A Chinn Chomhairle, the Motion standing in my name is:—
"That in the opinion of this Dáil the Government should, whenever the military situation so permits, take immediate steps for the consolidation and re-establishment of Civil Administration, and should, to that end, rescind the Decree establishing District and Parish Courts, in so far as it has not already been rescinded."
This motion was put down with a view to enabling the Deputies to debate rather fully the question of Civil Administration, and in particular the immediate steps that it is proposed to take towards laying the foundation. Deputies will remember that they cannot be taken now— permanent, far-reaching steps. It is not the time for such steps and the proposals which I intend to outline to the Dáil are meant to meet a purely transitory condition of things. They are proposals put forward with a view to saving the menaced foundations of ordered society in this country, and it is in that spirit and with that outlook that I would ask the Deputies to consider them. Most of us here are familiar enough with the history of the Courts set up under Dáil Eireann. And most of us realise that hastily conceived as they were in a time of stress, that they did do work that it was intended they should do; and they very largely achieved the object for which they were set up. But while we know that, and while we claim that these Courts, to a very large extent, justified their existence, and justified those who set them up, we know that they are not the kind that could remain permanent structures in the administration of justice in the country. In June, 1919, the provision of Arbitration Courts was first suggested and the motion was carried at the Dáil as follows:—"Dáil Eireann decrees the establishment in every County of National Arbitration Courts." In June, 1920, at a Meeting of the Dáil the following was passed:—"Dáil Eireann decrees the establishment of Courts of Justice and Equity and that the Ministry be empowered when they deem fit to establish Courts having Criminal jurisdiction." In the Spring and Summer of 1920 these Courts were set up rapidly throughout the country, until there was scarcely a parish but had its Parish Court, and certainly there was no constituency but had its District Court. On that front just as on the Local Government front the people took from the British administration the control of their own affairs, and under the supervision and superintendence of Dáil Eireann Department left the enemy machine hanging idle with little or no grist going to that particular mill. In that sense I claim that these Dáil Courts fulfilled the object for which they were set up. It was to exhibit to the world the spectacle of a whole people turning from the alien administration to even the rough and hasty administration set up by Parliament and by the Government that was holding its own in the teeth of an armed terror. We have arrived now at a stage when the entire administration of the country has passed into the hands of the people, and can be moulded by the representatives of the people, freely discussing and considering matters in an open Parliament, and it is not the opinion of those who are primarily responsible for that particular machinery, hastily devised as it was, as adequate to the needs of the time. I have therefore to put before this Dáil to-day certain proposals. It is the intention of the Government to appoint with very little delay salaried Magistrates to sit, each in his own area, at a Court of Summary Jurisdiction, having only the jurisdiction of the ordinary Justice in the past. These Magistrates or District Judges cannot be sent out until the Civic Guard are established throughout the country, and they will be sent out as close as possible on the heels of the police force, which must be their executive machinery. That proposal will involve the immediate withdrawal of Commissions given in the past by the British, and of the Commissions given in the past with a specific object in view by Dáil Eireann. I have described this as a temporary measure to meet a purely emergency situation, and it is a measure that is contemplated without prejudice to the report or findings of a Judicial Committee which will be set up to deal with the entire system of justice in the country. That particular Judicial Committee will deal with the administration of justice from the highest to the lowest Courts, and it will have in view the providing for the people of a more convenient and a more economic system of justice. It will have in view the removal of the rather glaring defects of the British system, which was cumbrous, expensive, and not at all suited either to the needs or the genius of this country. There will be about twenty-four or twenty-seven at the most of these District Judges appointed—these temporary salaried Magistrates. It is thought that one of these stationed in a particular centre, and with about nine Court centres around him, having Courts on about twenty days in the month, that at that rate twenty-six or twenty-seven such Magistrates will be sufficient to meet the requirements. I have spoken of the Civic Guard, and I think it is a matter on which Deputies will be anxious to receive information. I have here from the Chief Commissioner of the Civic Guard a report showing that during the last week the Civic Guard were sent out through the country to the following places and in the following strength, viz.:—
Limerick |
50 |
Bruff |
20 |
Ennis |
25 |
Galway |
25 |
Ballinasloe |
20 |
Monaghan |
25 |
Clones |
20 |
Cavan |
25 |
Roscrea |
20 |
Maryborough |
25 |
Kilkenny |
25 |
Naas |
25 |
Carlow |
25 |
Wicklow |
25 |
Mullingar |
25 |
Longford |
25 |
Athlone |
25 |
Granard |
20 |
Letterkenny |
25 |
Buncrana |
25 |
which would account for about 500 men. At the moment the effective strength of the Civic Guard is 1,500 men and officers. In addition to that they are guarding 60 banks in Dublin and District and there are small, comparatively small, posts in the following places:— Swords, Dundrum, Foxrock, Kildare, Newbridge, Clane, Athy, Rathangan, Castledermot, Portarlington. There is a further programme for next week which will practically exhaust the present strength of that force, and it is proposed to proceed energetically with recruiting. Now, as to what is the Government's conception of what this Force should be I would like to speak briefly. These men have gone out through the country absolutely unarmed as a civil Police Force for the protection of the rights and of the property of all the people—of all the people. We do not want to arm this Force if that can possibly be avoided. They have been sent out unarmed. It is an experiment—an experiment which we at least feel bound to make. If that experiment fails, and if it is a failure, as clearly demonstrated to the people and to the Force itself, then the Government must consider the new situation and deal with it as it thinks best. We have no desire to mould this Force on its predecessor, but neither can we agree to place servants of the Government in a position in which they would be shot down defencelessly. I prefer to speak of the future of this Force rather than of its past. Its past has not been a particularly happy one, and it is not considered that any great good would come of delving back into that past, drawing up details and enquiring into exactly whose fault it was that so and so happened. An inquiry was held, and certain officers—wherever the fault lay—tendered their resignations, and those resignations were accepted. The Force is starting a new chapter now, under a new headship, and it gives me genuine satisfaction to report to this Dáil that the spirit of the Force is excellent, and that while I feel that it is inevitable that complaints will come in from the country that the standard of efficiency is not high, I feel there will be very few reports or complaints as to the conduct of the men. That is the thing that matters—the spirit of the Force and the behaviour of the men. As to efficiency and experience, these they will learn just as their predecessors had to learn them. I feel there is in that 1,500 men the germ, the nucleus of a very efficient, highly disciplined, and a self-respecting Force that will be real protectors of the rights and property of the people. Members were sent into that force to make trouble, to play upon the feelings and prejudices of the men, and material was to their hand, and let us say they used that material skilfully and ruthlessly, and with a certain measure of success, if not all the success that was hoped for by the people who sent them in. That particular corner is rounded and that particular chapter is closed. I would ask that in this discussion Deputies should not attempt to reopen it. No good can come of that, and we should turn our minds, just as the men had turned their minds, to the future rather than to the past. There were faults inside and outside that Force. On the whole, reading the report by those who held the inquiry, and reading above all the evidence they took, one could only conclude that it was a very sad and very human story. We dealt with the situation as we found it, and I am satisfied that particular trouble is over, and well over, and that what has happened instead of being a permanent injury to the Force has been a salutary lesson to the men themselves. Lately I said that we were standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of the other scarcely set. That is the position, and I want Deputies here and people outside to remember that that is the position, and that the things we do as transitory or emergency measures do not affect in any way what we would like to do or will do when laying down the permanent measures for the future administration of justice in the country. But taking the situation as we find it, and starting at the lowest rung of these courts of summary jurisdiction, we feel that a selection of certain men in whom the people will have confidence, and for whom they will have respect, and sending these out through the country with only that limited jurisdiction that their predecessors had, that that at least is a step to holding things together until this Judicial Committee is set up, and reports to Parliament on some secure basis, I hope in better times the situation can be dealt with in a broader way. The magistrates that are to be selected will be drawn from both the two leading professions, and not otherwise. It will be their business to administer the existing law strictly and impersonally. No man will be sent to an area where he himself has any particular ties or associations. They will go out as the Civic Guard goes out, in the name of the whole people, and for the protection and preservation of the rights of all the people. For the present it is not proposed to interfere with the sittings of the ordinary County Courts. That step would only tend to make confusion worse confounded. There are only certain classes of cases which they have jurisdiction to deal with. These cases are of urgent importance. These County Courts will go out on their ordinary autumn session. I trust the people will have sufficient good sense to realise that it would be a very unwise step on the part of a Government, situated as we are, to play the part of the bull in a china shop, and that we should not interfere with the old arrangements until we are ready with cut and dry proposals for our alternative machinery. Let there not be that prejudiced criticism about British Courts. We should try to grow out of that. We should try to grow up as a nation and try to develop the capacity for looking facts in the eye and admit them. These are not British Courts. There are no British Courts in Ireland at present. There are no Courts in this country at the moment that are not Irish Courts, and the authority for making, altering and rescinding of law in this country is now in the hands of the Irish people, through their representatives, and if they have any particular law that the public feel should be repealed or should be altered they have the means at their disposal to repeal or alter it. When we are building we must build on a sure foundation, and we must not build in a hasty, ill-considered way. The Judicial Committee that will be set up will consider and report to the Government on all the difficulties of the old system and the respects in which it fell short of the people's needs and in which it clashed with the people's genius, and the Government will build sure and firm on that report, but until that report is made, and until the alternative machinery can be set up I do feel both the Deputies and the people outside ought to exercise a little of that uncommon quality called common sense in considering this whole matter. This country is, in my opinion, undergoing a test; it is a true test, it is a very severe test, a test which it has not been the misfortune of many countries to have to undergo, but it is none the less a test, and within the next six months we shall know whether or not this country is going to weather that test, whether it is going to take and avail to the full of the opportunities that lie at hand, or whether it is simply going in a fractious, futile way to throw away these opportunities and allow the harvest of the last four years sowing to perish ungarnered in the field. There is a kind of breaking of ties at present, a kind of loosening of the foundations, and we must attempt to meet and counter that, and we must do it firmly, and do it steadily, while remembering that, on the whole, it is perhaps not unnatural under the circumstances. Had the whole unanimous Dáil stood for the Treaty Settlement, there would have been a problem, and a very grave problem, for a transitional Government. There would have been the problem of the reaction from our special conditions of the last three, four or five years—there would have been the problems of the two reactions of the world war, which every country in the world is feeling to-day, and the reaction from our own special conditions of the last few years, and one man, no doubt an honest man, who loved his country well and not wisely, came with his torch to that barrel of gunpowder and multiplied that problem a thousandfold. That is the situation with which we have to deal, and which, if we fail to deal with, spells disaster, perhaps permanent disaster, for the land and the people we are responsible to. A rather general breaking of bands, a disintegration of the moral fibre of the country, a lack of civic sense, a lack of responsibility, a lack of appreciation of the fact that one cannot do things and escape the consequences, and now we are in the position that we cannot blame some other country or people or Treasury for things going wrong We can blame only ourselves. That is what we are faced with, and we must counter that both in word and in action; and it is the duty of everyone who is thinking straightly now, who is thinking clearly amid all this confusion, to express as far as he can express his clear thoughts upon those who are within his influence. It does not matter how efficient the Civic Guard become; it does not matter how efficiently, impersonally, and impartially the new magistrates administer. You are driven back always to that which finds expression in the words, "Unless the Lord keepeth guard over the house, the watchman watcheth in vain." Unless there is a spirit of charity, a spirit of decency, a spirit of civic responsibility inculcated here, the efforts of the Government to set up a firm and stable administration will not avert that collapse of the social and economic fabric which seems imminent. It is a matter for the people themselves, and not for any selected body of people, but for all the people, facing facts, to do the best thing for the Irish nation under the circumstances that have arisen. Padraig Pearse was right when he said that every man and every woman in Ireland carries the Irish nation in his or her heart, and, so far as any man or woman in Ireland departs from decent standards of citizenship the whole nation suffers proportionately, and the whole nation is let down proportionately. Men are standing in the path to-day, armed men, saying to the massed men of this nation, you must not take a certain course. That is a position which never has been conceded here, which never has been conceded in any democratic country. It will not be conceded here. No small section have a right to say, you must go back to war with England. You must, if needs be, make a Thermopylæ of it and go down to the last man. That is not sanity, that is not patriotism. They can keep their high principles, they can keep their own political convictions, but some men must be allowed to work that Treaty settlement for the benefit of the Irish nation; and they must drop back, and they will drop back sooner or later, into the position of constitutional opposition in the attempt to convert the majority of the country to their political creed. But they have not the right to kill this nation, as the nation will be killed if the democratic will of the people is not allowed to prevail. That, perhaps, is not very relevant to the question of the Civic Guard or the rescinding of the decree of the Dáil Courts, but it is relevant to the entire question of the attitude of the people towards the administration that is set up by the Government—that Government which is responsible to the Dáil, and this Dáil which is responsible to the people. It is the people's own machinery, and the man who set his face against it is sinning against the people; and we must develop here, and we will I am sure develop, that civic sense, that sense of responsibility that it is not a fine thing now, as it may have been a fine thing in the past, to break the law, because the law is the people's law, and because the Government and the Parliament that administers all this machinery is the Government and Parliament of the Irish people. I am prepared for certain criticism of these proposals. I am prepared to be told that it is a reactionary measure to send out these salaried magistrates to sit alone and administer, even the very limited jurisdiction that will be theirs. If there are those here who feel inclined to make criticism of that kind, I would ask them to weigh well all the circumstances of the time, and to weigh well the extent to which that civic sense, and that responsibility has been dissipated by the events of the last eight or nine months. It is true to say that we have tapped public opinion so far as we could, here and there, through the country, with regard to these proposals, and the consensus of opinion favours the course which we are taking. It is true to say that we consulted many of the Dáil justices themselves, and they asked to be relieved from an impossible position; they said that if in dealing with cases that came before them they did things which they knew and felt it was right to do, that they could not live on friendly and neighbourly terms in their areas. That is a pretty serious situation, but it is not a situation which will last. I do not want Deputies to think that these proposals, which we, to-day, lay before this Dáil are proposals foreshadowing the general trend of future administration.