The amount for Secretariat and Special Services is £19,050. I move that.
ESTIMATES. - SECRETARIAT AND SPECIAL SERVICES.
May we have some explanation of the Secretariat? What is it? Is it the Secretaries of the Ministers, or Secretaries of the Dáil? It is quite impossible to understand from this description what the term Secretariat applies to, and this surely is a case where we might have had, without much difficulty details of the salaries of the Ministers of the Dáil, and of the Ministers without portfolios. That is not difficult to set out in detail. Then there are the expenses of Envoys to the United States of America. I do not think that this Dáil knows anything about Envoys to the United States, and I think we should have some explanation of that, who they are, what is their purpose there, and what is their particular business? Are they there as Trade Envoys or Diplomatic Envoys? Have we any similar Envoys anywhere else, and if so, why are their expenses not included in this Estimate? Then there is Publicity. Some details in respect of this, I think, are demanded. Is this for the Minister's salary, or is it only office expenses? What kind is the publicity, and is it still going on? I think we are entitled to have some information on this Vote. A bald statement of this kind recommending that the Oireachtas shall adopt it without any further discussion is not at all satisfactory. We are practically asked to give blank cheques without any details. I invite the Minister to give us some explanation before we proceed further with the discussion.
I would like to support what Deputy Johnson has said, because all these items, particularly those he has mentioned, practically are not Estimates at all; they are legislation. Now, we have already legislated in support of A, that is, salaries, etc. I did not know that a decision was taken by this Dáil that Envoys should be sent to the United States of America. I am not aware that any Envoys were sent by the Second Dáil, the responsibility of which devolved on this Dáil. We did decide, I understand, not to create a Minister for Publicity; rather it was suggested that he should be merged in some other Department, or obliterated altogether. In view of that decision it seems rather strange that we should have an item here for Publicity. If we were asked to legislate in respect of publicity of this kind there are some grave questions one would like to raise, because there are forms of publicity that are not very happy or very fortunate. The right way in which that should be brought before us is by asking that these things should be authorised by the Dáil in the first instance, and then provided for in an estimate and not by retrospective action to create legislation in respect of the monies to be voted.
Surely the Deputy who has just spoken is not correct in saying that it was the intention of the Dáil to suppress the Publicity Department? If anyone had specifically brought forward a resolution to that effect I do not think I am entering into the realms of prophecy when I say it would have been defeated. There never was a time when proper propaganda was so requisite as now, and it is the one thing I think in which we have legitimate reason to complain in regard to the Ministry that it is not so active or so effective as it ought to be. It seems to me that there is no heading under which money could be more effectively expended at the present moment. The first effort of anything like propaganda that I have seen is a large placard, very badly displayed for the purpose of striking the eye, the reproduction of a letter read recently by the Minister for Defence as part of the correspondence of Mr. De Valera. For months we have seen nothing at all in reply to the very active and, I must say, the very able propaganda of the other side. I have received this morning, for example, a typewritten document. It is made up in paragraphs and I can well understand that a man who is not thoroughly conversant with all the truth of the situation would easily be converted by that document. It seems to me that the Pro-Treaty Party are doing very little, and surely to ask them to do less, by objecting to the devoting of any sum of public money, is very retrograde. I should like to see, instead of £38,050 for undefined Commissions—a thing which we passed a moment ago without a word of comment—I would rather see a very large amount set down for printing expenses and the rest, not merely incidental expenses like £200, under the heading of "Publicity."
I would like, as a matter of personal explanation, to say that the Deputy who has just spoken has entirely misunderstood my point, which was, not that this thing ought not to be done and that the money ought not to be devoted, but that it ought to be done first in the ordinary legislative form and that legislation should not be created by retrospective action on a Vote of credit.
I think it was said by a celebrated Frenchman that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one. If we had no publicity it would be necessary to set it up now.
We are following the procedure adopted in dealing with the Constitution Committee. I think we first established the Committee and then came for the cost of it.
That decision was taken by an earlier Dáil.
By exactly the same Government, by exactly the same people, with two exceptions. Now this particular Vote is, as far as (A) is concerned, for certain Ministers who have not got Departments under which their salaries would appear. They are the cases of the late President, two Ministers without Portfolio that I mentioned here, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has no Departmental Vote. There may be one later on, but at the moment there is not. There is also the Chairman of the Dáil while he was acting as a Minister of the Second Dáil and not of the Provisional Government. Do I make that point clear? That is with regard to the Dáil Ministers and those who are not in charge of Departments, under which salaries would be charged in the ordinary way? As regards the Envoys to the United States, that is in the same position as the Constitution Committee to which Deputy Figgis does not take objection. It was done by the Provisional Government somewhere about last March, and the two people we sent to America I believe were Mr. O'Meara and Mr. O'Sullivan. They went to America on the work of the Provisional Government. The Secretariat is what has been under the operation of the Provisional Government from the beginning. There is a Secretary, and there was formerly a Secretary and Assistant Secretary and several typists, and so on. I do not know, under the circumstances, that it is possible to do without that staff. As regards publicity, there was a Dáil Publicity, which was somewhat different to the Provisional Government Publicity. The Dáil Publicity was on a different footing and was different work, and that work is not so much propaganda as publicity, if we can distinguish between the two. That is as far as I can explain the Vote.
I am not sure what form these Votes will take in future— whether these particular items in the present form will appear in any other form before the Oireachtas—but I would ask that the information, for instance, on this particular Vote that the Minister has now given us would appear for the information of the reader six months hence. As it stands it is too bald and uncommunicative. It is vague and indefinite, and might mean anything; but the Minister has now explained it, and unless he attaches, as a sort of fly-sheet, a verbatim report of his speech, it would be better to have it properly formulated in any future publication of these items.
Motion made and question put "That the Dáil in Committee, having considered the Estimates for Secretariat and Special Services in 1922-23, and having passed a Vote on Account of £15,000 for the period to the 6th December, 1922, recommend that the full Estimate of £19,050 for the Financial Year 1922-23 be adopted in due course by the Oireachtas."
Agreed.