A person who has a licence but who may not use that licence at the moment, and may not be intending to use it, will be able to apply for six licences which he can sell at a very high price. It is not a good situation automatically to give to somebody a ready-made asset which can be put on the market and sold at a very high price, thus increasing the cost of transport. It is wrong that people should have the option of selling a licence given to them by the State. The Minister has indicated that perhaps this is a liberalisation of the laws. I take it that the Minister sees himself introducing further measures which will remedy the whole situation. We must bear in mind that legislation which goes through the Houses of the Oireachtas is not very often any sort of a temporary measure. It takes time to introduce legislation and a lot of people have to be consulted. Much work will have to be done before another Bill will be introduced. We usually have legislation like this for too long. At this stage it would not have been amiss to introduce something more radical, something that might require a little bit more courage and might have, perhaps, annoyed some vested interest. In the interest of the economy we should have gone a little further.
The other point that arises relates to giving the opportunity to people to invest in vehicles and engage in international haulage. We must consider the very high cost of purchasing vehicles here compared with cost in the countries from which our competitors come. This has put an undue burden on the whole haulage industry. The high cost of vehicles including spare parts and so on has been unjustified. It is depressing for some people in this part of Ireland to realise that just a few miles away they can buy spare parts and new and secondhand vehicles at a fraction of the cost that they are forced to pay for them here. What I am saying is probably not entirely in order, but it is relevant to what we are discussing. In the context of international haulage, it should be realised from the beginning that we will be at this disadvantage.
Another factor was not taken into consideration in the whole calculation. We get easily enough the figures of the number of companies that have their own vehicles, the number of plates that are around and the amount of transport done by CIE but there is another big question mark. Nobody knows exactly what the situation is in the industry, because there is quite a bit of illegal haulage going on. There are quite a number of industries which, because they simply cannot afford to tie up the requirements in cash, do not have licensed hauliers available and prepared to give them the right service, and the alternative is a sort of illegal system of haulage of which nobody really knows the extent.
These people who buy lorries on the hire purchase system are probably the most efficient people in the business. I have seen young men who are manager/owner/driver, accounts departments and so on being forced to operate under the handicap of the risk of detection knowing that they are breaking the letter of the law if not the spirit of it. There are a lot of these people. People in this position should not be forced to carry on outside the law while other less deserving people get complete facilities handed to them so as to engage in the industry. When we hear figures for the amount of haulage which is being carried on by the various interests involved, those figures cannot be accurate because we just cannot know.
With regard to the fact that the smaller lorries of under 2.5 tons are being given the opportunity to operate without a licence, this is a useful idea which will have some effect for the better. The bigger lorries have come in for a lot of criticism lately, but if we look around at our factories and industries which we have built up over the past 20 years we will see that they are established in locations where only big lorries can bring goods in and out. If we had not dismantled our system of railways a lot of these industries could have been located along the railway lines, and new, bigger industries, and co-operatives as in other countries could have been built along the canals and railways which would have provided an alternative. At the moment it does not seem that we have any easy alternative. In the last few years the number of lorries and cars using the roads have increased and lorries have got bigger. The roads have not kept pace with this development. It is harder to drive on the roads today because we have tended to neglect our roads. It is obvious to anybody, particularly those who are a long way from the seaports, and in the west of Ireland, where goods have to be transported, that we must take this situation very seriously. The answer is not to take the juggernauts off the roads. We cannot do it, and if it was done we would have to replace them with a big number of smaller vehicles. Nobody has calculated that that will produce less noise or less pollution of any sort, or that they will be less of a hazard on the road. The juggernauts may be anti-social, the cars whistling past at 70 and 80 miles an hour are also anti-social, and the number of cars on the road is anti-social. Many things are anti-social, but we will have to fit the roads to carry the sort of traffic which industry requires at present.
The cost of labour and administration has become so great that there is no alternative to putting bigger loads behind single engines driven by as few people as possible. We may not like it but that is a necessity if we are to survive. We can only improve the situation by providing the sort of roads on which these vehicles can travel with the least possible obstructions. It sounds liberal and it apparently catches the ear of the media to condemn the juggernauts and so on, but that is not a solution. What we have to find is a means of transporting goods with the least possible cost, because that is what we must do if we are to compete and to save and create jobs. We must solve the problem and condemn, out of hand, vehicles that make noise. We should work towards a situation where those vehicles are as clean as possible, take up as little space as possible, and have the sort of engines that can take them up hills without holding up traffic. We have also an obligation to spend money on roads, because there are a lot of roads here where one articulated lorry can hold up 50 cars for seven or eight miles. There is no point in blaming the lorry, we must invest money that is required to enable traffic to move more freely.
There is another area which should have been looked at. I spoke about illegal haulage in the context of the ordinary industrialist who cannot afford to tie up so much cash in vehicles. He tends to employ people who are prepared to buy a lorry and haul, perhaps without a licence. This has been done more in the agricultural industry than anywhere else. In every area the co-operatives have been using agricultural vehicles because some of the work is seasonal, and tractors can do a morning's hauling of meat for the co-operative delivery and can take back a load of meal or manure and so on. In most parts of Ireland one would have to be blind not to see that a vast amount of goods are being handled in this way by part-time farmers who do this job on the side for the co-operatives. At this stage we should have cleared the road for these people. We should have legalised what is going on. Maybe they are not being prosecuted as they used to be, and they are not being checked on, but the industry requires that they be allowed to continue. They give a service that will not be given by the bigger licensed hauliers and certainly will not be given by semi-State bodies or bigger companies. They are a necessity as far as the agricultural community and the co-operatives are concerned. Under this Bill I would like to see them being cleared of the guilt under which they have operated for the past few years.
I welcome the Bill in so far as it is a certain measure of liberalisation, but it is being done in the wrong direction. We could have done a better job if we were prepared to take a little risk and show a little more courage. The situation has already done considerable damage to our economy. We have had far too many lorries going the roads empty because, for one reason or another, when goods are delivered to the city, lorries go back empty a 100 miles, or maybe 150 miles to the west of Ireland because they could not legally take this, that or the other. We should have a complete opening up of the whole haulage business. I would like to see a situation where people in the industry here could compete on equal terms with people from outside. The sooner that situation comes about the better.
