Seanad Éireann díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 23 Mar 1966

Vol. 60 No. 19

Housing Bill, 1965: Second Stage.

Question proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Minister for Local Government (Mr. Blaney)

This Bill is intended to provide the legislative framework for the Government's housing programme. It increases the scope of the scheme of loans and grants for housing from both the State and housing authorities, includes measures to help housing authorities in the administration of their existing estates and the provision of further houses, and strengthens the powers of these authorities to require private owners to maintain flats and houses in good condition. It also provides for a unified procedure for compulsory land acquisition by housing authorities and for a number of miscellaneous amendments in the housing law. The explanatory memorandum which I had circulated to Senators gives fuller details of the contents of the Bill.

The Bill will replace, with minor exceptions, 50 or more different housing statutes dating back well into the last century, as well as consolidating many other references to housing in statutes which are only indirectly concerned with the subject. I would like at this point to pay some tribute to the achievements under the older Acts. Since they were first enacted, about 180,000 dwellings, or over one-quarter of the total housing stock of the country, have been provided under them by housing authorities. Of these houses some 50,000 were provided before 1922, and 130,000 after that date. Taking a conservative average of four persons per dwelling, at least three-quarters of a million people, or more than one-quarter of our total population, live in houses provided by local authorities. In addition, a further 130,000 dwellings have been built with the aid of grants under the Housing (Financial and Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1932, so that over 310,000 dwellings, or over 40 per cent of all dwellings in the country, have been provided or aided under the Acts now scheduled for repeal.

Since the passing, in the year 1883, of the first Labourers Act in the present code, to deal with the appalling rural housing conditions then prevailing, a considerable amount of overlapping has taken place between that code and the Housing of the Working Classes Acts dealing with urban conditions, one code being applied wholly or partly to areas for which it was not originally intended and vice versa. This overlapping, together with the numerous amending Acts, has led to a very involved and complicated legal structure. I, for one, have no desire to perpetuate the legalistic approach to housing or to local government—to which the present complex of interlocking statutes leads. Perhaps most important of all, it can be said that the existence of separate codes for urban and rural houses runs counter to the whole conception of a unified approach to housing problems.

The exceptions to the proposal to repeal all existing housing legislation are the Second Schedule to the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1890, and the Labourers Act, 1936. The Second Schedule to the Act of 1890 deals with compulsory land acquisition procedure and is, in effect, part of the Lands Clauses code. It has been amended by the Housing (Ireland) Act, 1919. After much consideration to see if the provisions of the Schedule could possibly be incorporated in the Bill, I decided reluctantly that they would be more appropriate to a general land acquisition Bill. They have, therefore, for the present, had to remain, as the last vestige of the old order.

The retention of the Labourers Act, 1936, as amended by the Housing and Labourers Act, 1937, which deal with vested cottages, is necessary to regulate the purchase of these cottages now being bought over a period by their occupiers. In addition, tenants of labourers' cottages provided before 1st January, 1966, may apply for purchase under the terms of the 1936 Act, as modified by the Bill, for up to about 18 months from the enactment of the Bill. When all purchases have been completed, the 1936 Act will lapse. It is, therefore, unnecessary to include the terms of the 1936 Act in the present Bill. Apart from sales for the limited period referred to, future sales of both urban and rural dwellings will be effected under the Bill.

The Housing (Loans and Grants) Act, 1962, consolidated the law on loans and grants for private housing. There are a number of arguments against retaining the law on private and local authority housing as separate codes, but in the end they boil down to the simple fact that to do so would be to complicate the attainment of the objectives of all this legislation—the provision of sufficient housing. After all, the payment of loans and grants by housing authorities, with which the 1962 Act deals, is very much part of a local authority's housing operations, and each housing authority must balance the desirability in their own area of helping people in these ways to house themselves, against the necessity of building houses directly for renting to tenants. I, therefore, concluded that the best course was to re-enact the private and local authority housing codes in the one Bill. The re-enactment of the 1962 Act will, of course, also make the task of dealing with the numerous amendments and additions to the Act easier for all concerned.

The principal amendments in the law on private housing are contained in Part II of the Bill. Section 12 sets out a number of ways in which housing authorities may help other organisations in getting houses built. They can do so by loan, guarantee or periodic contribution. These types of assistance may be additional to assistance by supplementary grant or the giving of technical aid under section 112.

Section 16 validates the scheme of special State grants of up to £450 for farmers, and for others in rural areas living in unfit or overcrowded houses or in need of housing on compassionate grounds, if their resources would not permit them to be housed otherwise. Supplementary grants by housing authorities and rate remission are, of course, also available.

A new type of grant is introduced in section 17 for "dower houses". Under it, a farmer providing a small house with sufficient accommodation for himself and his wife, on the transfer of his own holding, or a substantial part of it, to his family, may qualify for State and supplementary grants, totalling up to £350. Partial rate remission will apply under section 33. These grants will apply only to houses under 500 square feet which at present do not qualify for any grant and will, I am sure, help to meet a long-standing need in many areas.

Sections 18 and 27 provide for a special scheme of State and supplementary grants of up to £275 for self-contained flats or maisonettes in blocks of three or more storeys, or up to £325 where the building is of six or more storeys and a lift is installed. Rate remission will also apply. Apart from the obvious arguments for these grants based on the need to use space more intensively, especially in city areas, their existence will, I hope, influence investment funds in the direction of house or flat building.

Sections 21 and 22 re-enact the corresponding provisions of the 1962 Act with amendment. Under those provisions a farmer with a valuation of up to £50 may qualify for a reconstruction grant at up to two-thirds of the cost of the work, subject to the statutory maxima. The new sections will increase the valuation limit to £60. Section 22 also provides for a grant for "dower house" accommodation provided as an addition to the original house.

Grants for the provision and installation of a water supply or sewerage scheme in private houses will continue to be dealt with in the Local Government (Sanitary Services) Act, 1962.

Section 24 is a new provision, enabling State grants up to a maximum of £215 per house, to be paid to housing authorities to help them to improve their own houses, by the substantial reconstruction of a roof, the provision of extra rooms, a fitted bathroom, water and sewerage facilities, a hot water system or electricity. The grants will not be paid for work of a maintenance nature. These grants will, I am sure, be particularly welcome to members of housing authorities who have made many representations on the matter from time to time.

Section 26 enables housing authorities to apply to applicants for new house supplementary grants made on or after 1st July, 1965, a new income limit of £1,045 a year (with provision for allowances of up to £100 for dependent persons, subject to a maximum allowance of £400), in lieu of the previous limit of £832 a year. This section also increases the valuation limit for new house supplementary grant to farmers from £50 to £60.

The scheme of grants payable under the Housing (Amendment) Act, 1946, for the accommodation of persons suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis has been recast in section 32 and the maximum recoupment to local authorities increased from £100 to £200. The number of recoupments made to housing authorities under the scheme for the five years ended 31st March, 1965, was only 27. This is a provision which we may all hope will continue to draw such little demand.

Section 35 contains an important new power for the Minister to withhold or reduce a grant for a house which is priced above a level fixed by him by order or which, in his opinion, does not represent reasonable value. In arriving at his opinion, the Minister must consider any representations which the grantee may wish to make.

Sections 39 and 40 enable housing authorities to advance loans for the acquisition or reconstruction of houses. Under section 40 housing authorities will be enabled to advance a loan of up to £200 for the reconstruction of a house, without requiring any formal security. These loans, with the State and supplementary grants, would generally cover a very substantial part of the cost of reconstruction work to houses.

Section 43 will enable a housing authority to guarantee an advance not exceeding the aggregate of the appropriate State and supplementary grants, to a builder erecting or reconstructing a house. This may enable small builders in rural areas to get over the difficulties of finding the initial capital to get started on a house.

For the acquisition and development of building sites for private housebuilding purposes where the work of development commences on or after 1st July, 1965, housing authorities will, under section 44, be enabled to avail of subsidy at up to one-third of the annual loan charges, subject to capital cost limits. I have been advocating the provision of these sites for many years and I hope that this monetary inducement will act as a spur to housing authorities to provide these sites to a high standard of landscaping and lay-out, and in increasing numbers.

The special subsidy scheme whereby a housing authority may provide a house, subject to a nominal rent or purchase annuity, for a farmer with a land valuation not exceeding £5, at a cost to the authority of the loan charges on only £100 is also validated in section 44.

A further change proposed in section 44 is that enabling special subsidy to be paid to housing authorities for the provision of flats in buildings of six or more storeys.

Subsidy of up to two-thirds of the loan charges, subject to capital cost limits, will under section 44 be payable for the provision of houses for elderly persons, and for persons displaced by operations of housing authorities under section 77 of the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act, 1963, or by operations aimed at eliminating unfit or dangerous houses.

The section proposes to enable the Minister to use subsidy as a more positive instrument of policy. He will, for instance, be specifically enabled to reduce or withhold it if a housing authority are not maintaining their houses properly. In this way I hope to discourage the sort of false economy which results from housing authorities cutting expenditure on maintenance in the knowledge that the worst consequences of their action will not become apparent for some years. The real result of this skimping is that valuable property deteriorates faster than it need—to the ultimate loss of both the authority and the Exchequer.

Section 44 will also enable subsidy to be used to require housing authorities to adopt renting schemes which take account of the financial circumstances of tenants. This is all the more necessary since under the Bill the old classification of "agricultural labourer" and "person of the working class" will be disappearing. My intention is that no person in need of housing, including itinerants and homeless people, should be refused it on the grounds of inability to pay. Conversely, no person in reasonable circumstances should be charged a rent far below his ability to pay, thus unnecessarily swelling the total subsidy bill for local authority housing which is now of the order of £6 million a year.

A further power in section 44 is that enabling me as a condition of subsidy to lay down conditions for the sale of land or houses under the Bill. It is my intention to do away as far as possible with the necessity for the endorsement of my consent or sanction on individual transfer documents. Instead, minimum terms of sale will be laid down and if these are complied with no submission of individual cases will be necessary. I have not as yet decided on the minimum terms to be laid down for the sale of houses but I hope to be able to devise a formula related to the replacement cost of the houses—a consideration of prime importance when housing authorities are faced with such pressing demands for accommodation for those in need.

In the White Paper on housing it is estimated that there are some 50,000 dwellings beyond economic repair and, while some of the occupants could be expected to build their own houses, many must look to housing authorities for accommodation. In addition, further houses will be needed to meet demands arising from increases in population and from obsolescence. I propose in section 53 to 55 to try to ensure that the provision by housing authorities of the houses so obviously needed is approached in a way which gives the best return to the authorities concerned, and at the same time ensures reasonable continuity of work for the industry on local authority housing. Under section 53, housing authorities will be required at least once in every five years to inspect their areas and assess needs arising from unfit and overcrowded dwellings, industrialisation, population trends, migration, etc. In addition, they will be required to review the present and prospective cost of their housing services. Having assessed needs and costs, they will be required to draw up building programmes at least once in every five years, indicating the needs to be met by private building and by the authority's own schemes. I have already requested housing authorities to put in hands the survey of needs and the preparation of building programmes in anticipation of this legislation.

The elected members of housing authorities will be enabled under section 60 to draw up their own scheme of priorities for the allocation of tenancies in the authority's houses and the manager will be obliged to adopt such schemes when allocating tenancies. This is a more flexible approach than the present system under which priorities are determined centrally and must be followed by all housing authorities, more or less irrespective of local priorities. As at present, the authority will be required to have regard to the report of the chief medical officer in the allocation of tenancies.

I am well aware that the solution to the problem of slums and overcrowding is to build enough houses. This, however, is a long term objective. In the meantime, it is imperative as far as possible to prevent the abuse of houses by overcrowding and their use for human habitation when they are unfit. Part IV of the Bill, therefore, proposes to extend and strengthen the powers of housing authorities to deal with this type of property. In particular the Part proposes penalties for permitting the use of unfit houses to which demolition orders, etc., apply. Bye-laws under section 20 of the Housing (Ireland) Act, 1919, in so far as they relate to overcrowding, are being replaced by statutory provisions set out in Part IV. In so far as they relate to matters other than overcrowding, they will be retained until replaced by new bye-laws made under section 70.

The provisions of the Local Government (No. 2) Act, 1960, which lays down a procedure for the compulsory acquisition of land required by housing authorities for the purpose of any of their powers and duties, will be replaced by section 86. The new provisions will enable local authorities to acquire land by vesting order and will also help in speeding up land acquisition procedures.

Part VI deals with the powers of housing authorities to dispose of land and dwellings. As I said when describing the subsidy provisions, it will not be necessary for a housing authority to get my consent to each disposal of land or dwellings provided the disposal is made in accordance with general rules laid down by me. The requirement in section 16 of the Labourers Act, 1883, that a county council, when disposing of land, must first offer it back to the person from whom it was acquired is not being retained. I might add that the force of this requirement has been considerably diminished by later provisions enabling a local authority to use such land for the purpose of any of their powers and duties. A further reason for getting rid of it is that land acquired by local authorities for any purpose other than Labourers Acts housing is not subject to the same restriction when the authority come to dispose of it.

A uniform sales procedure for both urban and rural houses is proposed in section 90. The Labourers Act, 1936, as amended by the Bill, will continue to apply to sales already made under it. Tenants of cottages provided before 1st January, 1966, if they are qualified to purchase, will be afforded an opportunity of doing so under the sale terms of the Labourers Act, 1936, as amended.

In Chapter III of this Part, the provisions of the Labourers Act, 1965, which removed the statutory restrictions on the mortgaging, charging or subdivision of a vested cottage in addition to providing for the redemption of annuities, are being re-enacted. You will recollect that the 1965 Act was a hurried measure to meet a specific case and that I undertook that it would be repealed and re-enacted in this Bill.

The powers of housing authorities to recover possession of abandoned and unoccupied cottages and dwellings are being strengthened under sections 62, 102 and 106. In so far as recoveries under the Labourers Act, 1936, are concerned the new provision will, I hope, enable housing authorities, from whom I have had numerous representations on the matter, to use vacant cottages to house persons in need, rather than have them lying vacant. The purchaser of a cottage repossessed by a housing authority under the section will be compensated.

In Parts VII and VIII, I would like to refer briefly to section 115 which re-enacts, with amendments, section 88 of the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1890. It is based on the accepted principle that a member of a local authority should not vote on a matter in which he is beneficially interested. "Beneficial interest" is defined so as to provide that a person to whom a local authority house is let shall be deemed to be beneficially interested in his own house as well as in any other house provided by the authority of which they are the owner.

In conclusion, I would like to say, that, though this Bill will simplify and modernise the housing law, I am only too well aware that the enactment of legislation alone cannot solve our housing difficulties. It is a step, but only a step, in that direction. A great deal of effort and very substantial public and private investment will be required in addition. The Government's awareness of this need is illustrated by the size of their contribution towards housing expenditure. In 1965-66, the Government and local authorities, between them, will be providing over £20 million in capital and over £9 million in current expenditure on both private and local authority housing. The number of houses built will be at least 11,000— an increase of about 17 per cent on the number built in 1964-65.

The amount for housing expenditure is the largest single item in the Government's capital budget and is over twice the corresponding figure five years ago. The figure in next year's capital budget is slightly higher again than this year's provision. I mention these facts to emphasise the extent of the effort already being made by the Government and housing authorities to provide housing and the magnitude of the capital flow to the industry through public funds.

Lest, however, any person or housing authority should think that we will at some time or another come to the end of our housing programme, let me quote some further figures. Between 1946 and 1961 we built some 125,000 houses; but in that period our total housing stock grew by only 14,000 units. The balance disappeared through decay and obsolescence, demolition, change to other uses, and so on. In short, all our efforts barely sufficed to maintain our stock as it was.

Mr. O'Quigley

I am sure everybody will agree that this is an extremely important Bill and that its enactment at an early date and its early implementation are highly desirable. Having listened to the Minister's speech, I do not think his highlighting of the various things this Bill is intended to achieve will set this House alight with enthusiasm or that he will win for himself, as the Minister in charge of housing, any great plaudits from this House or from anybody in the country.

The Bill is a very jerrybuilt structure. I should have thought that had the Minister sat back and surveyed the position in regard to housing—the relationships between private house-builders, private house-purchasers, his Department and local authorities and the relationship between local authorities and the Department—he would have drawn up quite a different Bill. There are a number of things, of course, which this Bill will do. It marks a departure in providing greater assistance for house-building by farmers for dower houses and for the building of flats and maisonettes for elderly people, but I would hope that the necessary finance to get these projects going will be provided. I have not heard any indication in the Minister's speech of any particular allocation of money which would indicate that these items are being provided for or have been provided for in the current Budget.

The statement with which the Minister finishes his speech is quite astonishing. It is astonishing to learn that, notwithstanding all the houses built in the past 20 years, we have increased our housing stock by only 14,000 units—and that, after building 125,000 houses. The figures the Minister gives are a dreadful indictment of the Government. At this stage, I want to call the attention of the House to the reason we are now faced with an urgent housing problem of such magnitude. In paragraph 7 of their First Programme for Economic Expansion, the Government had this to say in relation, among other things, to housing:

There is general agreement that productive capital expenditure— productive in the sense of yielding an adequate return to the community in competitive goods and services—must receive a greater priority than at present in the public capital programme. It is on this fundamental principle that the present programme of economic development is based.

This is where housing was so strongly adversely affected by the Government's mishandling and misplanning of the situation. The quotation continues:

The social capital investment of past years has given us an "infrastructure" of housing, hospitals, communications, etc., which is equal (in some respects perhaps superior) to that of comparable countries....

And then it says:

The expected decline in social capital expenditure in the coming years will afford an opportunity— and underlines the necessity—of switching resources to productive purposes.

That was in 1958. In the Second Programme for Economic Expansion, for which the voters of this country were asked this time last year to “Let Lemass Lead On”, paragraph 22 has this to say:

(vi) The basic principles underlying the first programme will continue to be respected.

If anybody wants to know why we have such a shortage of houses at present it is to be found in the basic principle enunciated in the First Programme of Economic Expansion. At that time, the Minister was Minister for Local Government and I am sure he had the same competent staff about him then as he has at the present time. He ought to have been aware that between 1946 and 1958 the stock of houses that had then been built was not equal to the rate of obsolescence, decay, demolition and to the increased requirement for houses. It is a terrible indictment of the present Government and a further indication of their incapacity to do what is right as a Government that they have completely misjudged the situation and were not able to know, in 1958, that the rate of obsolescence, decay and demolition was nearly equal to the rate at which houses were being built. In 1957, when Fianna Fáil took over, I understood that there were too many houses in Dublin city. The complaint was that the inter-Party Government had built more houses than there were people for them.

Mr. McGlinchey

The people were gone.

Mr. O'Quigley

We heard all about that. The houses were there but there are not any houses there now and the people have still been going. There is no use in saying that the people were gone: the people were not gone. However, the fact is that the houses were built. That is getting into the realm of politics, on a non-political issue like housing.

Mr. E. Ryan

The Senator would never sink to that.

Mr. O'Quigley

I should like to devote my efforts, in relation to this Bill, to improving it, in so far as it can be improved. I feel justified in saying what I have said because it explains to the House why we have the problem that we now have. I may say, frankly, that, going around the city of Dublin and at any time when one is accompanied by strangers and visitors to this city, some of the areas one passes really look as if we had been through the last World War. With so many waste spots, houses tumbling down and houses being knocked down, one would imagine we had not escaped the damage caused to other cities in the last World War—but we know the reasons for that state of decay.

For a considerable period I was quite proud of the fact that in this country we had as a Government and through public investment built houses and housed our people in a manner we could be proud of. That tribute should be paid to the local authorities for the manner in which they tackled their job. I feel a certain sense of pride in passing by the places in Dublin where you have those fine blocks of flats built by Dublin Corporation under the Housing of the Working Classes Acts. Those are fine buildings and we have every right to be proud of them, but it is most regrettable that Dublin Corporation and other local authorities were not permitted to continue with the work they had in hands. I shall have something else to say at a later stage about the kind of schemes operated for building houses other than flats. The thing that seems to me to kill initiative and slow down almost to a standstill housing in this country, certainly to reduce the speed of production, is the fact that there is divided authority between the local authority and the Department of Local Government.

One has only to read the local weekly newspapers to see the number of occasions on which the county manager says: "It is the Department of Local Government which is at fault for not having approved this or given sanction to that". On the other hand, if a question is raised in the Dáil by a Deputy in relation to the housing problem in his constituency, the Minister says that the local authority have not complied with the requirements and he is waiting for this, that or the other. The ball is kicked from one to the other, and meantime houses are not being built and schemes not being sanctioned.

Very often, as the Minister knows, the person who is raising objections to the scheme of a local authority is not an engineer, an architect or quantity surveyor sitting at a desk in the Department of Local Government, but a person on the administrative side, and if the policy of the Department is to build houses and to pay reconstruction grants, then a lot of difficulties and little failures to comply with this, that or the other are overlooked, grants approved, approval of sanction given; but if it is desired to slow down the rate of house building so that too much money will not be spent out of the various amounts allocated, then, of course, every competent civil servant can find some fault with some scheme, and the whole scheme has to go back with nine or ten points raised which have nothing whatever to do with the efficiency of the houses which will be built or the lay-out of the scheme in general. That is the kind of divided authority which has slowed down and will continue to slow down the building of houses by local authorities. That is the fundamental thing that is wrong with this Bill, that there will not be any change in that system of building of houses by local authorities.

In relation to the promotion of tourism, of turf development, of Córas Iompair Éireann, of electricity supply and so on, it is possible to make a block grant to the authority which is charged with the carrying out of the particular function by the Oireachtas. After that the Minister, so far from interfering or having any say in what the particular authority does, will decline in Dáil Éireann to answer any questions relating to the day to day activities of those people. It seems to me to be quite wrong that in this day and age we cannot trust our local authorities, who are headed by competent county managers, county secretaries, accountants, engineering staff, to give them a certain grant, exercise a general supervision if necessary in the beginning over them, and tell them: "Get on with the job of providing houses as you think fit. You know the requirements in your local authority area." Why it is thought necessary to have to go backward and forward interminably to the Department of Local Government beats me. I would have thought that the Minister would loosen the kind of authority and hold that he and his Department have over local authorities in this way, and trust them to get on with the job in the same way as we do, with every justification, entrust the expenditure of quite substantial sums of money to other authorities set up by the Oireachtas. I think that that is the fundamental flaw in this Bill.

I am glad to see that some special regard is being had to the housing of farmers and people in rural areas under this Bill. There is no doubt about the fact that the conditions in which some farmers live, especially in the poorer counties, are quite deplorable. I hope that the provisions in the Bill will be availed of to give them the kind of houses they ought to have. In this context might I say this to the Minister, that I hope that some extra amount of money might be made available for the purpose of concreting the yards around the immediate vicinity of farmers' dwelling houses? Going through the country, one finds the general experience is that there is much to be desired about the immediate vicinity of the yards of farmers who simply have not got the money to concrete the necessary area around their dwelling houses. I hope that something of that kind will be done in relation to farm houses in order to provide the kind of hygienic background to the houses that is desirable. Farmers have their special problems with animals going in and out, and it would be a great benefit if some small grant were made available so that when the building contractor is on the site, a concrete yard of much bigger dimensions than the ordinary little apron provided around houses at present can be provided.

The position in relation to such houses as regards the payment of grants is one of backward and forward to-ing and fro-ing from the builder to the local authority and from the builder to the Department of Local Government. I do not see any reason why it should be necessary to have two sets of officials supervising the construction of the one dwelling house. As I understand the position at present, the house is first inspected by the appointed engineer of the local authority, who is an inspector, and when he certifies for the grant, then you apply to the local authority and they get the certificate and send it to the Department. The Department send down their own inspector to see that what is contained in the certificate is correct. When the application for the final instalment of the grant is made, the inspector of the local authority inspects the house and issues his certificate, and then the Department of Local Government inspector comes along and inspects the house and then if all is well, the certificate is issued.

That seems to me to be an unnecessary multiplication of duties and functions and a waste of time. Either the local authority inspector or the Local Government inspector should be the final and only person to give a certificate. These people are either competent and honest or they are not. If they are competent and honest and they are prepared to say that the house is properly constructed in accordance with the plans and specifications and that the grant may be paid, then one officer should be sufficient. As I understand the position, if one of the inspectors finds that there are minor matters which have not been complied with—say, if one small door is sticking, or if a proper lock has not been put on it—the grant will be held up, and held up indefinitely, until another inspector comes to see whether the door has been unstuck, or whether a new set of locks has been put on.

That is the kind of nonsensical procedure pursued by Government officials, in Government time, at public expense, and it never achieves anything. It does not provide anyone with a better house by having two sets of inspectors, but it does ensure that there is a long lapse between the time when the grant becomes available and the time it is paid. I would seriously suggest to the Minister that he should investigate this procedure. I think it could be done without legislative authority. He could cut through all that redundant effort on the part of so many public officials at public expense.

One of the things which every builder has to have regard to, whether he is a local authority builder or a private builder, is the building bye-laws. We are now living in 1966. Many of the building bye-laws are 60 or 70 years old, and they have never been revised. I have seen building bye-laws for local authorities and they are like documents which an antiquarian would be reading. They mention dry closets and things like that, which are gone and long forgotten, and there are requirements which are quite unsuitable and quite unrelated to modern developments and modern inventions.

In some of the building bye-laws which I have had occasion to look at, there is a restriction on the use of timber in any shape or form for housing. In modern times architects have gone mad on the use of timber facings for shops and dwellings, and so on. There is a variety of new materials which are quite fireproof and quite suitable for building, but which cannot be used because the building bye-laws impose a restriction upon the use of timber for dwellings, and if it is used the dwellings will certainly not comply with the conditions necessary to obtain a grant.

Surely the Minister and the local authorities ought to revise their building bye-laws and bring them into accord with the new materials now available for building, and not place this type of restriction upon people who have to resort to ruses and devices in order to use the new materials now being manufactured, and which are quite suitable. One would imagine that half the population of the world was not housed in dwellings constructed with timber. Half the population of America, and nearly the whole of Japan and China —and that represents a great hunk of mankind—are housed in timber structures.

I know a case in which a man built a house and put on it one of the new felt roofs and he could not get a grant. On the other hand, I know a person who built a house costing £22,000 and he put on one of the new felt roofs. I am certain that the architect who designed it, and the man who paid for it, would not put on a roof that was either unsuitable or dangerous, yet the other man who put on this new kind of roof could not get a grant from the Department of Local Government simply because it was a new type of roof. That is the type of situation that should not occur, and that is the kind of situation in which the Department of Local Government and the local authorities who are abreast of developments, alive to what is going on, and trying to anticipate developments, in the use of materials, should be giving a lead. I would suggest to the Minister that the time has long since passed for a condification of the building bye-laws of the local authorities all over the country.

In relation to the financing of housing, I must confess that I cannot venture to understand the manipulations between the Department of Local Government on who gets how much, and what, and when. I suppose the Minister will readily sympathise with us when we look at the number of Acts now being repealed. I do understand something about the Small Dwellings Acquisition Acts. They have been of great advantage to people who perhaps would not otherwise get a loan from the building societies. They sometimes get a grant or a loan under the Small Dwellings Acquisition Acts. There is one objection which is frequently made to the application and implementation of these Acts. It is that the local authority will not accept the valuation of the premises which the person buying it is prepared to accept. In other words, there is always a scaling down of the value of the premises so that, in very many cases, the applicant is not able to get the maximum grant to which he would be entitled if a more generous valuation were put on the premises.

I must confess that I can see no justification for the attitude adopted by the local authorities. It may be said that the purpose of this is to make sure that the builder's price is kept low. Has the application of these Acts in the way they have been applied had any effect upon the price of houses, or does the Minister think that builders of private houses are getting too much? If he thinks the latter, he should certainly have taken some steps to make sure that people were not getting an unreasonable profit from their building operations.

Houses which five years ago would not qualify for the maximum grant would qualify today because of the increase in the price of houses and the decline in the value of money. That has been going on for the past ten or 20 years. After a period of years, because of inflation, and because of the rising cost of building, the price of the house would exceed the amount of the grant, and for that reason I see no justification for this paring down. The net effect is to impose greater hardship upon the type of person who has very little money and is applying for an SDA loan. Unless the price of the house is quite outrageous this is a matter of a few hundred pounds. It means that the applicant for the grant will have to pinch and scrape, and perhaps postpone a wedding for another year in order to get the necessary money to make up the difference between what he will get on loan and the purchase price of the house. A more generous and more realistic attitude should be adopted by the local authorities.

The Minister, in so far as he dealt with finance, indicated that £29 million was made available in the financial year 1965-66. What money will be made available for the financial year 1966-67 and, more specifically, what number of houses does he anticipate will be built as a result of the money being made available? Is this the total amount that will be made available to local authorities or will some of it be made available by way of grants in order to enable supplementary grants and so on to be made? I would like to hear from the Minister what the housing programme will be in the next five years. People in the building world are most anxious at the present time to know what programme is likely to be in operation in the next four to five years. Perhaps the Minister may be able to give some indication of that before this Bill passes its Final Stage.

I want to return for a moment to the buying of houses. A young couple trying to buy a house have enough to do to purchase it, furnish it and pay all the expenses they meet with in establishing a new home. It would be appropriate if the Minister for Local Government would have a word with the Minister for Finance in relation to the stamp duty payable on the purchase of new houses which have qualified for a Local Government grant.

It is quite true to say that stamp duty can be avoided if people instead of buying a house when it is completed, go to the builder in the first place and obtain a lease of the premises and then enter into a contract to build a house for £2,600 paying sixpence on the contract. That can be done. In very many cases it just does not happen in that way. The house is already built. The people then pay stamp duty on £2,300 or £2,500, or whatever the purchase price happens to be. I would exhort the Minister for Local Government to make representations to the Minister for Finance, where a person is buying a house which has qualified for a Local Government grant, or which has been passed for approval for a Local Government grant, that stamp duty, which can be £20 or £30, should not be payable. It is a considerable hardship on the young engaged couple or the young married couple to have to pay that money. I think the total amount involved is very small from the point of view of the Exchequer. I would urge the Minister for Local Government to do something about this.

The Minister has, very rightly, paid tribute to those who built so many houses under the many statutes repealed by this Bill. There is a field in which the Minister for Local Government should exercise more responsibility than has been the case up to the present time. I recollect, when the Housing Bill was passing through here in 1958, bringing to the attention of the Minister the fact that many of the housing estates in and around Dublin where the dwellings had been completed were not taken over by the local authority because the local authority objected that certain things which should have been completed had not been completed. The Minister was then kind enough to offer his assistance and the assistance of his Department in all those cases where such difficulty was experienced.

I happen to be a member of a local housing association at home. I was able to bring the glad tidings to them that if Dublin County Council were not taking over our roads, as we felt they ought to, here I had the assurance given by the Minister in the Seanad. I got the Seanad debates and we sent a copy of them to the local authority. I think we wrote to the Minister for Local Government. We saw our local Deputies. Time has passed and the roads are still not taken over. It now transpires, or I think it transpired from correspondence, that the Minister did not have that kind of authority which he felt he had at the time he made that statement. I hope in this Bill that the Minister will make sure that local authorities have sufficient authority, where the builder has gone away or will not do whatever has to be done in the proper way, to step in and do the work themselves and then take the road in charge.

Where I live and places adjacent to it the buildings have been completed for seven or eight years. Nothing is done. I am told by builders, who had building operations in many parts of the city, this is not at all uncommon. The explanation advanced to me is this. The local authority believe that faults in the construction of roads will only manifest themselves after a period of eight, nine or ten years and, therefore, they wait for eight, nine or ten years before taking over to ensure that the roads in an estate are all right. Meanwhile, nobody cleans the place. Nobody cleans the streets for us and we pay full rates. That is a deplorable situation. If people pay full rates, or whatever rates they are required to pay by law, they should be entitled to services on a par with those provided for the rest of the ratepaying community in the local authority area. If the Minister has not got the necessary authority in this Bill, I hope he will take it if we give it to him by way of amendment.

There is another feature which one finds quite frequently about local authority estates. There is the no man's land between the public road and the road put in by the private builder. There is always some four to six feet which is potholed and full of water, muck, stones and gravel. I do not know what is the cause of this but it goes on year in, year out. A woman has to try to pick her way in and out in what passes for shoes at the present time—the dainty shoes which women wear—when she goes shopping. It seems absurd to me that people who have paid for their houses, and who pay their rates cannot make some authority responsible for bridging the five or six feet where their road ends and where the local authority road begins.

This is what makes people contemptuous of local authorities—the way in which they fail, so far as it is their failure, to do what is right. This is a problem which I understand the Minister has not dealt with and it seems to arise very pertinently under this Bill. As I understand the situation the pool of land available for private building in and around Dublin city and some of the other cities such as Limerick, Cork and elsewhere is drying up. The land is not drying up and that is one of the matters I want to deal with, but the supply of land is. If more land is to be made available for house building, I am told it is necessary to have certain areas drained generally in order to deal with surface water and that extensive sewerage schemes and continuation sewerage schemes are urgently necessary. I do not know whether the Minister has caused any forecast to be made in relation to the requirements of land for house building purposes in those areas.

I see from the Bill that the local authorities will be required once in every five years to make an assessment of housing needs and, presumably, of land available for them within their areas. But I do not want the situation to develop that this obligation will not begin to be undertaken by the local authorities until, say, 1970 and then they would find that by 1970 they have to get a drainage scheme undertaken which will take some years; there would be great activity in draining the land, putting in new sewerage schemes and that land would not be available for another four or five years. If my information is correct, this growing scarcity of land is becoming an urgent problem and is something which will require attention either by the Minister's Department or by the local authorities.

In that connection, I should like to deal with the situation which is developing and is becoming rather too frequent in relation to such houses as are available at the present time. It is a distressing piece of news to read time and again that people out in Bray, on the Dodder bank, in Carlow, New Ross and places like that find that their houses are flooded out. It is something we read in the papers during the few days the flooding lasts and there is talk about whether the river in Athlone will rise to the danger level. That passes and that is the end of it. This is watched with a great deal of public sympathy and concern, but where people are flooded out it is an entirely different matter. They have to pay the price afterwards in terms of suffering and in terms of replacement of furniture, especially soft fittings and in cleaning up their homes.

I regret the Minister is not here to hear what I have to say now, but I do think he showed a very unsympathetic ear to representations made to him in the Dáil in relation to the plight of people simply because they happened to live in Anglesea Road. I understand the position in relation to Anglesea Road to be that a great number of the people living there are widows, and widows in this country do not have any great income. There are also lots of people living in flats there and they are not well-to-do people at all. In any event, whether they be well-to-do or not, there is very little they can do about preventing their houses from being flooded. It requires action by either the Minister, the Board of Works as being in charge of arterial drainage, or by the local authority. Something requires to be done, and done urgently and it just does not do to sit back and say: "Well, it will not cause those people a great deal of inconvenience."

There are always people who will suffer, and suffer very severely, in terms of money and human misery when their homes are flooded and the insecurity that must breed in those people is something which I or indeed anybody else would not like to endure. I hope the Minister will avail of this Bill to take the necessary powers to do whatever is requisite in order to alleviate the hardship and misery which those people suffer far too frequently.

As I said earlier, the blocks of flats built in and around Dublin to my mind, as a passer-by, seem to be such as to really excite the admiration and justifiable pride of the citizens of this city. I cannot say the same for the houses which are being built. There is a dreadful dull uniformity, uniform mediocrity, to be observed in the design and architecture of the houses built in and around Dublin. It does seem to me that, without any great cost but perhaps with some little imagination, something might be done by the local authorities in order to lend some more interest to the design of these dwellings. It is regrettable that the type of development going on in the big building areas around Dublin has not altered over the years. I am told that one of the reasons, even in relation to private development schemes, the style or layout of various building schemes has to follow the present pattern is that they cannot change them under the building bye-laws.

I understand there is a system of development known as the ribbon system which is contrasted with the grid development system which has been in operation in and around our cities for many years. The ribbon system permits of a variation in the width of roads, the provision of parking lots and more culs-de-sac than you have in any building schemes at the present time and then all of this opens on to good substantial roads running through the scheme. The Department of Local Government and the local councils hold their hands up in horror at the idea of an innovation of that kind but it is widely practised in America, Switzerland and England. They contend they are obliged to follow the bye-laws. It is within their power to alter these bye-laws, but they have not had sufficient interest in revising them or the ingenuity to do so, even though they have been in operation for 70 or 80 years. I hope the Minister will take this into account, if he has any say in influencing the design of houses and the lay-out of building schemes, especially those in relation to local authorities.

There is one matter of detail to which I should further like to refer before I conclude. As I understand the position, the whole code of Acts relating to labourers' cottages is being retained in this Bill for the reason that, in time, it will lapse but I am advised that, under existing legislation, the local authorities have found it impossible to obtain possession of some of those labourers' cottages. It seems to me to be urgently necessary—at a time when there is a physical shortage of housing—that every available dwelling a local authority can legally lay its hands on should be available to it in order to supply the needs of persons entitled to cottages under the Labourers Acts.

I understand the Labourers Act of 1936 defines an owner as including the legal personal representatives of the former occupier of the house. The situation then is that possession cannot be obtained unless the requisite notice is served upon the owner. This raises two problems. Where representation is not raised to the estate of the deceased, when there is nobody on whom the notice can be served, therefore, there is no way of going into court to get an order to recover possession of the premises. That is one difficulty and it seems to me to be one which requires to be dealt with in this Bill but has not been dealt with. The other difficulty arises where you have two personal representatives and notice must be served on them. I believe this happens not infrequently, especially in cases of administration where brothers and sisters of a deceased owner are equally entitled to take out a grant and sometimes both apply for a grant. Very often one of them may be in England or cannot be found and it is not accepted in court as being sufficient that two personal representatives exist. It is a matter which, I understand, has resulted in a substantial number of cottages being left derelict year after year, when the housing authorities are unable to do anything about them. I hope to put down an amendment to deal with this matter. Perhaps the Minister may be able to indicate whether there are any powers in the present Bill—I do not think there are—to deal with the present situation.

Mr. Cole

First of all, there are a great many improvements and good improvements in this Bill. I do not intend to go through them or to list them as I believe it is our duty to point to other possible improvements and to make suggestions in relation to the housing code. Before going into details on the Bill, I should like to mention a matter which I have often tried to bring to the notice of local authorities. It is possible that if I now bring it to the attention of the Department of Local Government something may be done about it. There seems to be some sort of a commandment with housing engineers or architects generally in relation to local authority housing, in particular, and other housing also that a house shall not be built other than facing on to a public road, no matter what the aspect may be. If a man has a piece of land and wants to face his house in a particular situation possibly overlooking a nice wooded site or perhaps a distant view, the position is that he must face the house on to the public road even if there is an impenetrable mass of blackthorn bushes or a derelict site, or what have you, on the opposite side. Two or three houses near where I live are, to my mind, completely spoiled as residences because they have to be faced towards the public road.

I should also like the Department of Local Government to take up with the ESB—if it is possible—the matter of charges for connecting new houses or even new cottages. It is a question which it is quite impossible for a mere Senator to settle. From the point of view of connecting a house in the country with electricity, it is becoming economically impossible to build anywhere now except beside another house, whether it is a derelict house or has an unfriendly neighbour, or anything of that nature. It would seem that even a labourer's cottage cannot now be erected anywhere but a short distance from an ESB pole or the charge will be impossible. I know an instance where a man offered a site to a workman whose family had got too big for the house he was occupying. In my estimation, it would have taken probably three poles to bring the wires from his old house to the new situation. The two-monthly rent which the ESB demanded was nearly £6 10. 0. Just consider the plight of a workman who would be asked to pay over £6 every two months in electricity rent before using any electricity at all. In my county council, these matters crop up every other day. Because the ESB charge rents for connecting cottages and private houses, which it is impossible for the people concerned to meet, they cannot be sited in what very often would be the most suitable places. It is a great pity that we could not have these houses sited away from a very busy main road, or anything like that. They must be sited where the ESB provides the current, otherwise the cost would be enormous.

A big objection which a member of a local authority might have towards a Bill such as this Housing Bill is that new buildings, which we should all like to see, will involve an enormous extra charge on the rates because most local authorities add a like amount of grant to that given by the Government and this is becoming an enormous charge on the rates. I do not know if there is any way out of the difficulty unless the Minister for Local Government follows the example set by the Minister for Health and puts a ceiling this year on housing charges, and so on.

The charge on rates is becoming enormous for what sometimes seems an advantage to very few people. However, that is as may be. I take it that, at some time or another, there will be some advantage to the county by way of rates. The trouble is that most of the new houses replace older houses, and for a number of years, the rating advantage will not be very much to the county council. Furthermore, they would merely be in substitution for rates that had been paid on a previous house. It is becoming a very big burden on county councils. Up to 65,000 grants in one year for a county such as Cavan means that an enormous sum must be borrowed year after year.

With regard to reconstruction work, I should like if, at some time, consideration were given to extending the grants for building a room for a TB patient, to cover blind people or people who are permanently incapacitated. A great many of these people might be kept at home instead of being sent into the county home or hospital if there were suitable accommodation available for them slightly apart, perhaps, from a family of young children.

I would point out to Senator O'Quigley that, under the Farm Buildings Scheme, a grant is at present available for concreting areas around the farmyard.

Under this Bill, there is no increase in the grant for the reconstruction of houses.

I shall now say something which may not be very popular but I consider that I should say it. If the Minister were to say it, Senators on the other side of the House might say that it was not a very suitable thing for a Minister to say or an attitude that the country should adopt. Under section 16 of this Bill, we are increasing grants for the building of houses for farmers and others to £450. A farmer can get a grant of £450 and, in most cases, local authorities give him a grant of a similar size. This is £900 of grant, for a house with five rooms or more.

Most people, if they want to build houses at all, consider that at least five rooms are necessary. The £900 grant is going from both the Department and the local authority to a person whose valuation may not exceed £25. In a lot of cases you might have a very progressive small farmer with 25, 30 or 40 acres but if he is going to get credit, unless he is a comparatively well-off man, it is going to cost him probably another £2,000 at least, which would be the minimum cost for the house, including provision of site and everything else. He probably will borrow a great deal of it. To give an example of what the position is in my county, during the year ending last October we had in County Cavan 89 new grant houses built, the great proportion of them by farmers. Eighty per cent of the people who built those houses borrowed a total of £60,000 from the county council. That, I think, is a terrific millstone around the necks of those farmers for a long time to come, and I wonder are they doing this to the detriment of their farm and farm house and of production on that bit of land. I think they probably are. They are building a new house, and probably the family appreciates it very much, but I could see that perhaps greater help would have been to give them a reconstruction grant.

I know many farm houses which have been reconstructed, and the comfort of those houses is not necessarily in the reconstruction of them but in the fact that that little bit of extra cash was available to buy the modern comforts those people were looking for. To think that perhaps for years and years there will be no money available on a farm for anything else except to pay off the loan so that possibly a great deal of the reconstruction and development work around the house will still have to be done—that is an aspect which I think the Minister should look at. I feel that he should increase the reconstruction grants to give small farmers an opportunity of saying: "I could get a substantial reconstruction grant on this house and probably that would be a better proposition than trying to build a new house by borrowing money." A great deal of them would take that.

We had a farm survey a few years back in County Cavan—probably most counties have had one—and whereas I would not quite agree, for example, that some of the houses which the engineers classified as unfit are really unfit dwellings, because some of them were so classed because the thatch was bad—in any case those who carried out that survey claimed that there were in County Cavan 3,238 unfit dwelling-houses. Incapable of repair numbered 1,300 and capable of repair 1,900. Some of those classified then as incapable of repair have been repaired and reconstructed with the approval of the local government engineers. That is why I say that perhaps the figures in detail might not be quite reliable, but they give an idea of what an outsider would consider looking at the houses. In the houses incapable of repair were about 207 families eligible for housing by the local authority. Leaving those out altogether, we come to those not eligible for rehousing by the council and they numbered 1,100. The main source of livelihood of 1,040 of those families is farming and the valuations of their holdings are as follows—not exceeding £2, 38 families; £2 to £5, 188; £5 to £10, 340; £10 to £15, 206; £15 to £20, 117; £20 to £30, 110. Above that, there are only 39 other valuations and only 6 over £50. Those are the people in this county who perhaps might apply for a grant or a reconstruction grant. We are getting a great many more applications for reconstruction grants—about 4:1. I feel that in the case of a lot of those small farmers both from the national point of view and from their viewpoint it would be better to encourage them to reconstruct perhaps in a much better way, put in water and sewerage, and do that in preference to building new houses and saddling them with a considerable debt for a great many years.

When I consider, coming from a border county, that in other places they are encouraging those small farmers to give up those places, I wonder what will be the policy here in a few years' time. I do not want to give my own opinion of what will happen to those small farmers, but it is not a case which would justify spending or giving colossal grants on very small tracts of land. I see houses built on presumably small farms situated long distances from the main road, with not the slightest sign of a reasonable outhouse around them at all. I agree that it is perhaps a very hard thing to say, but I think the reconstruction matter should be pushed to the limit in the light of those cases and the grant position perhaps retarded. This is a matter which I imagine would not be a popular one for any political Party to take up. I feel it could be done by a considerable increase in the reconstruction grants.

This reminds me of a true story which I heard some time ago. It always stuck in my memory and I think it is very much to the point. A class of young farmers in an agricultural school were given an essay to write. They were told: "Supposing you were presented with a 50 acre farm and—I forget the exact sum— £500, £600 or £1,000, and you were told to go and start farming on that basis, what would you do?" One said he would buy a new tractor, a few implements and a trailer. Another said he would buy two horses, a plough and a cart and things that would last for a long time. Another said he would buy an old second-hand tractor, an old trailer and a second-hand plough, and that he would put the rest of the money into buildings and into manuring the land. I think that story brings out what I have been saying. Perhaps we are encouraging the spending and the borrowing of a little too much money which we should be putting into our land and farm buildings. I should not like to see any family in the slightest way uncomfortable in their dwelling and if the local authority can assist them within reason I think they should do so, but I think this is an aspect of the whole question of housing which should be considered.

Mr. McAuliffe

I welcome the Bill because it is a reasonable attempt to give us housing legislation and to put 50 or more Acts into one complete Act. It must be rather embarrassing for the Minister to be in the House at present because every member of a local authority knows that there is nothing doing as regards housing at the moment. In our own county council in Westmeath we have liabilities amounting to £84,000 and, despite the fact that we have made repeated applications for reconstruction or SDA loans, we have not got a reply, and people are held up completely throughout the country in regard to the building of houses. That is a state of affairs which should not arise. I know many people who are in dire distress. They have got their houses half reconstructed or half built, and there is no money forthcoming from the Department to complete them.

The Minister asked us to make a survey in 1965. The results of that survey were rather interesting. They were not exactly as bad in Westmeath as in Cavan, according to Senator Cole's figures. In Westmeath the figures showed that there are 554 dwellings unfit for human habitation, and that 458 of them are incapable of being made fit for human habitation at a reasonable cost. They showed that 96 of them are capable of being repaired, and that of the 458, a total of 326 families are regarded as being eligible for rehousing by the local authority.

Something else came out in that survey which was rather alarming. That was in 1965. There were 69 families, who had made application and were in need of rehousing, with an income of less than £3 a week. That was an extraordinary figure in a county which is supposed to be reasonably well off compared with counties on the western seaboard.

There was a welcome increase in grants for farmers and farm labourers under a certain valuation. I do not think it applied to anyone except farmers and farm labourers. Almost overnight when this grant was increased, the price of the houses jumped by much more than the increase in the grant. There is a very popular house in the Department's plan, B.57, which was built for £1,900 until the grant was increased. Now no one could get it built for less than £2,600 or £2,700. There is another four bedroomed house in the Department's plan which used to cost £1,300 and costs £1,800 today. You could not get any contractor to touch it unless you were prepared to pay £1,800. So, the increase in the grant did not mean very much at all. Because a small farmer with a valuation under £25 would have to borrow £1,200 or £1,400 at the present rate of interest, he finds that he could not possibly do it.

The man who borrowed the maximum amount that can be borrowed from a local authority today, that is £2,500, would repay £240 a year. That is an average of £4 a week, and there are very few people who are in a position to repay £4 a week. We also had a circular from the Department on 24th May, 1965. It was one circular which I could never understand. It stated:

In the overall assessment of housing needs already referred to, the housing authority should pay particular attention to the needs of small farmers living in unfit conditions, who would be eligible under the special scheme.

A person in occupation of an agricultural holding, the land valuation of which is not more than £5, who obtains a substantial proportion of his livelihood from the holding would be eligible, if in need of rehousing, notwithstanding that he may supplement his income otherwise than from the holding.

We completed our survey in Westmeath and we picked out everyone on a holding of less than £5 valuation. We sent them a circular letter pointing out any advantage they could get under that section, and not one single person in the county accepted the conditions. The circular was too ambiguous in the first place: "...he may supplement his income otherwise than from the holding." I did have a try for one person with a valuation of less than £5, but when I took the matter up with the Department I was told that his income from other sources exceeded what he was getting from the land.

It is absolutely ridiculous to think that any person in Ireland could get a reasonable income from land with a £5 valuation. It is no wonder that the Minister said later on that he was disappointed at the response he had got from farmers with a valuation of £5.

I should like to see the derelict sites in our towns and villages used for building purposes. There is too much stress on going out into the country and harassing the farmers for land for local authority houses. In almost every village and town there are derelict buildings that could be removed, and the sites used to great advantage for rehousing the people. I do not know why the county councils or the Department are so slow in this matter. Something should be done because we should concentrate on amenities when we come to housing. We should ensure that people have running water, sewerage, light and that they are near schools, churches and shops. We should concentrate on that except in the case of the small farmer who has his own holding. In no circumstances should we build a house for a person who is not concerned with farming unless we build it where there are amenities.

The term "unfit houses" is used quite a lot throughtout the Bill. I am against the words "unfit for human habitation." That should be dropped completely and be replaced by substandard. The minimum requirements for standard houses should be determined and likewise those for substandard houses. Houses can be substandard because of lack of an indoor water supply, w.c. or bathroom, defects in structure which can be remedied at a reasonable cost, and also defects in structure which cannot be remedied at a reasonable cost. Those matters could be dealt with under Acts which we have already. They could be dealt with under the Town and Regional Planning Act. We could deal with quite a lot of those things without making orders requiring the demolition of substandard houses. We have rushed this matter too much, especially in the city of Dublin. We are pulling down substandard houses.

We have a huge problem in this country—that of the 6,000 itinerants. In my opinion where we could use substandard houses to house itinerants we would be doing a great day's work and we would be solving the problem. I have seen this in my own county, where houses became vacant. They were not up to a great standard but itinerants were put into them. There was one very important thing done. The itinerants got work. They are settled down now and are first class citizens in the towns where they have been fixed up. I had the pleasure during the year of applying for a supplementary grant for water, sewerage and reconstruction for some of those houses. If those people could be put into houses and given work, we would be on the road to solving the itinerant problem.

We should not be shocked that a person should live in a substandard house. I would be altogether against the demolition of substandard houses. We know the modern concept of the relationship between health and housing has changed completely within the last few months. It does not mean because a man is living in a dilapidated house that he would be subject to tuberculosis since modern drugs have proved that is not the case. For example, when people travelled in years gone by they went in open cars. Now, they do not go in open cars but it does not mean that travelling in an open car is unhealthy at the present time. It could be just as healthy as travelling in a motor car or any covered car. The same thing applies with regard to substandard houses which have not water, sewerage, and the amenities which houses should have. It does not mean that those houses should be demolished as a danger to health. In my opinion they are not a danger to health. The medical profession hold that is so.

I notice a circular from the Department which rather gave me a shock. It was dated the 28th February, 1964, and it dealt with septic tanks in houses. As everyone knows, in most rural areas we depend on septic tanks. They got a rather bad name where they were installed. The reason for the bad name was that proper care was not taken to kill the bacteria in the septic tanks. This circular from the Department in 1964, which rather shocked me, pointed out that care should be taken to position the tank on the downward side of the dwelling wherever possible. Waste water from the bath, washhand basin and sink should also be discharged into this septic tank. A Department of Local Government sending out such instructions to any county council should have their heads examined because nothing in the wide world will destroy a septic tank only waste from a bath and sink. That is a Local Government circular. The number of this circular was N. 164 and it was sent out to every county council in the country. I object to that circular. It is bad and the Department are looking for trouble when they ask the people to run the bath and sink into the septic tank.

We had quite an amount of trouble in connection with State subsidies for houses. It is most unjust that we should have two sets of subsidies. I should like to see the Department fixing on a set figure. We have a 33? per cent and a 66? per cent subsidy. We should have something like a 50 per cent subsidy. Great injustice has been done by the fact that there are two different types of subsidies. People can get a subsidy if they are living in unfit dwellings and if they are living in houses that should be demolished, but some people are deprived of houses simply because they live with their in-laws. The subsidy cannot be paid in such cases even though the people have been forced to live with their in-laws because of circumstances. The council loses the subsidy in those cases and they cut it down to 33? per cent. The tendency is to give the house to somebody in respect of whom the full subsidy will be paid. I would like the Minister to do something about making a fixed subsidy of 50 per cent available for all houses.

We have the question of the minimum repair grant. This is something which came in recently and I do not know whether it was wise on the part of the Minister to ever bring in the minimum repair grant scheme. The idea is to prolong the life of the house until such time as the house is built but, from the type of person getting the minimum repair grant—the £80 from the Government with the council paying the balance—I do not think it has been a success. Only the minimum repair has been done and no good work has been carried out under the minimum repair grants scheme.

Then we have the question of the 1,400 square feet. Under the new Bill it is intended to increase it to 1,500 square feet. I personally can see no reason why a Minister should lay down what number of square feet a person should put into his house because the Act has been beaten the whole way through with the 1,400 square feet. It is as easy as walking out the door to beat the Act and you can build a house with 2,000 square feet. All you have to do is close up a door and put another door on it and call that an office or something else and you qualify for the grant by just closing the door until the grant is paid and then you can open it and close the one outside. It has been done all over the country. The Minister knows it and it is against good planning to compel a person to build a house of 1,400 or 1,500 square feet. Any section of an Act which can be abused as the section which ties it down to 1,500 square feet should be abolished and I would be all in favour of allowing a man to build whatever type of house he thinks fit.

I shall not delay the House any longer except to express the hope that within the next few months we, in the local authorities, will get the money to grant people SDA loans and pay supplementary grants to people who are really in a very bad way at the present time. There is no use talking about building houses unless the money is made available for them.

Mr. Garret FitzGerald

I am no expert on housing and have not experience in this field comparable with that of many other Senators but there are a number of points which have come to my attention in different ways and which I should like to raise.

First of all, we must recognise that there is inherent in the building industry generally and, perhaps more particularly in the house building sector of the industry, the danger of instability. We have had the experience over the last six months of a decline in housing starts and of unemployment in the building industry as a whole, a proportion of which is certainly attributable to the decline of activity in house building. The Federation of Builders has, in fact, recently stated that house building in Dublin is 49 per cent below normal. While this is not a very precise concept, nevertheless it is an indication of a sharp reduction in activity. Moreover, unemployment has been rising at an alarming rate. The figures for unemployment in this sector show a 23 per cent increase in December, 25 per cent in January and 27 per cent in February. It is worth noting that the figures for this year understate the position compared with last year because of the exclusion of certain assistance groups from this year's figures; but not from last year's. So that, for the first two months of this year, there has been a true decrease of 30 per cent in building employment.

Another factor which has contributed to this and another indication of the trend is the fact that building society loans fell sharply last year. I have made some private inquiries of my own covering four societies and they indicate a drop of about 20 per cent in the total advances last year which, taken in conjunction with the increase in the size of the average advance, suggests a drop of about 30 per cent in the number of loans. All that is disturbing and the NIEC in its Report on the Economic Situation published some time ago, drew attention to this problem in relation to building and referred to the fact that there was evidence that building is levelling off.

It said at paragraph 73:

...one consequence of these difficulties has been a levelling off, and possibly even a decline in building activity. Major fluctuations in activity in so important a sector are most undesirable, introducing an element of instability, which can have severe repercussions outside the sector itself. Steps must be taken to ensure a smoother and steadier growth of this sector.

There is there concrete evidence from all these different sources, of a disturbing trend but, perhaps, the most disturbing feature of all this has been the refusal of the Minister to accept these facts and his persistent attempt to put a face on it and indicate that activity is being maintained despite the fact that evidence from all those sources, the builders, building societies, unemployment figures and the NIEC Report points to a decline of a disturbing character.

When you have a situation such as this, the danger really arises not from the economic situation itself but from the refusal of the Government to accept the fact until it is too late to do anything about it. I would not be all that concerned if I saw an alert Minister conscious of the problems, accepting that there is a difficulty, recognising the facts and urging his Department to do something about it. But when the Minister concerned seems to sweep it all under the carpet hoping that something will turn up to prevent the situation getting out of hand, then I am disturbed. One of the difficulties which have helped the Minister to sweep it under the carpet and, to some degree to date to get away with it, is the inadequacy of information about the building industry generally and, particularly, about the house-building part of the industry. There simply are not adequate statistics to show us what is happening in the industry. There are statistics to show us the levelling off after it has happened. They may be of interest to economic historians but of policy decisions of Government we know nothing of what is currently happening.

The NIEC again pointed out in paragraph 12 of this Report:

...In the absence of adequate statistics of building starts it is impossible to assess accurately recent trends in building, with a view to determining to what extent activity in the industry has levelled off or started to fall.

The information simply is not available and it is not available because of the fact that the Government have made no attempt whatever to overcome the difficulties which are far from being insuperable and which stand in the way of adequate statistics on building. The absence of this information is culpable because it can be obtained; it can be provided and it is simply negligence that it is not available to us so that the Government are in a position to pretend they do not know what is happening and, perhaps, genuinely in the position of fooling themselves into believing that a critical situation does not exist when, in fact, evidence from all the sources I have mentioned suggests that it does exist. The NIEC Report laid great emphasis on this and it said later at paragraph 74:

... unless the Government knows what is happening currently in the sector

—making it quite clear that the Government does not know what is happening—

it cannot take prompt action...

That is the situation we are in. Certainly there is no sign of the Government taking the prompt action required.

The Minister's attitude so far has been to say that the statistics do not show there is any difficulty. The statistics of completion, for example, to which he has referred, are published about three months in arrear, so, if they were correct, they would tell us the houses which were completed three months ago. Secondly, they are not statistics of completions. It is a completely misleading description of them. They are, in fact, statistics of cases where houses have been inspected and certain approval has been given in relation to payments of grants, which can take place at any time up to 15 or 18 months after completion of the house and which the Department itself admits takes place, on average, three months after completion of the houses. So, the information on which the Minister relied for his misleading statement that there is no crisis in the building industry is six months out of date, on average, and, even at that, we are taking only an average figure and it might not give a true picture of what was happening six months ago.

There are statistics also of housing starts which tell us what is to come in the pipeline of house-building. They are not in fact statistics of starts but are statistics of approvals of grants which may or may not be taken up and which, if they are taken up, may be taken up at any time in the next couple of years. There is, in fact, a significant time-lag between the granting of approval and the start of building.

These are difficulties which could be overcome because, in fact, the Department has at its disposal, but has never bothered to extract, data of an accurate character which would give it information on housing starts. The Department's inspectors inspect the foundations of every house started. They record these inspections in notebooks but nobody in the Department and no Minister in this Government or in any of our successive Governments has ever thought to ask the inspectors if they would copy out of their notebooks this accurate current information on building starts which would provide the vital information the Government need for policy purposes. I drew attention to this last October. When I raised the matter again in December I was told it might be possible to get hold of the inspectors' notebooks for the current year but that they had thrown away the notebooks for the earlier years and therefore past information sought could not be obtained. Any Government which adopts such an irresponsible attitude to the getting of prompt information about housing does not deserve the confidence of this House.

The Government established some years ago a Building Advisory Council. That council has not got a good record. Many of the people on it are reputable and responsible citizens but they were not appointed to represent the building industry. Some of them are prominent in the building industry but they are not representatives of it. They are not permitted to communicate with the building industry in regard to what they are doing on the council. They are not permitted to let anybody know what reports they have made. The terms of their reports are confidential to the Minister who has never deigned to let either House of the Oireachtas know what these reports contain. The only exercise known to have been carried out by this council was a statistical survey of building of such complexity that it failed to get any kind of response with the result that it broke down. This was launched at a very lavish reception in the Martello Room by the Department and the Building Council in 1963 or 1964: I am not sure which year, at this stage. When it broke down, because it was so complex that nobody could understand the forms and fill them up, nothing further was done, so far as I am aware. No further attempt was made to get further information.

This building council did not even try to extract the data about foundations from the notebooks of the inspectors. That is the position we are in at the moment. I suggest that this Building Advisory Council should be reconstituted. It should be a representative body as other bodies are representative of other sectors such as agriculture and industry. It should be allowed to communicate with the industry and to communicate the industry's views to the Government and it should be allowed to communicate the Government's views back again to the industry. It should get on with the job and not be so discouraged by the failure of its Martello Room effort as to make no further attempt to do what should be done. This failure, the failure of the Department and the Minister's failure, all mean that we do not know what is happening. We have many indications of a disturbing decline in housing and other building activities, but apparently the Minister is quite happy that he has not any statistics which are absolutely accurate because he can then confuse and obscure the issue.

I do not know whether the Minister has bothered to read the NIEC report. It contains a concrete suggestion in this context. It points out that one of the difficulties about ensuring the maintenance of activity in the building industry is that when economic difficulties occur funds are not available to step up building and to use building as a regulator in the economy to maintain economic stability. In Sweden, there is a system in operation which helps to iron out fluctuations in industry. The Minister will find a full account of this in the magazine of the Scandinavian Bank, No. 2, 1963, which shows how the special tax arrangements in Sweden enable firms to set aside certain funds in periods of prosperity which they are not permitted to release until the Government tell them they may do so. When they are permitted to release these funds, it injects resources into the building industry at a time when there is a building recession. On 15th February, 1963, 31 per cent of the workers in the building industry in Sweden, on work other than housing, were at work because of the existence of this fund, so important is it in maintaining employment and stability. This suggestion of the NIEC, made last November, is worthy of investigation and I should be interested to hear the Minister's views on it.

On the subject of the housing targets, as far as I know the housing target that we have at the moment is one for 13,000 houses. It is believed, but we do not know because there are not any statistics, that we built 11,000 last year. The target for 1970 is 13,000 houses. I have read the White Paper on this matter. It gives no indication as to how the figure of 13,000 houses was arrived at. It talks grandly about the considerations taken into account, but there is not the slightest sign of a calculation, as distinct from consideration. On what basis was the calculation made in regard to the marriage rate? What demographic forecasts were studied as regards population and marriage? Who prepared them? I confess that I ask these questions with my tongue in my cheek because I have a shrewd suspicion that there were no such forecasts and that this target was taken out of the air with no demographic basis or serious attempt to estimate the rate of marriages to take place. I should be happy if the Minister would produce the data on which this is based, but I have doubts about its validity. This figure of 13,000 houses does not seem to me to be likely to be adequate in the light of the current demand for housing and the imminent rise in the marriage rate which has been rising in the past 18 months or so by as much as 10 per cent. There are the beginnings of a very sharp rise in the marriage rate which will continue until the 1970s as a result of the lower level of emigration since 1961 and the much higher level of young people who are moving into the marrying age groups between 23 and 30.

Another way of looking at this is to compare our expenditure on housing with that of other countries. I think there are very few countries, for which statistics exist, which spend such a very low proportion of the national output on housing. Indeed, I should be interested if the Minister could give us some figures for the principal countries in Europe and if he would let us see how many countries are as far down as we are in this respect and give such a low priority to housing as we have done under the present Government.

Not only is the scale of housing activity clearly inadequate by any standard but it follows a remarkable pattern. Of the 11,000 houses estimated to have been built here last year it is estimated that 3,200 were built by local authorities—less than 30 per cent. If we include the houses built by Government agencies such as the Shannon Free Airport Development Authority and perhaps the National Building Agency, of which we hear very little, though it must build some houses, we get a figure of perhaps 35 per cent of all houses built by public authorities. Again, I would be interested to know how many other European countries have this extraordinary record of Government and public authority negligence in the matter of the provision of housing, leaving it predominantly to the private sector, so that people with limited means, who in any other civilised country would be able to get housing for rent at a reasonable rate, are forced into the market to buy houses, admittedly with certain Government assistance, at prices that have in recent years been extremely inflated— people who in many cases have incomes half or one-third of what in other countries would be considered appropriate to qualify people for public housing.

The extent to which we are out of line here can be seen by simply comparing the figures for Northern Ireland and the Republic. Anybody interested will find that comparison set out side by side in the Irish Times Review and Annual where the statistical table compares the North and the South. There is a complete reversal of the proportion in Northern Ireland, being an ordinary country in this respect, where it is recognised that housing is primarily a public responsibility and the bulk of houses are provided by the public authorities, including the Northern Housing Trust, and the minority are provided by people who can afford them. Here it is the minority who get public housing and the majority, whether or not they can afford them, must buy houses for themselves.

To my mind, the responsibility of the public authorities in this, as in other countries, should be to build simple adequate houses on an economic basis for everyone who is prepared to pay an economic rent for them, and it should be the function of the State—this is a personal view I am expressing, not the policy of any particular political party—to assist people to pay those rents or subsidise the houses in proportion to the people's needs. Our system, in which every extra house built by a local authority involves that authority in a burden on the rates is one which could have been designed to discourage public authority building. The local authority should be able to build as many houses, within limits as regards the type of houses—not luxurious detached dwellings on large patches of ground but suitable houses of an economic and limited character, and they should be encouraged to build as many of them as there is a demand for. The rent for them should be an economic rent. It should be the function of the Government to see that anybody who cannot afford an economic rent has his income supplemented or rent subsidised by subsidy to the amount necessary so that he can afford to rent that house even if in some cases this means paying the great bulk of the rent.

Local authorities should not have to carry the burden, which is a strong disincentive to them doing their duty of providing adequate housing. On this I detect, I must say, in the Minister's speech views which seem not entirely out of line in the way they are spoken and written with what I am saying, but I do not detect in the Bill or in any practical operation of the Government's policy the slightest indication of carrying this to its logical conclusion.

Another matter which many people again have complained about, and of which many other Senators will have had more direct experience than I have had, is the red tape involved in this business of house building— the constant need to get departmental approval at every stage. This is all wrong. It should be the function of the Department of Local Government to lay down principles for public housing, to supervise that the local authorities are carrying out this obligation in a general way, and then let them get on with the job. The present system under which—I am open to correction if it has been changed in the last fifteen months, but I do not think it has been changed —builders have to approach three different officials, one for SDA loans, one for Government grants, and one for supplementary grants, is an absurd system. The Dublin District House Builders' Association approached the Minister and the Department on December 14th, 1964, and asked that a change should be made so as to be able to deal with one official and not to be chasing from one to another in relation to different aspects of their business. I would be glad to know if this change has been carried out or if we still have this duplication of effort here.

Other speakers have already mentioned, and others will mention again, the holdups and uncertainties about the financing of local authority housing and Small Dwellings Acts loans that have occurred in the last year and they are still occurring. One can understand readily that the Government, having got into certain difficulties, not entirely without some blame attaching to them, have not got available all the money they would like to have for housing. In that situation it is proper that the Government should ration the funds available. If they have not got money, they cannot provide it. But the method of rationing employed which is the antithesis of planning is one in which there is not the slightest indication or sign of any planning involved. It is to keep stalling, to keep putting off decisions, not answering letters, not giving any indication as to when the money or how much money will be available. That is quite indefensible.

The Government have a capital programme to which they are committed under which they provide money for housing and the money provided, considering the financial stringency at the present time, is by no means an inconsiderable sum. It is clear that the Government have made a great effort to give a high degree of priority to housing and they are to be given credit for that. But having allocated this sum, which is over £30 million, the Government have not told local authorities when and how they will get this money. Any local authority will understand that they will not get at the beginning of the financial year on April 1st or April 5th or whenever it is the bulk amount, but the Government knows how much money will be available, and if there is any kind of planning or even the most limited and rudimentary form of administration, they must know how much they intend to give each county. They must have a good idea at what rate they will be borrowing money during the year and when the money will be available.

Unless there is a complete breakdown of administration, never mind planning, the Department of Local Government and the Minister must be able now when the capital Budget has been cleared, to tell local authorities how much money they will get for the different purposes for which they require it during the year. There will be a certain margin of error, and there may be some doubt about the precise date on which the National Loan will be raised, and the Government will have to allow a margin for contingency. They should certainly at this stage be sure that they will be able to find £25 of the £30 million allocated for building, and there is no reason short of incompetence why local authorities cannot now be told what money they will get and when.

It is our duty to press the Government and the Minister to adopt this simple approach to the problem, to stop stalling and pretending. They should not say: "There is this temporary difficulty but we will let you know in due course." Local authorities are entitled to a clear statement of what they will get, and when. It is time the Department of Local Government and the Minister came clean. They have made a great effort to provide, in very difficult circumstances, adequate funds. In present circumstances for which they are certainly to some extent to blame, it cannot be held against them that they have not given high enough priority to housing or provided sufficient funds in the capital Budget to provide those funds, but their allocation to local authorities appears for some obscure reason to be a totally different thing.

I would like the Government to get the credit it deserves for providing this money, but they must lose some of the credit if, having allocated this money in the capital programme, which very few local authorities have examined, they do not tell the local authorities what money they will get and when. This is in the Government's interest as well as in the interests of the local authority and of the country.

Another matter which was raised 15 months ago—before there was any crisis in the building industry—by the Dublin District House Builders Association was the need to provide adequately serviced land for housebuilding. Here again there has been a complete absence of any form of planning, so that everyone is in the dark as to how much land is available, and when drainage will be provided. That has a disastrous effect on planning house-building and on housing costs. Housing costs are in large measure today raised to inordinate levels by the absence of serviced land. It is a function of the public authorities to provide these services, and they have a duty to tell private housebuilders what land will be available, where and when, and what their plans are. Either they have plans or they have not. If they have plans, in the public interest they must disclose them in order to avoid unnecessary speculation in land for building. If they have not got plans, it is time they began to do something about getting them.

Another matter about which I have always been puzzled is the question of house design. Perhaps I am not sufficiently familiar with the details of housing administration. It seems to me that houses in this country are designed as if the families were going to be nice little English families with a man, his wife and at best two children. There seems to be a total disregard of the fact that the average family size in Ireland is, and has been for many decades past, twice the size of an English family. I have never understood why houses are built here with just two or three bedrooms, and no provision is made for large families. I have been told—I find it hard to believe—that the only thing to do is to knock two houses together for a large family. It would seem to be more intelligent to provide more bedrooms rather than to be reduced to that unsatisfactory expedient. When houses are designed, account should be taken of different sized families.

It may be that we have set our standards too high. I think the Minister has made a point at times about the high level of housing standards in regard to the total amount of accommodation provided, but perhaps the standard may be too high in regard to the size of the rooms. It is very important to have enough bedrooms for children of different sexes. That is more important than whether the rooms are of a certain minimum size. We may perhaps have overdone the minimum size at the expense of the number of rooms.

Another matter associated with these practical problems which has been raised with me by a number of people expert in these matters is the appalling lack of any provision by Dublin Corporation in particular for qualified housing managers. The administration of the housing estates is carried out centrally. Dublin Corporation administer the estates and there is no one out on the spot to keep an eye on the estate at Ballyfermot, Crumlin or Inchicore or wherever it may be. There are no people with the training and qualifications as housing managers such as run the public authority estates in other countries. There seems to be a great neglect here. I should like to see a requirement in Dublin in particular, and also elsewhere, that we should have qualified housing managers who would be located in the field in each area, who would be responsible for looking after the estate on the spot, and would be available to the people to deal with their problems instead of having them trudge to Lord Edward Street to deal with what appears to them to be a centralised bureaucracy.

There is one question I should like to put to the Minister, although it may more properly arise on the section, that is section 18. There does not appear to be any limit on the size of the flats for which it is proposed to provide grants. I wonder if that is the case. We have a severe limit on the size of the houses for which grants can be provided. It was 1,400 square feet and it is now proposed, properly, to raise it to 1,500 square feet. I cannot detect a similar maximum limit for the flats. Are we thinking of providing grants for people to build luxury flats on a very large scale for people who are wealthy and like to live in those circumstances? There ought to be some maximum limit here. If there is, perhaps I have missed it.

The final point I should like to raise is one which was made by Deputy Costello in the Dáil. It arises out of the recent flooding in Anglesea Road and relates to the fact that the Minister has interpreted, or misinterpreted, the section of the Act which has been reproduced in section 22 of this Bill, in such a way as to rule out the provision of compensation for garden walls. The houses in this part of Anglesea Road are not very large, and they are occupied by people who are not particularly well to do. Sixteen garden walls were flattened by the flood waters bursting through, and the gardens are a shambles. The houses were flooded, and for this a certain amount of compensation was available, but the Minister has interpreted his discretionary powers as precluding him from providing a grant for the garden walls, although the best legal advice in this respect suggests that he is not justified in this interpretation.

There is no specific definition in the Act of "house" for this purpose, and the ordinary meaning of the word "house", as determined judicially, includes garden walls, orchards and things like that closely associated with the houses. There is no reason why the Minister should interpret his discretion so narrowly as to exclude garden walls. He is running against the weight of legal opinion, and it is puzzling that he should do so. The insurance companies will not accept these people as risks, and the loss suffered by them is one that imposes a harsh burden on them. I should like the Minister to reconsider his decision.

Deputy Costello asked him to introduce an amendment in the Seanad to give him the extra leeway which he seems to feel he wants. I hope that in summing up this debate he will indicate his intentions on this matter. If it is of any help to him we are more than willing to put down the necessary amendment, and we will do so if he does not feel he can. If he feels uncertain of his powers, we are more than willing to expand them for this purpose.

Mr. Rooney

This Bill is a comprehensive document. It is mainly a consolidating Bill to meet modern housing problems as they affect the community. It offers some fringe improvements only. It is not a dramatic piece of legislation which will bring a new face to the housing situation. It is very desirable that it should be enacted for the purpose of consolidating the many old Acts under which our housing campaigns operated. So far as I can see, this Bill will not speed up housing when the money is not provided for it. If the money is provided, this Bill could be effective, but without the provision of the necessary finance, we cannot expect that this consolidating legislation will confer any great benefit on the community in general. After all, the Government have made a very poor effort in relation to our housing problems. We have nothing but delaying tactics as far as the Government are concerned.

I note in this Bill that the Minister has written in very clearly that in future the differential rent system is the one to be operated by the various county councils, corporations and local authorities in relation to local authority houses instead of leaving the local authorities devise their own method of renting. This has caused a considerable amount of alarm, particularly in Dublin city and, indeed, in Dublin county where a number of tenants believe that the rents will be put up to a figure beyond their capacity to pay and very much higher than the levels which apply at the present time. We are sailing along here, at least the Government are, as if there is no crisis in relation to the need for housing at the present time. They seem to have closed their eyes to the fact that there are approximately 15,000 families in Dublin city and county crying out for immediate housing, housing which should be provided overnight if at all possible. At the rate housing is being carried out at the present moment, particularly in Dublin city and county, and, indeed, in the rest of the country, I think there is no hope of a solution.

We all know that the population of Dublin city and county is increasing at the rate of 20 persons per day and having regard to such very dramatic increase, approximately 7,000 people a year will need to be housed. We can see that a major problem, therefore, will be upon us particularly if the Government continue to be lackadaisical in relation to their attitude to this matter. It is all very well to say in regard to the Ballymun housing scheme: "Go ahead and do the job. This will solve the situation." It will not. The Government should adopt an emergency attitude towards housing in relation to Dublin city and county. While all these delaying tactics are in progress, building costs have been rocketing and the cost of land for building purposes has been going skyhigh.

Eventually those costs will have to be borne either by the people living in those houses or by the ratepayers in Dublin city and county. The Government were presented with an excellent housing programme in 1957 by the inter-Party Government. According to the figures given by the Minister for Local Government, 125,000 houses were built, completed or were the subject of State grants since 1947. If the figures for 1954 to 1957 are examined, it will be found that 31,000 houses or one-fourth of the 125,000 houses were accounted for during those years. In other words, one-fourth of the total was accounted for in the three years that the inter-Party Government were in office. That is the type of vigorous approach needed if we are to solve the acute housing problem within a reasonable time.

After 1957 the Government fell down on the job with the result that the house building years, which I have mentioned, of 31,000, fell down to 17,000 houses in the three years ended 1962. Indeed, there were still worse figures than that. In the years 1955, 1956 and 1957 the inter-Party Government provided something in the region of £12 million for housing, at a time when costs were 50 per cent less than they are at the present time. The great emergency has come upon us now because the Government have fallen down on the housing campaign. The provision of even double that amount will not now be sufficient to enable them to keep abreast of the pace set for them at that time. We heard some Fianna Fáil Deputies saying there were surplus houses in Dublin after the inter-Party Government left office in 1957, that houses were vacant and that the people had gone to England. That may be so, but there were 100,000 more people working in 1957 than there are at the present time, even though there were vacant houses in Dublin city and county at that time.

Mr. Dolan

There were 95,000 people unemployed and 18,000 houses vacant in 1957.

Mr. Rooney

Even with that number unemployed, you had 100,000 more people working. Now, of course, they have devised a system for solving the unemployment figures. Now nobody can understand how many people are unemployed because the Government are making sure by a new system that comparison with those years would be very difficult. If we examine the programme for housing set out in the First and Second Programmes we will see that, in fact, the Government are taking good care to ensure that the housing campaign will be a slow one. The attitude of Fianna Fáil is that investment in housing is not productive. It is social investment but not productive investment. They would be more interested, apparently, in investing money in a basement factory rather than in providing houses for homeless families.

In the Bill the limit in respect of the subsidy for local authority housing has been set at £1,650. Of course, every day that figure is becoming inadequate owing to rising costs and rising prices for building houses. On that point, in relation to unemployment, the Senator from Cavan will remember that the number of persons employed in the building industry has dropped by approximately 40 per cent in the last couple of years. This is a terrific drop. You cannot expect a labour force reduced by 40 per cent to provide the output in houses which is urgently needed at the present time.

It will, apparently, be necessary for the Minister to increase the upper limit of £1,650 and to adjust the subsidy in respect of serviced houses. The same applies to the subsidy for unserviced houses, which is now limited to £1,100. That figure will also have to be increased because every day it is becoming more difficult to get tenders from building contractors which will enable this subsidy to be the full two-thirds the cost of houses.

This Bill also encourages cottage purchase schemes which we have had right down the years. Certainly, it is desirable in rural areas that those purchase schemes should be encouraged amongst people particularly if they prove to be houseproud people. They will be prepared to maintain those council houses when they become vested owners of the property. There is, of course, agitation in the corporation areas also for purchase schemes to be devised. The problems existing in rural areas and urban areas are quite different so far as local authority housing is concerned.

This Bill offers encouragement so far as the purchase of dower houses and grants for farmers are concerned. These grants will enable farmers to renew their dilapidated farmhouses. It is a fact, unfortunately, that too many farmers are living in very uncomfortable conditions in very old and dilapidated houses. The farmers have not been able to replace these houses or improve them at their own expense. It is hoped that this new legislation will encourage farmers to improve or to replace the old houses on their farms because, of course, there is always a wastage of houses through the passage of time if we assume that the life of an ordinary house is 70, 80 or even 100 years. If we count up the total number of houses in the country we can see the number which need to be replaced or improved annually.

I think the Bill does not go far enough in so far as providing nominee cottages for farm labourers is concerned. It is a problem which should be tackled. Farm labourers are leaving the rural areas at the moment at the rate of more than 10,000 persons per year; I think it was 14,000 last year. But, if proper housing conditions are available to a farm labourer and his family, he will think twice before leaving the locality. On the other hand, if he is living under poor housing conditions, the inclination is for him to move towards better living conditions and better housing conditions. So I believe everything possible should be done to facilitate farmers who are prepared to give a piece of land for the building of a labourer's cottage on their holding. There is in the department at the moment an inclination to refuse permission for the building of cottages if water and sewerage services are not available to them. It is good to ensure that, in future, septic tank and water services will be provided in rural areas for cottages because the occupants will be brought up to the standard of living enjoyed by people living in the towns where water, sewerage and other services are laid on.

The department has turned down too many cottages in the rural areas just because water and sewerage services are not available and they are forcing the people who want to live two or three miles from a village to do without a cottage or to go to live in the village which, of course, may be a few miles away from their work. The important thing to ensure is that houses would be provided for a family near their place of work, where practicable. I feel the department should discontinue the policy of turning down proposals for the building of cottages in rural areas just because water and sewerage services are not available there.

The grant extension to 1,500 square feet is a welcome provision in this legislation. That was a problem with many people. They felt that the space of 1,250 square feet, as it was for a number of years, was really too small and the extension to 1,400 square feet was welcomed. This further extension, of course, will be welcome, too.

When housing policy is being debated and considered, I think the Government should not be boasting about the amount of money they are providing for houses. What they should boast about is the number of square feet, the floor space and living accommodation they are providing because, with the rising cost of building, it is no consolation to homeless families to see the Government spending twice as much money today on housing as they were 10 years ago. If the Government have anything to boast about, let us hear from them about the floor space in the form of living accommodation provided for people.

I see, too, in the Minister's statement that there are 50,000 houses regarded as being beyond economic repair. Surely that should be regarded as an emergency and some kind of emergency approach on the part of the Government is desirable.

I feel the department for too long in this country have adhered to traditional building methods and old building bye-laws instead of moving with the times, to modern building methods, modern conditions and modern needs. I am glad to see that the old building bye-laws will be abolished under this new Housing Bill. Except in cities and towns where there should be a standard type of building, I feel the department should not stand in the way of people who do not conform to the traditional building methods when they are providing housing accommodation in rural areas and where they are not interfering with anybody else. If a man decides to build a timber house with 1,500 square feet living accommodation and he is not interfering with anybody, he should be encouraged to build it, because he will be providing living accommodation, in modern conditions, for his family.

It would be quite a different matter if you wanted to build a wooden house in O'Connell Street, or in any town or village where there is a possibility of a built up area where, of course, the department strongly recommend adherence to the traditional building methods. If a person wishes to construct a dwelling house which may not conform to the type of building standards required in cities, towns and villages, he should not be stopped, provided it is a sound structure providing adequate living accommodation.

The policy of the department in sprawling the city across half of County Dublin, outside the original city boundaries, has been a great mistake. Any of us who have gone to other cities find that the buildings there go up to, maybe, eight storeys high or, perhaps, ten storeys high but they have not any of this low style building we have around the Dublin city centre, with the exception of a few sky-scrapers. The buildings in modern cities are all eight or ten storeys high and this ensures that have public services available, which a reasonable area and that they will have public services available, which are most important. I am thinking particularly of hot water services. In corporation schemes in which there are thousands of houses, all of them are provided with a little range or fireplace to heat the water for domestic requirements. It is all a very big effort in these days of modern living.

It is desirable that these working-class families, though they are not provided with adequate floor space accommodation, should be provided with as much of the public services as possible, including water and sewerage and, of course, a system whereby they have only to turn on the tap for hot water from one central water heating station. It is impossible now because, of course, the city is sprawled out in all directions with these little two storey houses with entrance doors only four paces from each other. There are only about four long paces between one door and another in each of these corporation housing schemes.

As I say, they are comparatively small and they are sprawling out all over the country. They are built on land which is costing anything up to £2,000 or £3,000 an acre and somebody must pay for it. If the tenants in all of these little houses do not have to pay for it, the ratepayers or the taxpayers will have to pay for it. The policy of sprawling corporation houses all over the country has been a mistake so far as providing modern conditions for the people is concerned. Many of these unfortunate people find the fuel bill beyond their capacity, particularly if they are without employment.

Business suspended at 6.5 p.m. and resumed at 7.15 p.m.

Mr. Rooney

When business was suspended, I was discussing the desirability of encouraging the building of nominee cottages on farms in rural areas where farmers are prepared to make a site available. It may be said that there is nothing new about that. It has been done in the past, but it will be agreed by councillors and local representatives that there is a departure from that and that it is not as easy now to get the Department of Local Government to agree to the building of a cottage on a nominee site. When we see the drift from the land into the towns, villages and cities we must realise that one reason for it is the fact that those who drift away from the rural areas are not settled down and tied into their own homes, and if the Department did more about fixing families into homes in rural areas we would have a greater chance of keeping those people living in those areas. Those who do leave the rural areas find that it is just as easy to take up their roots and go to Birmingham or London as to take up their roots and go to Dublin, so that we lose them in the form of emigration just because we do not have them tied down in their own comfortable homes in those rural areas.

Of course, I know that there are many homes where there is nobody now except the old parents, and the young people have left, but at least it is possible that some of those young people will come back to the old home at a later stage. The accent should be on the provision of good housing accommodation in the rural areas in the hope of getting people to remain in those areas. People find it much easier to move into a town or a city and avail of whatever modern amenities are available rather than to suffer on in the rural areas.

The Minister mentioned that there were something like 50,000 dwellings beyond economic repair. I agree that this is the situation. We had an example a few years ago here when we had some very heavy rainfall in the city and a number of buildings collapsed because they had reached the stage of depreciation where they were beyond the possibility of economic repair by their owners and they were allowed to collapse. The built-up areas should be maintained in that form and we should avoid a situation in which numerous derelict sites exist all over Dublin city at the moment, and, of course, in other towns, too. Derelict sites, particularly within the boundary of any urban area, should be taken over by the local authority or even the Department of Local Government, and developed somehow or another so that there would be a proper community within the boundary of the urban area.

I mentioned the fact that the Department are not in favour of encouraging the building of houses which are described by them as substandard because they do not contain a certain type of material rather than the old building material to which they have become accustomed. I suggested that outside the villages, towns and cities, the Department should encourage the establishment of homes rather than stand in the way of building dwellings which do not conform to the type of construction which is considered desirable inside the village, town or city boundary.

There are still many derelict sites inside the city boundary. I am glad that flats are being built on a number of those places because I feel that in such flats it will be possible to provide many modern amenities, apart from water, sewerage and lighting systems. In these modern flats we will be able to provide the modern amenities which are available now in the more cosmopolitan cities of the world. Dublin is becoming a cosmopolitan city but we still have the antiquated system of amenities here.

We all agree that the old system of compulsory purchase was very cumbersome and very slow. We bent over backwards to ensure that we would not treat the owners of land unfairly, but, in the meantime, the members of the community who were depending on the development of sites which were subject to these compulsory orders had to suffer on and were sometimes deprived of the amenities which would be available through the provision of new houses in certain areas.

This new machinery for the acquisition of land will bring great advantages and will speed up the process for which this land is being acquired. There is an inclination, owing to the differential rents system, for people in the rural areas in local authority houses to avail of the cottage purchase scheme. Then there are others who have got cottages so cheap that they feel it is better for them not to have the cottages vested in them, but to leave the responsibility for maintenance and repair still with the county council. It is desirable to encourage private ownership so far as possible and for the various councils to encourage the vesting of these cottages in the rural areas.

However, we must make sure that those who avail of the cottage purchase scheme, because it will reduce their rent perhaps to one-half or one-quarter of what they were liable to pay under the differential rents scheme, maintain those houses in a proper condition and do not allow them to fall down eventually. A situation could arise in which persons who are not houseproud and who do not value the houses in which they are living, or maintain them in a reasonable condition, could, by ordinary negligence, by not bothering to put on a coat of paint now and again, by not bothering to replace deteriorating timber in window frames, to replace doors or to do other necessary repairs, allow the houses to become dilapidated. There will possibly be a number of careless families who will avail of the cheaper rent under the vesting order and then what will happen to those good houses built at considerable expense? I do not see anything in the Bill to ensure that the problem will be met.

Of course, it is a condition of the tenancy agreement that the vested tenant must keep his cottage in proper condition or he is liable to be dispossessed. Those are very strong conditions but I do not think they are ever acted on. Some inspection should be carried out by the various county councils and the tenants should be notified regarding the conditions of the vested house in which they are living. It should be pointed out to them what needs to be done to ensure that the house will be preserved in a reasonably good condition for the average life of the type of house in which they live.

The position regarding housing finance is nothing short of a disgrace, particularly considering the abuse the previous Government had to put up with from the present Government Party. In Swords—the Minister knows this—a tender was accepted for the building of 150 cottages many months ago. This tender was accepted the best part of a year ago. Sanction has not yet been given for the building of those cottages. However, some notice was issued to the county council pointing out that the department would pay for them on the instalment system; that they would pay perhaps one-third of the money in the current financial year, a further amount next year and a further amount the year afterwards. In the meantime, it is possible that building costs will rise, wage levels will increase and that it will not be possible for the contractor to build houses next year or the year after at the cost at which his tender was accepted some months ago.

I do not know what the Minister can do about this matter. We live near Dublin Airport where 2,500 people are employed. There has been a movement of population towards the Swords district. This has caused a shortage of houses which are not local authority houses. Similarly, a number of houses are overcrowded with as many as 19 people and three families and sometimes four families living in them. There are people living in shacks and converted sheds and, of course, in caravans all around the Swords area. They are waiting for the building of those 150 cottages. If only 50 cottages are built this year under the instalment scheme suggested, the position will still be worse next year because it is possible that the number of families requiring houses will have increased in the meantime.

We got some figures in the Minister's statement regarding the amount of money provided for the building of houses. I mentioned Swords but the same thing applies to Dublin city and throughout the county. I think tenders have been accepted for at least 300 cottages in the county and, as I say, there is not one penny to build one of them. The same situation obtains in Dublin city regarding tenders accepted for the building of corporation houses. It is all very well to provide money on paper and say: "This is our scheme. This is what we propose to do." The money must be provided or some scheme must be devised which will finance those schemes. There is no point in making statements about the provision of money. About £6 million was saved during the last two years on house development that did not take place. It is possible that the money earmarked this year for house development will not be spent.

Another point I should like to mention concerns the practice of local authorities in condemning houses for demolition when they decide to give tenancy of a council house to a certain family. They select this family and they will not give that family the key of the house or allow them into the council cottage until the owner of the house, from which the family is being removed, is served with a demolition order or his house is condemned. Since housing accommodation is so scarce, this practice should be discontinued because there may be dwellings in a dilapidated condition which would be suitable to accommodate, perhaps, three people but which would not be suitable to house the six or seven people being accommodated in a council cottage. The issuing of demolition orders should be discontinued, as far as possible, unless the house is actually in danger of collapse and likely to kill or injure somebody who might go to live in it. The practice of issuing a demolition order because the local authority want to get rid of a house, because it is an old one and they want to get it off the face of the earth, should be discontinued as long as the housing emergency exists.

The housing emergency is growing every day because we are not keeping pace, first of all, with the number of houses that need to be replaced immediately, in addition to the number of families who urgently need houses. Therefore, our first effort should be to devise a scheme which will, first of all, provide houses at a rate equal to the rate at which houses are falling into disrepair owing to age, in addition to the number required. The population of Dublin is increasing. An examination of the figures can easily show planners the number of houses required at any given time and on this basis planning should be carried out. A survey of other towns could be carried out also with a view to ensuring that we will have not have cities and towns crowded with families living in deplorable conditions just because housing is there.

We have seen, in recent times, that there is a growth in the cities and towns. One very good reason for that is that modern amenities are available in the cities and towns and they are not available in the rural areas. Under this Bill it is desirable that arrangements should be made now to make the houses in the rural areas comfortable and the conditions attractive for the people who decide to continue living in the country. We will, as far as I can see, always depend on a large labour force resident in rural Ireland in order to play our part in the agricultural output of the country since we lack many valuable minerals. We may move a proportion of our population into industrial sectors but, in the absence of minerals, we must go back to the land so far as winning wealth from the soil is concerned. I would like to see the Minister, particularly, encouraging a vigorous programme in the rural areas and amongst small farmers. This will repay itself in the long run.

Mr. O'Kennedy

This is another of those measures which have come before this House which all Parties agree is very desirable in the interests of the community. There may be certain opinions expressed as to whether or not it goes far enough and, indeed, we had some of those opinions expressed already in this debate today. It has been said, in an effort to strike at the fundamental idea of the Bill, that there is nothing new, nothing dramatic in it—as if drama should be the criterion of any Government programme, including a housing programme. But, leaving aside the question of whether or not it contains anything dramatic, in my view — and, I readily concede, an amateur view—it certainly does contain constructive ideas towards continuing and, in fact, renewing the housing programme which, in all fairness, has been undertaken over the past 20 years during the period of office of both the present and past Governments.

As I see it—and the Minister in his opening speech referred to the major purpose of the Bill and the aspects it intended to implement in the coming years—there are important ideas and, certainly, provisions contained in it. First of all, and, of course, this is the basis of all legislation nowadays, it does replace much of the archaic and unworkable legislation which has hitherto governed the housing programme in this country. To the extent it replaces and consolidates the existing law and makes the machinery more workable for all concerned with it, it is—as, indeed, are all such laws— very welcome. Secondly, in that it rejects as out-dated and proposes new attitudes particularly in connection with the types of people to be housed and in need of housing, it is a most commendable Bill. I refer to the proposal, pointed in the White Paper on Housing in 1964, to discontinue the classifications of persons of the working classes and agricultural classes as being the people who are directly in need of assistance under a Government housing programme. It is pointed out in the White Paper that the "working classes" definition, which was defined statutorily in the Housing of the Working Classes (Ireland) Act 1908, includes:

mechanics, artisans, labourers, and others working for wages, hawkers, costermongers, persons not working for wages but working at some trade or handicraft without employing others except members of their own family, and persons, other than domestic servants, whose income in any case does not exceed an average of thirty shillings a week, and the families of any of such persons who may be residing with them.

That is the Housing Act of 1908. There have been various suggestions and various other definitions adopted in a report, for instance, on the housing of the working classes in the city of Dublin. There is a judicial definition in England in 1955 which goes much further than the early definition of working classes here. But I think it is quite clear at the same time that we are in the present statutory law concerned with the definition I have just read in the 1908 Act. Anybody who looks at the modern requirements in housing will see it is totally inadequate, in present cirmustances, that the working classes, as defined there, with the bias towards people engaged in manual labour only, is not at all an appropriate one in present-day circumstances, when there can be many people engaged in other activities from shopkeepers to clerks, sometimes even some of the less well-off professional classes, who are just as much in need of certain assistance of a government housing programme as are manual labourers and tradesmen.

To the extent that the Bill proposes to consider the individual needs of each particular case, irrespective of whether or not the individual involved can be fitted into archaic classifications, it is a new and, certainly, a most commendable departure. Further, in that it lays down provisions for regular or periodical surveys by housing authorities of the housing needs in their areas and the programmes which these needs will demand, it does set about demanding a constructive approach to the demands for the time being in each particular area. This, after all, is rather a peculiarity of housing to anybody who does not necessarily have to be expert, in that houses, as they become obsolete, will create demands. Population as it shifts will create further demands; marriage trends as they increase will create further demands and nobody can forecast at this stage what the extent of these changes will be. This Bill makes provision for the local authorities to investigate periodically and regularly, in the future, the various demands which will arise because of these trends. To that extent, this Bill does make a very constructive effort to cope with what is really a human phenomenon; that of changing populations, increasing populations and, if necessary, better housing conditions.

There is another aspect of it which is one not merely related to our own country at present but indeed abroad. That is the greater co-operation between the various responsible authorities. Many of us will agree that the various authorities have found themselves in difficulties implementing schemes which were more economically feasible for a neighbouring housing authority. There might be certain isolated demands in remote areas by certain counties which would not be an economic proposition for the housing authority or for the housing programme in the area concerned but which could well be economically provided by a neighbouring housing authority. Any of us can think of cases of this nature without having to rack our brains. To the extent that this Bill gives very wide powers to housing authorities, first of all, to cooperate with each other in drawing up programmes of mutual benefit and, secondly, if necessary even in delegating to a neighbouring housing authority the powers and various responsibilities the former has, it does make a genuine effort to deal with these pockets which create quite a problem throughout the country at present. This is something new and, simple though it is, it certainly is a very commendable provision.

Another matter which occurs to me, reviewing the purpose of this Bill and the Minister's speech today, is the encouragement given in the Bill towards research into new methods and materials in housing and in the construction of houses because, as new demands arise, old materials become obsolete and we find that certain facilities we have nowadays, such as even central heating, are not suited to some of the standard type of equipment used in housing construction hitherto. As these new facilities become available to people, it is quite possible that the houses which have been built recently and earlier will become obsolete.

It is very important that we should encourage research because these new methods and materials which might well be provided at a cheaper cost may give us houses which may not last as long but houses which, at some time, for the duration of their existence, will be more serviceable than some of the houses we have seen crumbling down around the city in recent times. One of the problems we face nowadays in Ireland is that we have so many houses that were built for generations ahead — generations which have now just ended — and which, in their time, were composed of sturdy material. They are now causing a major problem for us, particularly in this city of Dublin partly because the administration which was ruling here up to 40 or 50 years ago might not have been so concerned with the preservation of houses that were built in different times.

To a certain extent, we have inherited many of these older houses around this city, houses which, in their time, were built as very highly-desirable town houses. We have inherited them and they have now become highly undesirable slum houses. To this extent, there may well be a case against building a house which may last the test of too many generations. This is the kind of thing I envisage. This Bill gives an opportunity of investigation. I express no view as to whether a house should last a stated period of time but that point is certainly open to investigation and full study.

There are certain provisions in the Bill which I think we will all agree are attractive. We hope they will not be abused not so much by the Government who will try to implement them as by people who may apply for the reliefs which are available under the Act. One which springs to mind particularly is that of the grant towards the dower house. Any of us who know the position in rural Ireland will readily agree that this idea of a dower house is not a new one. It has been expressed before, but now, for the first time, we have it in legislation. This idea is something which many of us suggested should have been included in legislation before this. It endeavours to give an opportunity to the parents to retire from the traditional home on the farm to a small house on the holding which is more suitable to their more current needs. In doing this, of course, they make way for the new owners, who are members of their own family. This should do away with the frustration which many young people on Irish farms have felt up to this, the frustration which a young man must feel—it is a human frustration—when he brings a young girl into a home which is overcrowded in the literal sense and in the popular sense in the fact that the mother and father of the young bridegroom are there exercising sway which they intend to continue to exercise. The fault lies with nobody if they continue to exercise that sway. The bride may find this situation unacceptable and it can be the cause of a lot of contention. This is a major problem with which this House should concern itself.

This Bill provides certain inducements towards doing away with that problem and, to that extent, is highly commendable. It occurs to me that people might have the impression that, by occupying certain houses which are not dower houses within the meaning of this Bill, when enacted, or by dodges which are not within the compass of this Bill, they might make themselves entitled to certain grants. If these new incentives are being offered, the people at large should realise and accept that they are being offered for certain definite types of houses, houses which are to be built according to certain strict requirements. They should not. therefore, start off a whole new trend of dogging their public representatives to get them a grant for a house to which, in fact, everybody knows they are not justly entitled. This I say because of my short experience as a public representative. I feel that the public at large have a certain notion that State schemes and State grants are free schemes and free grants for all and, whatever the original purpose might have been, sometimes the attitude is that they are available to those who can get them whether or not they are entitled to them. These new grants in this Bill would certainly be abused if people adopted that attitude. In so far as many new commendable grants are introduced under this Bill, it is important that it should be said that the people who avail of them should do so in all strict conscience.

There are other aspects of the Bill which give encouragement. It makes provision for houses for elderly people by way of giving certain rates remissions and loans to bodies directly concerned with providing such houses. People in many places throughout the country are at present making surveys in connection with the problems of the aged. I understand that the major problem which many of them come across is that of unsuitable houses. To this extent, I hope this Bill will be used to eradicate that problem as quickly and effectively as possible because it is a major problem.

One aspect of housing which I feel should be subject to severe and very definite restriction is that which gives grants up to £275 in respect of flats or maisonnettes which are built in certain areas. The purpose, of course, is to relieve certain congestion also. Indeed, as has been pointed out in the White Paper, since many houses are now being freed from rent restriction, it is found that more and more people are becoming interested in building houses for such purposes. I have seen in this city in recent times what could be termed—and nothing short of it— an exploitation of those in need of flats of the type which I suppose this Bill intends to encourage. In so far as this Bill will make grants available for this purpose, the Minister should retain certain definite powers as to the rents which may be charged in respect of these flats.

Senators

Hear, hear.

Mr. O'Kennedy

There are many young people in this city at present who unfortunately, because of the existing state of the law, do not qualify for a local authority house and who, when they get married, have to pay exorbitant rates for flats. It is right that we should encourage the further building of flats but nothing could be less right than that we should encourage this type of exploitation which is certainly visible in part of the city, if not universally throughout it at present. I know many cases of young married couples who do not qualify for assistance from local authorities and who are paying exorbitant rates to main tain themselves in reasonable comfort. We intend here to make flats available for them, but if we do we should certainly keep severe restrictions as to the price they are going to pay for those flats, particularly restrictions under the Rent Restrictions Acts, which have been somewhat released and do not apply, in any event, to furnished flats which is the type we would consider here.

Other aspects of the Bill which I feel are commendable to the House are the guarantees which the local authorities and the Minister may give to builders to the extent of grants available to them. As the Minister said in his opening speech, this will enable the builder to commence a scheme or the construction of a particular house without waiting to know if certain moneys will be forthcoming. To this extent it will obviate undue delays.

The last specific point I would make on this Bill is in relation to the acquisition of derelict sites and their development for housing purposes. It strikes one in Dublin particularly by comparison with other major cities in Europe that the first step is to demolish, the second is to leave demolished for a long period, and the third to convert into a parking space or possibly a building. This, unfortunately, leaves many gaping eyesores throughout the city and in many towns in this country. This is a type of situation that from any inspection of other countries one feels is not allowed to happen there. In most major European cities a house is only demolished or a lot of old buildings demolished when a new project is ready for construction, and to the extent that we have in many parts of this city and elsewhere demolished many houses before we were ready to start with new construction projects, I feel that we should introduce some steps to regulate that type of situation, because now much of what is being built in Dublin does not add to the beauty of this city.

Many of the modern buildings we see going up have very little of a native character. Certainly these gaping holes throughout the city not only do not add to its beauty but make it into an almost continuous slum in some places, which has never been characteristic of this country. This is something we should make every effort to regulate. The Minister is offering certain inducements in the Bill also towards the development of sites, and I hope that in this he will get the co-operation of all concerned in the building industry.

Finally, any of us who review the position in housing will agree that it is a subject that has many aspects but the major aspect is the social aspect involved. Very many things will occur to people who look at the ills which arise where housing is totally inadequate or unsuitable. In major cities throughout the world the crime rate is highest where the accommodation is most limited or unsuitable. Again, one will concede without going into great research that developing from that the crime rate generally is higher in the cities than in rural areas. Part of that stems from the lack of space, lack of privacy, and lack of beauty which surrounds many of the ugly and inadequate housing areas througout the cities, not just in Ireland but even more so in the cities of the world. We have a little of this problem in Dublin and possibly also in the other cities, and I am sure that the police authorities could reassure the Minister that most of the crime problems here come from areas which are absolutely inadequately provided with proper houses. This does not belong to any particular class or income group. More and more it is a peculiarity rather of inadequate housing. To this extent we are making a major effort to eradicate what is now a terrible sore throughout the world and is developing somewhat in the urban areas of our own country.

I hope that as a result of this Bill the people and the housing authorities particularly will be encouraged to introduce housing schemes that have an element of beauty and that will demand certain pride from those who occupy the houses in the scheme and give them an opportunity of developing as proud citizens in a nation that is concerned with its housing.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I should like, with the other speakers, to welcome this long-awaited housing Bill. Needless to say, in many ways I looked forward to something possibly more revolutionary and more spectacular than we have got in this Bill, but I would like to welcome the very many good sections it contains. The Minister in his speech introducing the Bill to the House today said:

In conclusion, I would like to say that though this Bill will simplify and modernise the housing law, I am only too well aware that the enactment of legislation alone cannot solve our housing difficulties. It is a step, but only a step, in that direction. A great deal of effort and very substantial public and private investment will be required in addition. The Government's awareness of this need is illustrated by the size of their contribution towards housing expenditure. In 1965-66 the Government and local authorities between them will be providing over £20 million in capital and over £9 million in current expenditure on both private and local authority housing. The number of houses built will be at least 11,000—an increase of about 17 per cent on the number built in 1964-65.

It would appear from that statement that even the Minister was expressing in a way perhaps his own disappointment with the Bill, but the biggest disappointment I find in the Bill in spite of the many good things contained in it—and I think that every member of a local authority irrespective of what side of the House he may be on will agree with me—is that more control has not been taken away from the Department of Local Government and given to the local authorities in this Bill. There is the old control by the department all the time. That control, to my mind, has been a very costly experience, due to the delays and the frustrations occasioned by the department in preventing housing schemes from getting off the ground where local authorities were more than willing to get on with the job of providing more houses.

As I said, I welcome the many good sections in the Bill. I want particularly to pay tribute to the Minister for the section which at long last regularises the subdivision of vested labourers' cottage plots. The Minister knows that I, and many others, have been pressing him for a number of years for legislation in connection with this problem. It was a very big problem in my own county where we have a total of 5,278 cottages. Many of those cottages were built on one acre plots and very many of those cottages were vested. When they were vested, loans could not be obtained when the cottage garden was subdivided because a second mortgage could not be obtained. I am grateful for what the Minister has done in this connection. The position is being regularised and, to my mind, speaking for my own county, this makes a big number of sites available to people who need houses and who are in a position to avail of SDA loans and grants.

I also welcome the section which legalises the increased grants. The Minister and the local authorities have been paying these increased grants in anticipation of the passing of this Bill. That proves that the Minister was sincere in his attempt to do what he could to help in providing more houses and in easing that position. I could go on talking about the many good sections in the Bill in which I am particularly interested, and which I am glad to see included in the Bill, but as this can be said to be a Committee Stage Bill, I can deal with them more fully on Committee Stage.

What I am perturbed about is the control which the Department will have even after this legislation is passed. As I said, it has been a very frustrating experience, and reading the Dáil debates and seeing the questions that were asked, one sees that the Minister has got very cross with people seeking information. That does not refer to the Opposition only. He got cross with some of his own Deputies who were asking pertinent questions in connection with the delays and holdups in the Department. He almost put the blame back on the local authorities. That surprised me, because the Minister, like many of us, served his apprenticeship on a local authority and should be familiar with the problems of members of local authorities.

I am sure that when the Minister was getting cross with the individuals who were asking questions, if we only knew what was in his mind, it was that he was more cross with the officials in his Department who were not expediting the work they were being asked to do. The proof of my argument is that if a local authority acquired a site to start a housing scheme in 1960 it eventually became a housing scheme in 1965. So, it takes approximately four to five years from the time the land is acquired for a local authority to have the houses erected and the tenants put into them. To my mind, that is due to the un-businesslike way in which the Department have been handling the problems sent up to them by the officials of the local authorities.

I was not a member of the local authority in County Meath in 1934. I became a member of Meath County Council in 1942. The county council which was elected in Meath in 1934 stayed in office for eight years for one reason or another—due to the general elections, I do not know if the war had anything to do with it. At any rate, more houses were built in County Meath from 1934 until the emergency of 1940 when building more or less ceased——

Mr. Lenehan

Under Fianna Fáil, of course.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I am not disputing that. The Senator will get an opportunity to make his speech. I have already given credit to Fianna Fáil for what they did. It was a Fianna Fáil council and I am not taking anything from it. In 1942 a new county council were elected and when they were about to hold their first annual meeting the county manager accompanied them to the meeting. I am greatly afraid that we can trace this slowing up and these delays in getting on with a bigger and better effort to provide more houses, to the coming into operation of the County Management Act. When bureaucracy came in the door commonsense went out the window. I just want to point out that there was no county manager from 1934 to 1942, and that is why a much better and a much quicker job was done. More houses were built in that period than in any other period in my county.

I do not see much hope, as a result of this departmental control, for those who depend on the local authorities to provide houses for them. It is true that excellent work has been done so far as the private sector is concerned, with loans and grants, but when people avail of loans and grants to solve their housing problem they are usually people who have a bit of capital which gives them an opportunity to solve their own problem. I am wondering is there anything we can do, even at this stage, in this Housing Bill to help other people through the SDA loans and grants who have not got sufficient capital to enable them to provide their own houses, because, after all, if a person who can get assistance to provide his own house is willing to provide his own house and is not dependent on a local authority, I think he should get all the encouragement possible. We in County Meath have tried and are trying to do something about that. We introduced four per cent loans in Meath—and the Minister can refer to this when he is replying—and the difference between the four per cent and the 6¾ per cent or seven per cent, or whatever it was, was paid out of the rates. In that way we were able to help a number of people who would qualify for a local authority house if the county council were in a position to build houses. We have served quite a number of people and we hope to be able to continue with that.

I mention that because I hope that the Minister may be able to devise some means whereby more people can be brought within the scope of the Small Dwellings Act loans and grants. Nobody can accuse the Minister of not doing his best to provide money while money was available. I have never come across a case where I found any difficulty, when people were looking for grants from the Department, and when they needed them, that the Department did not bend over backwards to help people help themselves. I would ask the Minister to see if more people could be brought within the scope of the Small Dwellings Act.

There is one problem in regard to this. You may have people earning a good week's wages. There might be a couple in that family and if they had £300 or £400 available to get the contractor to quote they were half way to building their own house. The difficulty is that unless the person has £300 or £400 to pay to the contractors when the house is up to the wallplate the contractor will not be interested in taking the contract. As a result, those people do not get houses. I throw that suggestion out to the Minister because I believe there are many people who are prepared to help themselves if we could go a little further in providing the initial money to enable them to build their own houses.

So much for the people who can help themselves but there is a big number of people, unfortunately, who are not in a position, for one reason or another, to avail of the Small Dwellings Act. Therefore, they must wait until the local authority can provide a house in the way in which we do in the building of isolated cottages or schemes in towns and villages.

I suppose this problem is greatest within a 30 or 40 mile radius of this city. In my own county, at the present time, I have here a list—anybody who wants to is welcome to inspect it—for two vacant cottages in the Ratoath area, which is approximately 12 miles from Dublin. They are two three-roomed cottages. They were built approximately 70 years ago and they are very old type cottages. Senator Fitzsimons, myself and others have a very vital interest in seeing how we can put 37 applicants on the list which I have into those two cottages. That is the position in a county where we have built 5,278 labourers' cottages. The Minister cannot accuse the Meath County Council of falling down on their job as far as the building of houses in the past was concerned.

I mention the problem of dividing 37 into two which very definitely will not go to illustrate again the problem of housing in the rural areas. At one time it appeared as if what we call in the country the isolated labourers' cottages were finished, that no more cottages would be built haphazardly throughout the country as they had been built in the earlier days and that they were now to be built where they could be serviced with water and sewerage facilities, which is a very desirable thing. As many Senators, who are country people like myself, well realise it is not everybody who likes to go into the town no matter what the inducement. They are country folk and they like to stay in the countryside.

The Minister has sanctioned the erection of a number of those isolated cottages in Meath. Senator Rooney mentioned unserviced cottages and suggested that because unserviced cottages could not be built no cottages would be built. I think that is wrong because the Minister has given the green light to us in Meath and we will be building approximately 100 to 120 of those serviced cottages. The problem here again is the old one of LSD. The money does not seem to be available. I will not criticise the Minister for that because nobody, I am sure, feels as badly as the Minister does about this and, knowing the Minister, I believe he would make all the money in the State available for housing if the money was there. Some of those houses have already been advertised and tenders accepted. We have asked the Department for money from the Local Loans Fund so that we could get on with those houses. Unfortunately, it has not been forthcoming.

When I mention those serviced cottages there is another matter I would also like to refer to. Other Senators may have different views on this but this is something I feel strongly about and more especially as we would all like to see grants increased. It often makes you wonder where does the grant go? I say this because we advertised those cottages in fours, sixes or eights. They are serviced houses. Water, septic tanks and sewerage facilities, and all the rest of it, have to be provided. They are four-roomed houses, if you like, with scullery. We have got tenders for those houses at between £1,600 and £1,700. Anybody here will know that the type of house built under SDA Acts with loans and grants will cost £2,100 to £2,200. This makes you wonder how is it the county council or the local authority can get those tenders at such a modest figure in view of the fact that the individual who tries to make a deal with a contractor has to pay £500 or £600 more. If you like, that represents the grant.

I raised this matter at my own local authority meeting when those figures were read out. It appears to me as if the grants are not going into the pockets of those they were intended for but into the pockets of the building contractors. That is something we should have a look at. Those are the figures and I am sure the Minister and his officials have those figures which were given at the Meath County Council meeting.

As I say, this is purely a Committee Stage Bill and I hope, with the Minister's indulgence, to put down a few amendments. I suppose I will have to be different but, as I said, the Minister's intentions in this Bill are the best. I do not doubt that for one moment. Again, I am afraid it is not the blueprint that will solve our housing problems over the next couple of years. There is a similarity between this and other acts of Departmental control, and whether you put the door here or the window there; whether the window should be 2' 6" or 2' 9", and when you have to be writing up and down. I would ask the Department, for God's sake, to have more faith in the local authority engineers and officials. They are on the spot, they are realistic and they do a good job. I do not think it is right that engineers in the Custom House, in Navan, Naas, Dublin or anywhere else, should differ and write back and forth to one another while prices are rising, the costs of the houses going up and unfortunate people waiting for these houses condemned to live in either overcrowded or uninhabitable homes.

As one who has spent many years on a local authority—a county council —and knowing all the problems, although perhaps not as well as the Minister who has the problems of the 26 Counties on his shoulders, I feel very strongly about housing. It is the greatest social evil of the day. While I agree that a lot of progress has been made, it is really brought home to us in the last page of the Minister's statement here today that:

Between 1946 and 1961 we built some 125,000 houses but in that period our total housing stock grew by only 14,000 units.

That surely brings home to us all the legacy we were left with when we gained control of our own affairs over 40 years ago. To say that 111,000 of those houses were replacing uninhabitable houses that our unfortunate people were condemned to live in means that we have only, in those 15 years, improved the housing position by 14,000 units. It does not appear as if there is much hope for young people who want to get married and stay in this country when we find there are still, according to the Minister's figures, 50,000 unfit houses in the country which will have to be replaced. It surely brings home to all of us the big problem we are faced with in solving, or helping to solve, the housing problems for those who need new houses to replace the unfit 50,000 the Minister has mentioned.

Somebody did say in the Dáil it was a good sign to see the demand on the part of young people for houses. I agree with that and I hope it will always remain, so that we will have people seeking houses, staying in their own country and being able to stay in their own country. That is what we all want and what we hope to see. Perhaps that is why the problem is so pressing within a radius of 40 or 50 miles from Dublin or any other area where you have development. If young people have good jobs, can get married and get houses they will stay here. But, as Senator O'Kennedy said, if they have to live with their in-laws they will be happy for the first month or two but the novelty will wear off and the next thing they do is leave the country, which is something we do not want to see.

As I have said, I welcome the Bill and I hope that more money will be available in the very near future and that we will make a bigger, better and more determined drive to build more houses, realising that in housing our people and putting them into better homes, we may be making a very big saving in the money we are spending on the health services.

Mr. Lenehan

At the outset, I wish to congratulate the Minister on introducing this Bill. In my area 98 per cent of the families have good houses. Some years ago we set out to give these people supplementary grants from local authority funds and, as a result, approximately 98 per cent of our people are now well housed. These people went out of their way to erect those houses because there was very little trouble involved beyond thinking up ways and means of providing the money. The money we promised was provided. The people built the houses and they are there to see. We now find ourselves in the rather unhappy position that the two per cent in this area who have not good houses are causing us 40 times more trouble than all the people we housed before. I suppose the same problem obtains throughout the rest of the country as well. We are now in the unhappy position that we have to make the best case we possibly can for people who themselves have fallen down. I do not think for a moment that there is any serious difference between this particular two per cent—and two per cent it is where I live—and the other 98 per cent. The fact remains that this two per cent of the population causes far more trouble today than the 98 per cent who are housed. It is true and I am sure there are other people here who must agree with me on that.

I have been a long time a member of a local authority and there is nobody more interested than I in trying to provide houses as fast as it can possibly be done. But I must be honest about it and say that if some of those people made a real effort, as far as my area is concerned anyway, the housing problem would certainly be reduced to the minimum. That is not bad going in an area such as mine. It is unfortunate that the housing programme should be turned into a political football to be kicked around among the Parties. I am not so stupid as not to remember that back in 1956, in a very small area in Dublin alone, some 600 houses were vacant. I am sure some of the people on the far side, unless their memories have failed them, will also remember. Those people left the country simply because they had either to get out or starve. Most of them departed overnight, leaving the houses to Dublin Corporation and for at least one or two years afterwards those houses were still vacant and Dublin Corporation had to try to get tenants for them. It was probably four or five years before they succeeded in filling those houses. I do not think anybody on the far side of the House can deny that.

As it so happened, things began to improve afterwards. I am not claiming any thanks one way or the other for the fact that matters did improve. But improve they did and people started coming back; they started coming back so fast and, of course, people here got married so fast, got so well off so fast, that extra houses were needed. It is a well-known fact, particularly in an urban area, that it takes quite a long time from the date on which it is decided that houses will be built to reach the stage when people can occupy those houses. There is a considerable space in between: it may be up to five years. We are still up against that problem even today. We may as well be honest and fair about it.

People can come in here and fling any stones they want to fling, and even rotten eggs if they wish to do so. The pure and simple fact remains that, so far as Dublin is concerned, the people on Dublin Corporation are obviously shirking their responsibilities to such an extent that the Government have had to step in and take fellows up from my part of the country to build these hundreds of houses out at Ballymun. There is no question about it. If you go up to Ballymun, you will find people from my county working there and building the houses. They will build them and thus ensure that the people of Dublin will have their houses. The Government have had to step in.

I shall not throw any stones at Dublin Corporation because we have the same position in my own county. In the past ten or 15 years, I doubt if, in my county, our council—I am a member of it and I must accept responsibility—have built more than four houses. That is a disgrace and it is the position, despite the fact that I, and other councillors like me, have made representations at every level. It has nothing to do with the Government. The Government are not in any way responsible for it. We are responsible.

Mr. Browne

Good man.

Mr. Lenehan

We have built four houses in County Mayo in ten years.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

You will not be elected the next time.

Mr. Lenehan

I have the safest seat in Ireland. Other councillors and other members of local authorities come in here and throw stones at the Government. Why do they not go back home and first put their own houses in order before coming into this House and throwing stones at the Government? That is something I cannot understand. If they would put their own houses in order I think things would be much different.

Unfortunately, it is possible that many of our officials are so backward in coming forward that they just cannot see what is required. I wonder if it occurs to them for one moment that, in the long run, these houses cost nobody anything: they will be paid for by way of loan. I probably deal with as many houses as anybody in Ireland. I have had no trouble in my area with regard to housing grants and housing loans.

If the council in County Mayo have had any problems in regard to these matters, I believe it is purely and simply that the officials have not played their part in making an honest effort to co-operate with the councillors to provide the houses which in many cases are urgently required. While I say that about two per cent of the people where I live require houses, I am quite satisfied that in other areas of the county the percentage would be much higher. That is not my fault. I have looked after my people reasonably well and I intend to continue along those lines.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

Were the four houses built in your area?

Mr. Lenehan

Yes, in my electoral area. If members of local authorities were quite honest and if, instead of attacking the Government and the Minister for Local Government and somebody else, they went back and looked into their own failures, I am satisfied that they would find that our lack of housing, especially in the rural areas, has nothing at all to do with the Government. I think it is their own fault.

It is very unfortunate that, in many cases, we have fallen down on our job in this regard. I shall not blame the ordinary local authority members. I think a great many of their officials are lax in doing their duty and I make no apology for saying so and I do not care what newspapers publish it. The fact is that we come into this House and the cheap and the handiest way for us and the surest way of getting the most publicity down the country is to attack the Government but there is not a word of truth in it. Down in County Mayo, we have never asked the Government for anything that we did not get. If any official in Mayo gets up and says that that is not so, I can say that he is a liar.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

They were not very grateful to the Government.

Mr. Lenehan

In Mayo?

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

Yes.

Mr. Lenehan

That is what you think.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I know it.

Mr. Lenehan

In every type of debate in this House we come up and blame the Government for this, that and the other but the fact is that it is we ourselves who are in the wrong. Is there even one case where it can specifically be stated down in the western territories of this country that a local authority, a county council, has sought financial aid from the Government for the building of houses and that aid has not been forthcoming? It certainly has not happened in my county, anyway, and I have been a very long time a member of the council there and, in making that statement, I am saying what is completely and entirely true. Somebody gets up here and attacks somebody else for not building enough houses in the vicinity of Dublin Airport. I wonder if the person who got up here and attacked the Government for not having sufficient houses around Dublin Airport realises that were it not for the fact that the present Government intervened and established Dublin Airport, there would be no trouble now about the building of houses in that vicinity because there would be no Dublin Airport and there would be no people employed there who would require houses adjacent to their work. Why can people not have a bit of commonsense when they get up here to speak?

Mr. McDonald

Why not give a lead yourself?

Mr. Lenehan

We hear talk about Shannon Airport. Who the devil opened Shannon Airport but Fianna Fáil. Does anybody want to suggest to me that the people who opened it will close it? The people who come up here and give out that kind of nonsensical stuff may succeed in drawing attention to themselves at local level but certainly that type of stupid criticism will not cut any ice in my constituency. If it were not for Fianna Fáil policy, there would be no major industry in this country except possibly Guinness—and we should all be on top of our heads, anyway, and there would be no point in the world in——

A Senator

"Pint": that is right.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

If Senator Lenehan would stop opening and closing airports——

Mr. Lenehan

The Leas-Chathaoirleach was not here at the time. If he had been, I am sure he would have called for order in relation to the talk about Dublin Airport. However, he was not here.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

For the record, I was present in the House.

Mr. Lenehan

This problem of houses is one which will go on to the end of time. In the case of existing houses the question of decadence arises. Some of them are going to fall down. People marry and have families and this makes necessary the provision of more houses. That is the situation in every country in the world. I do not know if any Senators on the other side of the House have ever gone across to Great Britain and seen the position there. If they did, they would not throw half as many stones or bricks as they are throwing here. How many on the other side have ever gone to Coventry, Birmingham, or to London or Manchester, and taken a look at what our people have to put up with there? No matter how badly off they are in this country, they are better off than they are there. Nobody gets up in this House and says one word about the conditions in which our people have to live there, because it is of no value in trying to overthrow an Irish Government and of course no British Government will take any notice of what they say. The unfortunate thing is that they do not say it anyway. The truth is bitter, and I, coming from an area from which a great many of our people go to earn their livelihoods in a foreign country, be it America, England, New Zealand, Canada or elsewhere, have to think of those people when they leave us just as much as when they are here. Other people come in here trying to make all the political propaganda they possibly can out of anything they can lay their hands or their tongues on, knowing that it will be published in certain papers, as anything will be, so long as it is anti-Government. The plain and simple fact remains that 90 per cent of it is completely and entirely untrue. If we went back to 1932 or 1933 when the Fianna Fáil Party first took over it would be very interesting to know how many good houses there were in the country and who had these good houses—the big shots, Lord so and so, Lady this and Lady that.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

There is none of them living in a labourer's cottage today, either.

Mr. Lenehan

I knew Ministers who were living in them. The fact remains that in 1933 outside of that class, the big shot element, there were very few good houses. Let us be honest and fair about it; let us give credit where credit is due. I would like any Member of this House to go down the country and tell the people the Party who between 1933 and the present day, built any houses, and when and where, other than a Government sponsored by Fianna Fáil.

I do not want to be political about this. I am sorry the Minister has gone, but Senators on the other side started it.

This Bill has been criticised, but criticism is very simple. Nobody ever offers any constructive criticism. Everybody says what is wrong but nobody will come in and say what is right. Several people have said: "This is wrong; that is wrong; and the other thing is wrong." But none has said what he will replace it with. What is the alternative? There were not enough houses being built, the money was not big enough, this was wrong, that and the other were wrong, but not one member of any Party who criticissed this Bill said: "That is wrong, but this is what you should do." These are like the people who criticise the Budget and other proposals—they never offer any alternative. People who come in and are destructively critical of a Bill such as this should offer some alternative. If they cannot do so, they should keep their mouths closed or keep out of the way.

I know that there probably are flaws in this Bill, as there are in every Bill, but this is not the last Housing Bill that will be brought into the House, or the second last. I suggest it would be much more valuable if some of the destructively critical people had offered constructive suggestions for improving it. There may not be much sense in many of the things they say, but on the other hand, there is quite a lot of sense in some other things they put forward. As a member of the local authority for a long time, I can see flaws in the Bill but I know that Bills like this must be put into practical operation before we can know where they fall down or where changes are necessary.

Section 23 relates to essential repairs. I am sorry the Minister is not here at the moment but I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary will convey my remarks to him. Under this section we may be dealing with an old man and woman in a house which is falling down. In my county we came to an arrangement whereby in such cases we would put a roof over their heads. We had the idea that if we had to build a new house, we could get it up fairly fast to that stage. I know the Minister will agree with me, but some of his officials have an extraordinary way of interpreting some of the regulations. We have reached the point where if we do not knock down the old houses and do something with them, that will be the end. If we steer clear of the old houses and build new houses, even though it will cost less to build new houses than to repair old houses, the officials of the Department will probably say we cannot get a grant under this section. That is absurd.

I discussed this matter of the grants with the Minister and his attitude is very fair. In my county we have a high standard. We will not allow someone to throw lumps of brick and mortar together.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I shall not say anything. It is easy to supervise four houses in ten years.

Mr. Lenehan

We are reaching the point at which it is cheaper to put up a small new house than to repair a big old house. We want to come under this section of the Bill. Otherwise, it will cost £600. I know there is a way out under another section. We can get away with it and we have the ingenuity to do it. We should like to be in a position that where there is an old house that is not worth repairing, we can provide a small new house at low cost.

I must commend my friend from Mayo, the Minister for Lands, for bringing in the section dealing with dower houses. I do not know how many people will remove from their habitats. I doubt if many will because down in Mayo, just like anywhere else, the devil would not shift them. Once they get married, they do not want to see anyone else getting married at all. This may have some effect. It is certainly worth trying, but I am afraid the grant is too small—with £175, and another £175 for sewerage and water. I should not like to tell my father-in-law or my mother-in-law to get into a house built at that price today. I must be quite honest about this. I am afraid they would not go out. The grant is too low. The St. Vincent de Paul crowd get £600. You cannot expect people to buzz off at that price. It does not make much sense to me.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I hope the Parliamentary Secretary is nothing the criticism from that side.

Mr. Lenehan

They would go at that price, in my county, but I do not know about Meath. That grant should be increased. It is utterly impossible to produce any reasonable type of dwelling with water and sewerage for any man or woman today at a maximum price of £350. I do not think it would rob anyone to increase this grant because there would be so very few looking for it that it will not have much effect anyway. The fact remains that our local authorities are very backward in coming forward to do anything. They will spend everyone's money as long as they are not asked to work themselves.

One matter which I consider of great importance is the provision of sites. I see no reason why local authorities should not go out of their way to provide houses. It is amazing the number of people who are prepared to erect their own houses, if they can get a site, but it is difficult, even in small rural towns, to get a housing site. When we consider the tremendous number of derelict sites we have in these towns, and that very few local authorities take any action, good, bad or indifferent, to deal with these derelict sites, we must realise immediately what the problem is.

These derelict sites are eyesores all over the country. Some of our small towns for shame's sake could not enter a tidy towns competition. They could enter an untidy towns competition, but not a tidy towns competition. For the past three or four years, the local authorities had the power to deal with these sites but they did not take any action. They put a token sum of £100 or £200 in the estimates. In a county like Mayo where there is a big dividing line between north and south, and where the northerns are progressive and the southerns not so progressive, we find ourselves in grave difficulty. We have always been agitating for the taking over of these derelict sites, but unfortunately the home of authority is in Castlebar, and there you are. That is the problem. The people in Castlebar will not agree with us. I do not know whether it is a question of vested interest. Unfortunately when Senator Flanagan was there, he did not have these powers. If he had, I am sure he would have helped us out.

Now we find ourselves in the unhappy position that not one single derelict site has been taken over in Mayo, and I am sure other counties are in the same position. These sites are there for the taking; they should be taken over and made available for new houses. That would solve a great many of our problems. I am sure there is no Senator here who does not know that what I am saying is completely true. If those sites were taken over, it would change the face of these rural towns, and in a matter of two or three years, make a big difference to them. There are several such sites in the town from which I come. I have tried by every method to solve the problem but up to now I have failed. I hope the Minister will go out of his way to help us in dealing with it.

I want to congratulate the Minister on section 99 of this Bill. The section gives power to tenants of local authority houses to purchase their houses outright. It is extraordinary the position in which many people find themselves because of the fact that under the 1936 Act, they could not buy out their houses. If they wanted to buy out the houses, they could not get a second mortgage on them, which placed them in a very unhappy position. If they wanted to raise a loan, they just could not get it. The Minister was asked to bring in this section to get over this difficulty and I want, very particularly, to congratulate him on doing so because it means that many of those people will be able to buy out their houses. They are within the available security for loans. The houses will be much more valuable than they are at the moment.

Many people probably do not appreciate this situation because they have never come up against it. You find county council tenants paying, say, 1/- a week as rent, and owing £20, perhaps, to the local authority. If they wanted to pay that £20, up to now, they had to pay it at a 1/- a week. They could not pay it otherwise. The value of this section is shown in that they can now liquidate the £20 and can then use the house as security for a loan.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

At what cost?

Mr. Lenehan

The cost would not create any problem.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I am afraid it may. You could not liquidate it by paying £20.

Mr. Lenehan

There would not be any problem. I have gone into it.

Mr. J. Fitzgerald

I hope not. I will go to the Senator if I am stuck.

Mr. Lenehan

It was an extraordinary position. Under the 1936 Act, they could not buy out their houses. The house could be vested and if the man or woman who vested the house in his or her name decided to sell it to somebody else, the person buying could not raise the money, even though he bought it. That problem disappears now. That is a tremendous advantage, as Senators will agree. The monetary side of it makes no difference. I want to congratulate the Minister on that particular point alone. As a matter of fact, if he never did any other thing in bringing in this Bill except to put that particular provision into it, he has done a tremendous amount of good. I know many people who found themselves in considerable difficulty over this matter. They had to go along to insurance companies and various other people to try to raise the money otherwise. Now section 99 or section 100—I am not sure which section it is —will make a tremendous difference to very many people.

I want to congratulate the Minister on this Bill because taking the Bill, by and large, no matter what criticism one has of it, it is a very important step in the right direction. As I said earlier, I am sure it is not the last or the second last Housing Bill which will be brought into this House or the Lower House. It is only as a result of our mistakes that we learn. I honestly believe this Bill, taking it as a whole, and being fair towards the Minister who introduced it, and towards the Government, is a step in the right direction and I certainly congratulate the Minister on it.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

I notice from the First Schedule to this Bill that this is the eighth Housing Bill we have had since 1953. On page 79 we find we had the Housing (Amendment) Act, 1954, the Housing (Amendment) Act, 1956, the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act, 1957, the Housing (Amendment) Act, 1958, the Housing (Amendment) Act, 1960, the Housing (Loans and Grants) Act, 1962 and the Labourers Act, 1965. In every one of those cases the extent of repeal is total. For each of these, the whole Act is gone. When I hear, as I remember hearing on an earlier Bill, that this is a motion to consolidate all previous enactments, I cannot help wondering how long this particular Bill will last. I wish it longer life than some of its consolidating predecessors.

The basic point is considered in the White Paper on pages 24 and 25, that is the extent of the total present need, and the White Paper indicates that they think the amount of building required, the number of dwellings, will be something like from 12,000 to 13,000 a year. They wisely say this estimate may well prove too low for various reasons. We notice on the opposite page, page 25, that in fact, the 1948 Estimate of 100,000 dwellings required turned out to have been an under-estimate by some 37 per cent. We must recognise, therefore, in aiming at 12,000 to 13,000 new dwellings a year, that this may well be too few. In 1953 it proved possible to build 1,400 houses. I think that was the highest individual year. In the 1964Statistical Abstract it was indicated that in the previous year State-aided schemes had succeeded in building only 7,400 houses. It is recognised, therefore, that something considerably more is required than what has proved possible almost every year up to now.

I recognise, as others have said, that this Bill is more of a Committee Stage Bill, but I should like to make a few points in relation to what might come up on the Committee Stage with regard, for instance, to subsection (2) of section 56. I notice that the housing authority "may" in connection with, and so on, "if they think fit" maintain in good order and repair roads, shops, playgrounds, places of recreation, parks, allotments, open spaces, sites for places of worship, factories, schools, offices and other buildings or lands, etc., etc. I remember some of the earlier building schemes which were started in Dublin in Kimmage and Crumlin, with the best of good intentions, as regards some of those amenities. Maps were displayed in the City Architect's Office which showed large areas boldly marked "playground". If you went to Kimmage or Crumlin up to 15 years afterwards you found that those playgrounds had not even been levelled out. I would prefer it, therefore, to be mandatory on the local authority to supply all local amenities, recreational and otherwise, unless, by specific resolution, one or other of those amenities should be deemed unnecessary by the local authority. I am not satisfied that it is enough to say they "may...if they think fit". In Dublin in particular, we lack recreation facilities, playing grounds, swimming pools, to an extent which is quite alarming if we compare it not only with towns of a similar size in Britain but with towns of a much smaller size in Ireland which have supplied these things better than we in the capital city have managed to do.

I should like to support also what Senator O'Quigley said in relation to the lack of imagination in the design of houses. I should like to feel that local authorities would be encouraged actively to be concerned not so much, as is set out in page 26 of the White Paper, in employing "new building methods and techniques" but in experimenting also in new building design. If the emphasis is on method and technique, I think we are over-emphasising what they call in the next paragraph "the low cost prototype house". These are words which have an ominous meaning. We will get some "economical" blueprint for houses all over the country, and the chance for experiment, improvement and the use of good design will be lost. I am familiar with a town in France, the town of Amiens, which was the sixth most war—destroyed town during the last war—some 26 per cent of its houses were flattened—and they took the opportunity in their reconstruction during the post-war years to experiment, in six different areas of the town, in six different designs and building techniques. The point I am making is that we too in Ireland ought to take the opportunity presented by our housing requirements of trying out new techniques and designs which will bring into full play the skilled imagination of our architects, who reach a very high standard indeed given the chance. It is time we got away from the notion that a single blueprint will do for the whole country, both town and country. In other words, experiment not only in relation to low costs but also in relation to design, convenience and so on. I should not like to suggest that nothing has been done in this way because one can think of examples of very well designed schemes. I simply urge that more could be done and that we should become more conscious of the need for variety of design in the sort of houses we are putting up.

Senator Garret FitzGerald mentioned the fact that in Northern Ireland far greater emphasis is placed on public authority building than is done here. I notice in section 57 that:

A housing authority may provide sites for building purposes on land acquired or appropriated by them for purposes of this Act and in connection with the provision of such sites may construct roads and lay out open spaces on the land and provide such other services and carry out such other works as may be necessary for or incidental to the development of the land for building purposes, including works or services necessary for or incidental to the development of the land for places of worship, factories, schools, shops, offices, playgrounds, places of recreation, parks and open spaces.

I fear this type of section also. It seems that in this case the local authority will do all the hard work, lay down all the amenities and then hand over the profit-making portion of the enterprise, allowing the profits to be creamed off by private interests; incidentally, adding to the ultimate cost to the tenant. We should be more confident in the capacity of local authorities as apparently they are in the North. But we have this idea that we must hand over sites to private interests, once the local authorities have done all the hard work in this connection.

Section 60 subsection (1) says:

It shall be the duty of a housing authority to make in accordance with this section within one year from the commencement hereof and thereafter from time to time as they shall think fit, a scheme determining the priorities to be accorded to categories of persons specified in the scheme in the letting of dwellings provided by the authority under this Act and of which they are the owner.

I should like to ask the Minister on this point whether this includes the duty of making public this scheme of priorities. I hope I am right in suggesting that this will, naturally, be so. If not I think the words "and publish" should go in before "a scheme". I notice too that the sort of things which must be taken into account in section 60 in relation to these priorities, at subsection (3) paragraph (d), includes:

the segregation of persons suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis.

In my opinion this derives from a very old-fashioned view. The old-fashioned view, unfortunately, which used to obtain in this city was that there were two things you must have to get a house and they were (a) a large family or (b) open and positive tuberculosis. Clearly that was a very bad scheme. It succeeded in spreading the tuberculosis to, very often, the children of the patient and neighbours. Subsequent to the Noel Browne era the positive tuberculosis patient is not and should not be at home while he remains positive. Therefore, when you say a housing authority should segregate persons suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis it is an entirely old-fashioned provision. If he is a positive patient he should not be at home, and if he is not positive but is a former patient who has recovered, then he should not have the stigma of segregation placed upon him and his family. I should like to see this paragraph dropped and I should like to see perhaps in its place some paragraph to the effect that there ought to be an endeavour to establish a harmonious and balanced population from the point of view of age groups. It is obviously bad to have a population composed entirely of a limited range of age groups. An attempt, in this way, to establish a harmonious balance could prove useful in deciding the priorities.

I notice in Part IV, section 63—the definition of "overcrowding"—says:

A house shall for the purposes of this Act be deemed to be overcrowded at any time when the number of persons ordinarily sleeping in the house and the number of rooms therein either—

(a) are such that any two of those persons, being persons of twelve years of age or more of opposite sexes and not being persons living together as husband and wife, must sleep in the same room, or

(b) are such that the free air space in any room used as a sleeping apartment, for any person is less than four hundred cubic feet (the height of the room, if it exceeds eight feet, being taken to be eight feet, for the purpose of calculating free air space),

and "overcrowding" shall be construed accordingly.

The point I want to make here is that this seems to me not to be sufficiently specific. It does not seem to say the number of bedrooms in the house. It seems to imply that it would be in order if some people were to sleep in the parlour, kitchen or bathroom. I think it should be made quite clear that "the number of rooms therein" refers to the number of bedrooms and not just to the number of rooms.

If we are tempted to be complacent about housing we ought really to have a look at the figures. I should like to ask the Minister if, in fact, he can give us even more recent figures than the latest Statistical Abstract, which gives the 1961 census figures. There we find the fact for instance that there has been an improvement; because in 1936, if we compare the number of rooms in the whole country to the number of persons, there were, on an average, 1.09 persons per room. By 1946 that had dropped to 0.1 per room and by 1961 to .90. This indicates a clear improvement but it still means that an enormous percentage of our population is still overcrowded. This is borne out by the 1961 figure also which refers to “percentages of persons in households which have more than two persons per room,” and in Dublin city the figure is 14 per cent. Fourteen per cent of the population of Dublin City is living with more than two persons per room. Cork can be proud of a better record on this, as indeed they can in housing generally. The figure for Cork is 8.7 per cent. It is a bit startling, indeed, horrifying to find that in County Kildare the percentage is 17 per cent, and that in Donegal 18.5 per cent of the people are living in households with more than two persons per room.

Again, if one has a look at the percentage of persons living in one or two room dwellings, this applies in Dublin to 11.1 per cent of the population; that is to say something like 69,000 of the people living in this city are living in one or two room dwellings. In Cork, the figure is 5.4 per cent and in Donegal, 13 per cent. Senator Lenehan has departed, but he seemed to be very proud of the figures for Mayo. I looked them up while he was speaking. When he was talking about his area, I think he was probably talking about some very small area surrounding Senator Lenehan in North Mayo. He said 98 per cent of the people there were well housed. According to the 1961 census, the total number of dwellings in the whole of County Mayo was 30,020. In relation to the amenities of these 30,020 dwellings, 8,445 had flush lavatories; 530 had chemical closets; 2,629 had dry closets and 18,416 had "no special sanitary facilities" at all. I do not consider a house, be it rural or urban, which has no what are called "special sanitary facilities" at all, not even a dry closet, not even a chemical closet, to be a house in which people are "well housed". I would question, therefore, Senator Lenehan's assertion that 98 per cent of the people are well housed.

I notice that the percentage of people in County Mayo in houses having more than two people per room is 14.6 which is almost identical with the Dublin figure. I wonder if Senator Lenehan is aware of this fact, or is it true only of South Mayo and not of North Mayo, of which he had the honour of attempting to represent. This figure of 14.6 per cent for Mayo which I have just mentioned is surpassed by only three other counties in the whole of the 26 counties. Consequently, I do not feel that his complacency is permissible in that particular field in relation to Mayo.

I pass to another point which seems to me open to question. I should like to hear the Minister's views on it. It comes under section 65, in relation to overcrowded houses. It says, in effect, that if the owner of a house is "causing or permitting" the house to be overcrowded the local authority may, if they think fit, serve on such owner a notice in writing requiring him "to desist". How would you require a landlord to desist from causing or permitting overcrowding in his house? Does it mean that he must evict a certain number? What do we expect him to do? I ask the Minister what action he expects arising out of this kind of legislation. I feel the action would not be very satisfactory, particularly when I notice subsection (5) of this same section 65 which provides:

(5) Where a house which would not otherwise be overcrowded becomes overcrowded by reason of the increase in the age or in the number of children of the person by whom the house is occupied, the owner of the house shall not be guilty of an offence under subsection (4) of this section.

In other words, if these conditions occur, this is to be deemed an exception to the rule that the landlord can be required to do something about it. In any event, he cannot do much about it short of eviction. I think the onus should rather be on the local authority than on the landlord in such cases.

I turn, then, to section 70 where I find a reference to the fact that the housing authority shall, in relation to houses let for rent etc., make bye-laws. Then there follows a host of purposes for which it may make bye-laws including the purpose of ensuring the execution of any repairs necessary to "maintain the structure" of the house and the purpose of ensuring the provision in the house of such closet accommodation, water supplies, and so on, as shall be "adequate".

I am aware, and have been aware for some time, that there is a bye-law of the Dublin Corporation, among others, that there must be a lavatory for every twelve persons in any house. This bye-law has been grossly broken for years in hundreds of Dublin tenements. It would be deemed revolutionary indeed if one were to ask the corporation to apply this bye-law. I put this question to the Minister: is it the intention not merely to frame the bye-laws but to have them implemented? There is no point in having bye-laws of this kind—as we have had, going away back to 1911, I think, in Dublin—which have been grossly flouted by landlord after landlord, without the corporation's taking the slightest action on such matters as the provision of sanitary accommodation, and so on.

I wonder how the phrase "any repairs necessary to maintain the structure of the house" might be interpreted. What does it mean where the house is held up mainly by the wallpaper? Would it mean fresh wallpaper? How, in all seriousness, would one interpret a phrase such as this and how would it be implemented?

Subsection (3) of this section 70 indicates that, if the owner of the house does not comply with the bye-laws, the local authority may go in and do the work itself and recoup itself later from the owner. Again, I hope that this will be implemented and will not just remain a pious hope.

I then come to the last point I wish to make in relation to the text of the Bill. Part V refers to the acquisition of land and goes into some detail. For instance, section 77 states that a housing authority may be authorised to acquire compulsorily land not immediately required for building purposes. That is, it can buy land ahead of needs. Good. We have failed, so far, in this country, however, to recognise—at any rate, for city building—that what should have been done long ago, and what should still be done, was quite simply to municipalise land. The value of the land depends upon the existence of the community and not upon the skill of the speculative builder or the speculative buyer of land. It depends upon the surrounding community. We should long since have municipalised all building land in the country. We should also consider the necessity for rating land values rather than rating house values. Our failure to do this has led to derelict site after derelict site throughout the country.

I want to refer to the question of finance. On pages 18 and 19 of the White Paper, there is reference to the average costs, the average rents, and so on. They all seem to be based upon loan charges at 6 per cent for 50 years. The point has been made by other Senators as to whether this six per cent is really necessary. Senator J. Fitzgerald made the point that his county council had decided to make a loan charge of four per cent and to make up the difference by a charge on the rates. I wonder whether we could not tackle this matter even more radically than that. If as private citizens we lend money to the Post Office Savings Bank we get the princely rate of 2½ per cent for it. It would be quite possible for the Government to pay three per cent on Post Office loans and yet to charge only four per cent interest to local authorities and to save, therefore, two-thirds of the present loan charges. Who now gets this big benefit? I presume, in the final analysis, it is the lending banks. On what is their credit based? Again, it is based on the community. Can we not intervene in such a way as to see to it that the community gets a little more of the benefit which derives from the credit-worthiness of the community itself? In other words, are the loan charges at 6 per cent not far too high?

It is obvious that in the overall picture we have a long way to go in relation to housing conditions. We find in the 1961 Census that, for the whole country, out of 676,402 dwellings, only 44 per cent had piped water in the house, publicly supplied, and another seven per cent had privately supplied piped water. We must recognise that the standard of housing with which we have heretofore been content and of which sometimes we seem inordinately proud is not high enough. I notice that if we look at the figures in the Statistical Abstract, we recognise that about half the houses in the whole Republic, that is to say, 338,032 out of 676,402 are completely without public piped water supply. How will the children in those houses get the great benefits of publicly fluoridated water? This point has been made before in this House by me and others, and it is a vital factor in the social amenities we deem essential in our housing. If we are convinced that fluoridation is valuable in the protection of teeth, we have to recognise that the medium through which it is to be obtained——

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

I do not think the Senator should attempt to convince anybody about that on this Bill.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

I should like to finish this in a moment. The medium through which it is to be brought into the house is a public piped water supply. If in fact we are content to leave half the houses in the country without such a supply, then in the implementation of our own legislation we are inadequately supplying the needs of half the country. I do not want to argue about the possible benefits of fluoridation, but if half the children have to get fluoridated water elsewhere, they will probably have to go quite a long way. Obviously the answer should be to supply the treatment in tablets distributed, but this also has apparently met with insuperable difficulties.

I also think that we should not be satisfied when we notice that still in 1961, 35 per cent of the dwellings in the country, the actual figure being 237,277, are without any sanitary facilities whatever. The percentage used to be 48 in 1946, so there has been progress, but let us not be satisfied with the progress to date— 35 per cent is still far too high. I feel that a mark of our desire for real progress in this field to meet our needs would be to set up a Ministry for Housing, and to create a Minister who would deal with the whole question, including land development, finance, design, the provision of amenities and so on, within the scope of a flexible overall plan based upon an imaginative and varied series of local experiments, and which would preclude the necessity for the introduction within a year or two of another Housing Bill at the end of which we would find that the portion of this Housing Bill, 1965 being then repealed would be the whole Act.

Miss Davidson

This Housing Bill which consolidates, with amendments, the Labourers Acts from 1883 and the Housing of the Working Classes Acts from 1890 is, indeed, a very welcome measure. A pleasing feature of the Bill is that it provides that the members of housing authorities may now prepare and adopt building programmes and programmes for site provision. This reform is very long overdue. Indeed, the housing shortage in County Dublin could have been avoided with more clear-sighted advance planning as urged by progressive councillors, but the promotion of housing schemes has been a managerial function for over 20 years and this has resulted in the present very expensive difficulties. The Minister could, of course, have remedied that situation by making an order under section 16 of the County Management Act, 1940 to transfer the housing executive function to the members of the council.

It has been the practice, especially since the passing of the Housing Act, 1958, for managers to restrict the housing programmes so that only persons living in unfit private houses were given local authority houses. It is known that managers ignored the growing demand for houses from the lower income groups and also from the newly weds. The only qualification recognised by managers was residence in an unfit private house apparently because the maximum subsidy would be paid to the local authority in such cases. The subsidy system, designed to encourage the replacement of unfit houses, was used by managers to restrict the building of new houses to the number of unfit houses.

Reference to the Official Report of 24th October 1963 at column 269 will show that the Dublin County Manager represented the "housing need" as 429 as at 1st July, 1963, although there were 331 sub-tenants in overcrowded conditions not included in the manager's definition of "need". At today's date, Dublin County Council would require £1,500,000 to accommodate applicants for housing loans— there are over 640 applicants.

Section 39 of the Bill continues the provision for housing loans. Thousands of working class persons who should have been housed by the local authority were forced to acquire private houses which proved to be beyond their means at the expiry of the "reduced" valuation period. Many workers have had to take a second job in order to pay the outgoings on housing loans. It may be difficult at times for some people to grasp the reason for higher pay claims. One of the principal reasons is the high cost of housing. Working class people have had to find ways and means of paying £1,000 to £1,500 more for houses because of the restricted housing programme of the housing authority.

In 1964 over 10,000 houses were erected in Northern Ireland and of this number seven-tenths were provided by the public authorities. In the same year over 7,000 houses were erected in the Republic and only two-sevenths were provided by the public authorities. It is little wonder that housing costs have been inflated. Most working class people want a good utility house but the private builders insist on providing what they describe as the "superior" house. As Senator Jack Fitzgerald mentioned, at present the local authorities are accepting tenders for houses at £2,200 or less while the private builders charge £3,500 to £4,000.

Improved land acquisition powers are included in the present Housing Bill, but it seems that the Minister will not accept the considered opinion of members of Dublin County Council who have had some experience of the vexatious land acquisition system which the Minister refuses to amend. This recommendation was adverted to in a Dáil question at column 526 of the Official Report for 1st February, 1966. The Minister has stated that the existing powers of local authorities are adequate. The Land Commission offered a 60-acre parcel of land within one mile of the centre of the town of Rush to the Dublin County Council on 16th June, 1965, but the manager and senior officials of the County Council have prevented the council from acquiring this property.

It seems that the planning officer, who has been unable to prepare a draft plan for the town of Rush, has decided that the conditions prescribed by the Minister in page 3 of Appendix A of his circular letter of 24th May, 1965, prohibit the purchase of the property, on the ground that threequarters of a mile is "remote" from schools and churches. Even in the built-up areas, it is not always possible to locate schools within a mile of most of the pupils. The Minister is aware that land within the town of Rush cannot be secured below £2,000 an acre and that the manager of the county council prevented the local authority from purchasing the Kenure estate at rather less than £300 an acre. It was the council's intention to retain the "open" land near the town and sell the surplus land. The Land Commission acquired the property and allocated the open land to smallholders. If the council is prevented by the officials from acquiring the 60 acres of land at Kenure House, it will be necessary to attempt compulsory acquisition of land which is now used for intensive horticulture. Only 15 of the 30 acres of woodland allocated by the Land Commission to the council are suitable for housing purposes.

It should not be necessary to impress on the Minister that in areas like County Dublin the local housing authority should have the power to purchase an estate which comes on the market, especially when it adjoins a town, even if the area of the estate is twice the land requirements of the local authority. By selling the surplus land, the local authority achieves four socially desirable objects: (1) land acquistion by agreement: (2) land at minimum cost; (3) land for future needs; and (4) disposal of surplus land, in small lots, to enable people of modest means to bid for a parcel. The Planning Act will not operate for years in County Dublin, due to lack of staff, and the Minister's proposals in section 77 of the Bill are not adequate for County Dublin conditions. The Kenure dispute has proved that the land acquisition powers in the Local Government Act, 1946, are not wide enough.

The Minister stated in the Dáil on 10th February, 1966, that Dublin County Council were endeavouring to acquire a further 60 sites in the Santry area to accommodate applicants who cannot be housed in the 26 house scheme in Santry. The Minister will recall that the local authority land at Santry Court was recently sold for about £260 an acre and that Dublin Corporation subsequently purchased the adjoining property for £1,400 an acre. It is to be hoped the Minister will not allow a repeat performance at Rush by the same "planners". Incidentally, the county council 26 house scheme at Santry is over a mile from church and schools, as the Minister can very easily verify. It would seem that the "remote" mile in Rush is not so remote at Santry, Balbriggan, Skerries or Malahide.

The Minister has a compulsory purchase order before him for confirmation regarding land acquisition in Malahide. The Malahide site is a mile from churches and schools, but it is not regarded by the same planner as being "remote". Another example of administration of the housing code under the managerial system occurred at Stillorgan, County Dublin, where Dublin County Council were obliged to purchase 3½ acres last November for about £41,000—or about £11,700 per acre—to accommodate 25 applicants. Owing to the credit squeeze, an area of 23 acres at Deansgrange cannot be acquired through the operation of the Planning Act due to inability to compensate the property owners—the minimum compensation would be about £80,000.

Provision is made in the Bill for grants and other assistance towards the provision of accommodation for old people. In many cases the provision of an extra room would enable an old person to remain at home with a married son or daughter. The Minister should know that the manager of the Dublin County Council has opposed the provision of an extra room, on the ground that the old people had contributed to overcrowding by inviting a married son or daughter to reside with them. I cannot think of a better way to provide suitable accommodation for the old folk than the erection of an additional room. Perhaps the Minister, in his reply, would explain if the maximum subsidy to be provided for the purposes of sub-paragraph (i) of paragraph (a) subsection (2) of section 44, would apply to the erection of an extra room for a parent, or other elderly person.

Section 98, which has been commended by Senator Jack Fitzgerald, continues the Labourers Act, 1965, which was debated in this House last autumn. This section, and the Act of 1965, enables a cottage plot to be subdivided. This amendment of the law should have been introduced years ago as it facilitates tenant purchasers in two ways. First, it enables a second cottage to be erected on a plot, especially where the plot is large or drainage is provided; and secondly, it enables an agricultural worker to subdivide a plot, redeem the annuity on the plot and raise a loan to erect a greenhouse by way of mortgage, thus making himself self-supporting if he should become unemployed. I am informed that this desirable development was delayed while the Department was drafting a circular letter to local authorities on the administration of the Act passed last year.

The Minister in the Dáil refused to accept an amendment to section 160 to require local authorities to put dwellings into "good structural repair and sanitary condition" before vesting. In other words, the Minister proposes to repeal the words "and sanitary condition" already in the Act of 1936. Surely this is a regrettable step backwards. Private houses have to be kept in good sanitary condition. I would urge the Minister to amend this section in line with the Act of 1936.

I am not at all happy about section 115 of the Bill in its present form as it is very much wider in its scope than section 88 of the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1890. The voting restriction there relates only to Parts I and II of that Act, applying in the main to slum clearance areas, and used mainly by urban authorities. The Bill before us extends the voting prohibition to operations of county councils which up to now were carried on under the Labourers Acts which, so far as I am aware, had no prohibiting clause. The limited provision is now to be extended and applied all over, and it would seem to be open to much abuse.

I will endeavour to illustrate my point. On the housing authority of a council, there could be nine members, six of whom are tenants of council houses, thus being "beneficially interested" and therefore denied voting rights in the fixing of rents. The remaining three members are not council tenants and appear to be regarded as not "beneficially interested". They could vote to raise the rents of the council houses. Now, if rents are raised, rates could be reduced and we could have a situation in which a substantial person—the local mill-owner, merchant or publican —by his vote could secure a personal reduction of from £26 to £100 and upwards in his yearly rates bill. Would such a person not be "beneficially interested" to the extent of his saving on the rates? Should he, therefore, be permitted to vote in such circumstances? The withholding of voting rights could, as I see it, give a very unfair advantage to one section of the community as against a weaker section.

I would like it to be much clearer as to what constitutes "beneficial interest" or "beneficially interested" and I would ask the Minister to give a clear indication as to what is covered by these terms. On this point, I should mention that a former British Minister of Housing and Local Government in 1956 found himself in a difficulty in this matter under section 76 of the Local Government Act 1933 and took steps to rectify the position. I quote from the Labour Party's Local Government Handbook, page 30:

In the last few years an increasing number of elected councillors are living in council houses. It cannot be denied that they have a financial interest in housing matters.

With this in mind Mr. G.R. Mitchison, M.P., on 28th February, 1956, put some questions to Mr. Duncan Sandys, M.P., then Minister for Housing and Local Government, and asked the Minister to review the position. The Minister would not agree to do this but he said:

In exercising their discretionary powers under section 76 of the Local Government Act, 1933, the policy normally followed by successive Ministers has been to allow councillors who are tenants of council houses to vote on questions affecting rents only where half or more of the members would otherwise be disqualified...

...in some cases the inability of even a small number of members to vote might result in the adoption of a policy to which the majority of the council were opposed. This would obviously be most undesirable. I have, therefore, decided to inform local authorities that where in their opinion this is necessary in order to avoid such a situation, I shall be prepared to consider sympathetically an application for the removal of the disability to vote, provided that the application is supported by a resolution of the council concerned.

I wonder would the Minister look at that paragraph again and consider taking steps to give himself power to act in the same manner under this Bill?

Debate adjourned.

The Seanad adjourned at 10.5 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 30th March, 1966.