any form of charge which is in direct proportion to the income of those who use our services, the group of charges levied for both postal, telegraph and telephone service, are a perfect example. No one can deny that. With the inevitable few exceptions, the more money people have the more they telephone, and to levy a charge for the telephone service upon the ordinary taxpayer would be highly injudicious.
Telephone calls from boxes are being increased to 3d., and that will take place, I may say, in the United Kingdom very shortly. At present the figure is less but it will soon be 3d., if it is not already that.
The annuities in this Bill cover repayment in 25 years. That has been increased by five years because we now estimate that plant will last longer. We estimate the life of plant as being 29 years, so we make these annuities repayable in 25 years.
We do require, as I have already indicated, more electrical engineers. We are taking every step to see what can be done about the matter through whatever approaches can be made to the Minister for Education and those in charge of our universities, but it is difficult to secure enough electrical engineers. There is a scarcity of electrical and mechanical engineers throughout the State, in a great many State services and even in private businesses, and the question will have to be studied as a whole.
To introduce another slightly flippant note, one member of the Dáil suggested that school children should be given instruction in the use of the telephone. I would like to express the hope that no member of the Seanad will make that proposal because the system is sufficiently overloaded already without teaching any more people to use the telephone.