In considering this force we have to go back to its beginning. Its beginnings were in the early months of last year, shortly after the Treaty was passed, and when it was becoming increasingly clear that there was, in this city, and, to some extent, throughout the country, a section of men who had their minds pretty definitely made up to attempt a coup d'etat. It was not at that time a difficult proposition. The Provisional Government had just been established. The Army, in so far as there could be said to be an Army at all, was in a very fluid and unsettled condition, and the late General Collins rushed three or four score of men into Oriel House under people whom he considered particularly trustworthy and reliable, and Oriel House started its career as a semi-military body. We may take it that the three or four score of men were not selected according to any drawingroom standards. We may take it, too, that the establishment of that institution was something of a gesture; if you wish something of a threat, to those who were planning very dark and very violent enterprises. Putting it baldly, it was the Provisional Government's Four Courts. Now, matters went on on that basis for many months. It was September of last year when Oriel House passed formally under the control of a Civil Department. Through all the months before that it was a semi-military body; in so far as it was supervised and controlled, it was under Army supervision and Army control. Then during those months, too, this happened. The particular officers whom General Collins put in control, and on whom he relied to keep things straight, were recalled to the Army for definitely Army work, and it is not plain that throughout those months that institution was run on absolutely strict lines, or that there was discipline, or a very high standard of efficiency. You have to take the institution in its setting, and the setting of the circumstances of the time, and there is no use claiming that there should have existed in that institution what did not exist in any other phase of national life at that time — discipline. There was indiscipline in the country from top to bottom. Was there any force or department in which it could be said that the standard of either efficiency or discipline was high? About September last year the institution passed under civil control, and it passed definitely under the Home Affairs Department. For about three or four months a genuine effort was made to make that institution, in the fullest sense of the word, a civil detective force, and the men confined there were intended for ordinary civil detective work. Those who kept track of the daily or evening papers of the time will remember the success they had in tracing the ordinary abuses that are more or less inseparable from the life of a city, and in their successful prosecution of these abuses.
Then people had the brilliant idea that it was a comparatively defenceless place, and that it would be a bright stroke to blow up the institution and the members thereof. Four mines were placed under the building, only one of which went off. If the four had gone off, not only that institution but every man in it, and a great many of the poor homes of the neighbourhood would have gone up along with it. Then we slipped the leash, and those men were let out after the people who tried to blow them and their institution up, and who incidentally were trying to blow the State up. Now, frankly, without claiming for a moment that matters there are perfect, that there is not much that ought to be remedied, much that can be regretted, just as there are things in every other Department of the national life that can be regretted, without claiming that, I claim that that little bunch of men down there in that building have done great work for this State, that they got after this criminal conspiracy here in Dublin in an energetic manner, day in and day out, night in and night out, with the maximum of risk and the minimum of ease. They have been doing valuable work for this infant State, and it is not a right or a creditable thing that a Deputy should come in here and brand them as natural born gunmen. They may not handle a cup of tea as gracefully as the Deputy, but they have saved this State at a time when the Deputy's efforts were rather in a contrary direction. Kipling said, "Single men in barracks ain't exactly plaster saints." Those men are not plaster saints. I do grant that amongst the personnel that was established in the stormy circumstances of this time last year, there may have crept in some definitely indisciplined people, and even some whom it has not been possible to single out and deal with in an individual sense, but taking them as they are, they do not deserve the taunts or reflections cast on them here, and their work stands. They have broken the spinal column of this conspiracy against the State, and the individuals they have traced and the documents they have traced have led to valuable results not merely in the Metropolitan area but throughout the country. The successful operations in the Knockmealdown and Comeragh ranges lately, arose from documents that were traced here in Dublin. Now, it was an easy thing to come in and raise this matter. I have referred to it before. I have given an assurance that no one in the Department held the view that everything was lovely in that particular garden, but it was an easy thing to come in and, simply making mountains of mole-hills, represent that Force as being simply one in which there was no good.