If it is still there. At the rate, as they are closing the railways we might have to go by the Grand Canal. However, this entire matter was obviously a power struggle within the Cabinet. The Minister for Lands said Castlebar. We know of a politician who set his eye on a public office and put it into the newspapers. The then Taoiseach, Deputy de Valera, said: "There it is", and he had to appoint him to that office. There was a by-election as a result. That happened, and the Minister for Lands no doubt took a leaf out of that book which was well known to him.
I would have thought this would be done according to some plan, but we have this new form of Government action by bludgeoning and blundering —like amalgamating Trinity College with UCD and letting everybody else work out the details; like the new health scheme promised 18 months ago and not a sign of it; like the draining of the Shannon and not a sign of it; like the £1¼ million for Galway for university development, not a halfpenny of which will be provided for years to come. I would have thought this would be worked out in good Civil Service fashion—that somebody would have opened a file for Lands and another one for Education and that they would have planned step by step and decided when the Minister would have attended to cut the first sod of the new Department of Lands building in Castlebar and when the Taoiseach would be sent down to cut the first sod of the new Department of Education building, or perhaps they would have sent the President down to do it, in Athlone. All those things should have been planned. There has been a great deal of unnecessary disquiet and upset caused to a wide variety of the most devoted people by this decision. I know of one poll taken in one Department of one or two joint grades and out of 120 there was only one who volunteered to go West.
The truth of the matter is that a lifetime of saving and of endeavour has been put into people's homes here in the suburbs of Dublin, of those who are married with children. Children have been placed in schools here in Dublin. There is no guarantee that the Convent of Mercy in Castlebar will be able to accommodate anything like the number of children who are going to go down to that school or that subjects which those children are being taught here in Dublin schools, which their parents want them taught and which they are entitled to have them taught, will be taught in the Convent of Mercy or the De le Salle College in Castlebar.
Those are real problems and there is no use in saying that there will be teachers. There will be between 50 and 60 children who will be seriously affected by this lack of planning. It may be some comfort I suppose to the people who are affected to think that rather a lot of other Fianna Fáil plans and promises have been slow in implementation and still slower in bearing fruit. I would have thought that if they were going to transfer any Department, that if they were going to decentralise at all, that there are certain units in a variety of Departments which could be transferred to any town, such as Castlebar, Athlone or Waterford, or anywhere else you like, and that in any Department there would always be found enough volunteers or enough people who would not be upset by this decentralisation. I would have thought that in such a situation if you wanted to transfer 3,000 or 5,000 civil servants to the West it would have been possible in the various Departments to pick out certain self-contained units, such as a law branch, and that those could be hived off into various towns in the country with no dislocation to anybody in any particular Department.
When you single out a whole Department to transfer to another part of the country undoubtedly this creates insoluble problems as far as the civil servants are concerned. The same thing could have been achieved, as I say, if we had hived off self-contained units, which are in any Department, and this would have achieved exactly the same number of civil servants to transfer to the West. It would have been a very good thing to have a variety of Government offices with some contact with the people in the various towns. That, to my mind, would have been a far better way of approaching this.
When the Minister for Lands spoke in Castlebar during 1965 he referred to the transfer of the Forestry Division of his Department. I think that is what he had in mind and that that is probably what was in the Ryan Report. It certainly seems to me to be a more sensible and a more cautious way of doing this. It certainly would have been welcomed by the civil servants. It was a recommendation, which, if it was made, would have been followed.
The situation now is that married men and no less the single men and women have been upset. I want to point out that to my certain knowledge there are many people in the Civil Service of this country who have grown into spinsterhood and bachelorhood because they were looking after a dependent mother or father or the children of a married brother or sister or looking after a sick relative. They still have to look after them. Some of those civil servants brought their relations to Dublin so that they could look after them. That is the kind of thing which will be upset now.
It is an intractable problem when you are transferring a whole Department. It would not have been so if you did it otherwise. The sooner an announcement is made the better it will be because there may well be a stage that, because of the intractable problem which will be there for some civil servants, they would retire without full pension or certainly with full pension on attaining 60 years of age. We have precedent for that in the legislation of this country. The British, when they were getting out of here, made that provision for their civil servants in Article 10 of the Treaty. That was honoured by the Irish Government right up to the 1940s and later. They were given permission to retire, if they could show that their conditions of service had been worsened. The same happened in legislation which took place in the 1920s in relation to the railways. There was a scheme of redundancy whereby they were enabled to retire if their conditions had worsened. The same thing happened under legislation affecting the railways and canals in 1954 and under dieselisation in 1955. When that came in it caused redundancy. I do not know whether that has been adopted in regard to the British railways. We have a better record in that respect. Similarly, under the amalgamation of the GNR and CIE, we had legislation to cover that in 1958.
When it was necessary in the interests of the common good and the public interests to do something which, while it may be entirely valid so far as the contracts of the people are concerned, when such a decision is necessary, when it is necessary to do something which will upset their lives and upset their way of living, such people are entitled to expect morally, if not legally, that we should provide some escape for those who find it necessary to take a somewhat smaller pension. We should certainly provide them with the opportunity of retiring, if they so wish, rather than transfer them. The sooner an announcement is made the sooner it will relieve the unnecessary worry and misery which some people have had to bear since this announcement was first made.
There is another intractable problem that has been presented to me by some people I know in the Civil Service. Indeed, I know from my own experience that there are some people who will not leave Dublin if they are told to do so, and who will forfeit their promotion rights, which they have got in the Department, if they remained in it. That will create a problem for those people and it will be a grave disappointment to them. I do not know how best to attack that problem. The redundancy affecting promotion in the Civil Service is in my experience the most insoluble problem which has ever been encountered. Everybody is unhappy with this. I can see people deciding to remain here in Dublin and this will affect not alone the persons in the Department to which it is necessary to have them transferred, where they will block promotion, and, of course, the people themselves so transferred will, I rather think, forfeit promotion, if not for all time certainly for a very long time to come.
These are the kind of problems that affect the civil servants. It is no use laughing at the typical view the public have of the civil servant as somebody who is bound hand and foot with red tape and who is a faceless person. Of course, they are not. They are the men and women living on the same estate as any of us all around the city of Dublin with their families and their wives to think of. They have a network of relations and friends. In the public interest all that will be thrown overboard. There is a real problem there that has to be dealt with.
The Minister for Finance is particularly burdened by the Government with the responsibility of looking after the revival of the Irish language. I do not think the present Minister for Finance has any time for Irish in the sense that, as a Minister charged with the economy of the country and with all the many things he has to do, he can possibly find the time to devote in a worthwhile way to implementing the recommendations of the Commission on the Revival of Irish. It is an absurdity to say that the job of reviving the Irish language should be given to the least flexible and, in the public mind at any rate, the most fossilised Department of them all, the Department of Finance. The thing sounds crazy from the start. If it had been given to the Department of Education people could accept that, or if it had been given to the Department of the Gaeltacht people would think that that was a move in the right direction.
The only effort as far as the public are concerned is one which, in fact, I do not think the Minister for Finance had hand, act or part in. The only person who spoke about it on television was the Minister for Education, if my memory serves me. That is the new programme Buntús Cainte. That, to my mind, is a programme that has been very well received by the public which indicates the fertile field that is there to be cultivated. Now, instead of learning Irish ó glún na máthair we are learning it ó glún na spéirmhná nó ón ainnir on our screens. It is a popular programme and well done on the lines of Parliamo Italiano and the French programme. I feel that if the proper background work were put into preparing the people of this country for a programme of that kind and if the people were properly cultivated, we would find a great deal less difficulty in getting people to cotton on to Buntús Cainte and Labhair Gaeilge Linn and, what is more important, speaking such Irish as they know. The truth of the matter is that most of us are shy or bashful about speaking such Irish as we know because the idea has not yet got abroad of speaking what I term revival Irish—Irish that certainly is not of the standard of the native Gaeilgeóir but is good Irish in 1967 and should be spoken widely and be widely approved of. I am glad to see that Telefís Éireann has got its news announcers who are obviously people who have not Irish ó glún na máthair to deliver the news in Irish. That is a thing which I recommended myself to the Commission on Irish. I was the only member of Oireachtas Éireann to give such evidence to the Commission. That must be ten years ago, but better late than never. I am glad to see that it has been introduced.
On the BBC recently they had a programme about cells. Senator Dr. Alton is not here, unfortunately, but it was a very highly scientific programme, well outside my reach and comprehension. The programme was absolutely fascinating in the way in which it showed the development of cells and how they can be interfered with. The important thing is if you have one good living cell to keep it alive. Unfortunately, whenever one goes to the Gaeltacht, whether it is in Galway, Mayo or Kerry, one sees year in and year out the inevitable dying of the living cells of the Irish language. There is nothing effective being done by the Government nor do I know of any promise even to do anything effective to even keep the attenuated areas of the Gaeltacht alive and vibrant. I cannot understand why it would not be good policy for the Department of the Gaeltacht and Bord Fáilte to erect a fine, big luxury hotel such as they are going to erect in Dún Laoghaire, out in Spiddal or, better still, down in the Belmullet peninsula where there are strands by the mile unpeopled all day, every day, during the summer, and no shortage of staff for hotels. That would provide something for the people. It would provide some incentive for them to grow vegetables and the other things that hotels require.
I suppose if they did establish an hotel in such a place we would be getting Michael Joe Costello's dessicated carrots and dessicated French beans because of the incapacity of the organisers of this country to organise local suppliers into supplying fresh vegetables. Either that or establish factories where there are populations. Stuffing dolls and making teddy bears and so on and paying girls £5 or £6 a week is not even an effort at industrialising the Gaeltacht and as certain as the Government does not do that and subsidise transport to those areas—that seems to me to be the only added cost and disincentive to industrialists going there—as certain as we are sitting here in 1967 the Gaeltach will die. It is dying and we are doing nothing to give moral support, not to speak of financial support, to the people of the Gaeltacht. Because these people are living in poor areas they feel that speaking Irish is the badge of poverty and nobody is doing anything to try to bring home to them that they are the people who are in a unique position in this country as far as Irish is concerned. If one meets some of them and tells them that they are so pleased to hear that there are some people who have that kind of respect for them. There is nothing being done by the Department of the Gaeltacht, by the Minister for Finance who is charged with implementing the Revival of Irish plan, the Department of Education, Bord Fáilte, the Department of Industry and Commerce or anybody else to save the last remnants of the Gaeltacht that it is still possible to save.
As an interim measure, I would hope and suggest that Telefís Éireann should try to do something about bringing the actual Gaeltacht to the people since there is not the accommodation in most Gaeltacht areas for the people to go to the Gaeltacht. So long as we continue with the Fianna Fáil policy of making sure that people must pass their Irish for their examinations and that we do not leave it optional to people, so long will we have antipathy towards Irish and so long will Governments feel they have not got the people behind them in these extraordinary measures which are necessary to deal with an extraordinary situation.
I think the sooner the Fianna Fáil Government adopt the Fine Gael policy in relation to Irish in the schools the sooner will you get the kind of attitude towards Irish that will enable it to grow steadily and enable the Government, if they feel that it has not the moral support at the moment which it should have, to do the kind of things for the Gaeltacht area that urgently require to be done. A time was when we were told that the two great national problems were the saving of the Irish language and the ending of Partition. I am afraid that the exponents of the two ideas did damn all for saving Irish and damn little for Partition. If Partition is ever ended in this country it will be due to two people—to Pope John for his decree on the need for tolerance and to Ian Paisley who shows how intolerant people can be when they live together. Paisley has done more to expose the weaknesses of the Stormont Government and the Stormont régime over a period of 40 years than all the talk and all the exhortations and all the complaints that could ever be made.
As my time is running short, I should like to devote some little time to a few matters of importance. In my own profession, as in other professions, there is need for modernisation. One could take a decision to get rid of wigs and gowns and one could say that the Government have got rid of these things. There is a great deal of nonsense in them but there it is. If the Government got rid of them to-morrow they would say they had reformed the legal profession or were they to decide they would abolish senior counsel.
There are things in the courts at the present time that to my mind have no relationship with any requirements of modern times. I shall not proceed further on that line. That is a matter for the Rules Committee of the various courts. There is another matter for which the Minister for Finance is responsible and about which he can do something. There is a requirement that nearly every document that is used in any litigation has to be impressed with a 2/6d or 1/- stamp or whatever it is. That means that the solicitor's clerk has to take the document which is, first of all, sent from Castlebar, or Bandon or Cork, to his town agent. In this modern age why we cannot serve these by registered post on every lawyer in the country I do not know. At any rate, this is sent to the town agent who goes down to the Four Courts where he has to queue up at the counter and pay 2/6d and get his stamps. This goes on, day in, day out, and the number of man hours wasted in that way is probably incalculable.
It is, first of all, a question of whether we should waste so much time in the national interest for the sake of the little money got out of it. I would abolish the stamp altogether for the amount of revenue that is got out of it is negligible. If the Minister says he will not abolish that source of revenue there is a simple way of dealing with it; that is, by taking all the cases that come in and working out an average and saying on every order the amount to be paid should be ten pounds. That would be one operation with a limited number of people and it would dispose of the whole procedure.
You have a procedure whereby you have to get an attested copy of a document which means that the document is brought up to some court official who has it proof-read over to him with another official and then attested with the name of the officer attesting and then stamped. It is great waste of time and this could be dealt with by placing the onus on the solicitors to send in proper documents.
These are the kind of things that require to be done and these are the kind of things that cause unnecessary delays, confusion and waste of time.
There is another matter with which the Minister for Finance or the Minister for Justice should be acquainted. It relates to the appalling conditions of the courthouses around the country and in the city. It is disgraceful that lawyers require a person to sit from, say, 11 o'clock to 4 o'clock in a cold and draughty court. He may be 60 or 70 years of age suffering from rheumatoid arthritis or gout or rheum can come on him if he has to sit in these places. High court judges and circuit court justices have to sit for hours at a time in places that would not meet the specifications I came across one time in a Department of Agriculture leaflet for piggeries, where it was specified that the piggery should be kept sweet and clean. There are a great number of courthouses that would never reach that specification. They are most unwholesome, unhealthy, draughty, dull places and this is where justice has to be administered in this country.
I saw where a district justice was administering down in Achill from 11 o'clock to 9 o'clock and at the end of the day he had no light and it was the ingenuity of one of the gardaí that enabled him to rig up some kind of light. There was no fire. In the days of the old Grand Juries courthouses were kept up by assessments collected by the Grand Juries and consequently county councils are supposed to look after those places. What is clearly a central government charge should not be charged on the rates and the responsibility of cleaning these courthouses should not be left to the county councils. It is time the Department of Finance and the Minister for Justice awakened up to their responsibility and provided proper accommodation with adequate space with a minimum of toilet accommodation, which does not exist for the public or the people who work there.
There is another matter to which I should like to refer which causes untoward delay to the legal profession and that is the Land Registry. The Act was enacted in 1963 and its operation was delayed until 1st January, 1967. It is an absurdity to say that in this day and age, with all the mechanism of photostating and photocoding, and so on, that it takes three months to get land registry maps in the Land Registry even if the fee had been paid. Either the staff is inadequate or the machinery is inadequate, but it is an absurdity to say that people have to wait so long to close sales of property. If they are buying a plot of land from a farmer, they must wait in order to see whether the particular plot they have in mind is on the map attached to his folio. You have to wait three months before you can get it.
Again, you have the absurdity that you have to pay Land Registry stamps in order that somebody in the Revenue Department can say: "We collected so much last year in land registry fees". I had to go, in pursuance of my lawful duty, to look at a Land Registry map. In my innocence, I produced £3 to the official who said: "You will have to get Land Registry stamps for that". I asked if I could buy them there and he told me I would have to go to the post office for them.
It is absurd that one cannot get Land Registry stamps in the Land Registry. This brings the service into disrepute. This is an indication of the inefficiency and lack of concern for public opinion which arouses so much antipathy to the Civil Service and leaves people, like one of the Senators opposite, with a cynical smile when we talk about the sorrows, grievances and so forth, of civil servants who are real flesh and blood. It is the system of which these unfortunate persons are themselves victims because the Department of Finance will not sanction an increase in expenditure. That is the reason these things go on. There are many other matters to which I should like to refer but, in deference to the House, I shall not do so.
