It is getting rather late, and, with the approval of the Dáil, I would now move the adjournment until 3 o'clock to-morrow. I will undertake to introduce the Budget statement at that hour. I am sure the discussion on it will take a very considerable time. If the Dáil is agreeable I will now move the adjournment.
ADJOURNMENT OF THE DAIL. - NEWSPAPER ARTICLES RE RELATIONS OF GOVERNMENT AND ARMY.
I desire to second the motion.
For some time past there have been very suggestive items of news appearing in the London papers in regard to conditions in the Army here. One of the latest is a dispatch which appeared in the London Times of April 7th. The Dublin correspondent of that paper says:—“Rumours concerning proposed changes in the National Army have been in circulation in Dublin during the past few weeks. It is impossible to trace them to their origin, but the general feeling seems to be that the Civil arm of the Government does not exercise sufficient control over the Army, and that the combination of the offices of Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief does not make for military efficiency. There is a movement on foot to bring the Army more directly under the Civil Authorities; but the matter is extremely delicate, and is not likely to come to a head until the Dáil meets next week after the Easter Recess.”
In the Morning Post, of April 9th, two days later, there is another article on the same subject. It was copied into the Belfast News Letter, of April 10th. In that article very serious statements are made which call for an explanation or a statement of some kind from the Government. It is suggested in that article that the Commander-in-Chief or the Minister for Defence intrigued while in the Army to put at the head of the Army the members of a secret organisation. If that is so, it is a serious offence. It is serious if that was the objective, and I think that it should be denied, or there should be something said about it. The article states: “Two things were concentrated upon—the raising of the gunmen stalwarts of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to the superior jobs at Portobello and elsewhere, and the elimination of British officers and others who, it was suspected, might behave inconveniently in case the flower of bright Republicanism should suddenly blossom on General Mulcahy's baton.”
Again, the article states: "The general idea of the intriguers was to make the Irish Republican Brotherhood the connecting link between the Republicans and the Free State Army. Needless to say, Cosgrave, O'Higgins and the rest of the Cabinet knew what was on foot long before General Murphy discovered it, and they have been working hard to get the Free State Army really under Cabinet control, but until the last week or two, Portobello has been too much for them."
Further on it is stated: "With Hurley at Portobello a game began to be positively apparent, and the Cabinet finally screwed up its courage, or to be more accurate Kevin O'Higgins screwed up the rest of the Cabinet's courage, to do something about it. It has been done, and not, one may believe, without a good deal of opposition."
Finally it is stated: "The Army Council has been abolished, and Mulcahy ceases, as President of that triumvirate, to exercise supreme control over the Free State Forces. He remains Minister of Defence, of course, but that is a constitutional position in which he is closely under the supervision of the Parliament. In place of the Army Council, Military affairs are placed in the hands of a Cabinet Committee of Defence consisting of five members. These are Cosgrave (President), O'Higgins (Vice-President), Mulcahy, McMahon, and McGrath, the Minister of Labour. To this Committee two military advisers have been appointed. They are Generals Murphy and Dan Hogan. The latter is a brother of the Minister of Agriculture and a young man who, though lacking Murphy's experience, showed himself, when in command of the Limerick area both able and resourceful and, what is more to the point, a pertinacious rebel hunter with no friends in the enemy camp."
We all know that statements by individuals are very hard to get into the Press at the present time. We know also the Government has a Publicity Department. This is evidently given out by somebody or other, and anyone who has experience in the running of a Government knows that to do things he has to get items of news printed in an out of the way paper and let them come back then and be copied somewhere else. This news has been copied into the North of Ireland papers and printed in England, but it is not allowed to be printed in the Free State. Perhaps the idea is to keep the people who are intimately concerned with the Free State affairs in ignorance, or perhaps the thing may be a newspaper story and may have no foundation, but I think the whole thing is sufficiently important to have an authoritative statement on the matter from the Government.
I heard of this matter being raised in the Seanad this evening. I have not seen the Morning Post article nor the article that appeared in the London Times, and I do not know anything about them. I have not read those papers; and I am not in the habit of learning what is happening in this country from papers that are published outside of this country. It appears to me there is an attempt in this case to drive a wedge between the Government and the Army. There is no such chasm as is indicated in this article. There is as far as I know, an evident hostility in this article, evident as far as opposition or hostility to both the Army and the Government is concerned. I do not know what is behind it. It has not come from Government sources that I am aware of. It has not come through any source over which the Executive Council has got any control that I am aware of, or that any other member of the Government that I know of is aware of. It is one of those things which occur very often during the lifetime of any Government. I have read articles dealing with other Departments, other than the Army, in some papers that are hostile to us, and they are articles which could only have been written by some person who was moved by no other motive than an endeavour to shake confidence in the Government or in the staple conditions that are gradually evidencing themselves in this country. The most recent cases that have come under my notice are in connection with the Sailors' and Soldiers' Housing Act, and the apparent idea behind it was that we were hostile to that Act, and that the Minister for Defence was himself hostile to it, and did not wish to see the Act put into operation. Now, there has been no discussion, good, bad, or indifferent at any time between the Minister for Defence and myself in connection with that Act, or between the Minister for Defence and the Executive Council. We agreed to appoint General Sir Bryan Mahon as a Trustee of this Act some time ago, and we have not at any time indicated an unwillingness or any desire to interfere with the occupation of houses provided under that Act by people for whom they were intended—that is, ex-soldiers of the Great War, as it is called. I do not know if it be the intention of members of the Dáil to raise matters which appear in newspapers not circulating, or, at least, not published or printed in the country, and under the control of the Government. At any moment those questions may arise. I have seen some foreign newspapers which make extraordinary comments upon the situation here. I have met people from other countries who have come here and who have told us that they were amazed, after reading those newspapers, to find the condition of affairs existing here.
If the intention be to disturb a situation which is gradually approaching normal conditions in this country I think that this Dáil is entitled to pay no attention whatever to the newspapers that start a hare of that sort, and which have not certainly got the best interests of this country at heart. As far as I am concerned the Minister for Defence as a member of the Executive Council has my entire and implicit confidence, and there is no intention, as far as I know, of interfering with his position. I do not know, except for the purpose of exploding those things, that there is any use in bringing them up here.
The fairly insistent suggestions in rather highly placed and influential British newspapers, from time to time, that in the first place the control of the Army had passed from hands that were guided by National inspiration, and that actually the control of the Army had passed to hands that had Imperial training might have some implication to some of us, but we can leave it, I think, to the common sense of the English people to deal with anything there might be in any implications of that kind. The fact that those things appear in English newspapers would mean nothing to us if there was not stirred up, as a result of that, criticism of somewhat the same kind here. The main criticism we find at the present moment is that the Army is not under civil control, and is not responsible to or not responsive to this Parliament. That is a position that I and everybody associated with me in the Army are most jealous, should be absolutely safeguarded, I think that the members of this Dáil and the public at large, though they might be inclined to slip into little criticisms of one sort or another, from time to time, must feel fundamentally that the Army is perfectly responsive to the Government in its actions. There is another point that I feel, from time to time, more or less put into the dock about. I feel from time to time to be more or less put in the position here in this Dáil and elsewhere that I am more a soldier defending the Army in any blessed thing that the Army does than a responsible cog in the Government machine, for controlling the Army, and I feel that I am put into the position of standing up for and defending an inefficient Army and saying that it is efficient. I think that anybody who has his eyes about him can speak for the efficiency of the work that the Army has done. We have taken a very, very scattered situation and gradually pulled the threads of it so tight that you are able to see in the rough what the general effect of the work of the Army has been, in some of the southern counties by the documents you got recently. And it speaks of the final work of control in the Army that the operation in which the unfortunate Liam Lynch lost his life the other day was dictated from Headquarters here by wireless 24 hours before that. You have an Army as efficient as it has been possible to give you, and, I think, you should fully realise it and fully realise that there is no other group but the group that is controlling the Army at the present time that could have given you that Army. The dragging into public of this particular matter drags also into public in a suggestive kind of way that there is something dark and sinister and mysterious, at any rate, in the minds of those who are controlling the Army, and you have it pointed out that the "Boo"—I.R.B.—is there. If the spirit of work and the spirit of obligation, and the spirit of true disinterestedness, and a true appreciation of the country's strength and position-if that spirit which Tom Clarke and MacDermott and Pearse embodied, if that is the spirit, which for libelling purposes you can call the I.R.B., then that is our spirit. The men who are specifically mentioned in this article as being heinous persons grappling the Army for their own sinister purposes and getting it from under the control of the Government, who are they?
They are the men who practically controlled your Army for the last three or four or five years, and the spirit in which they control the Army to-day is the spirit in which they controlled it yesterday. We find ourselves to-day with Collins and Griffith gone—a nation that for decades past has leaned itself upon some national leader of one kind or other, We find ourselves to-day, whether for good or ill, without, perhaps, anything in the shape of a national leader. A national leader alone would not have sustained us in the holding together of this country under the strain of the past three or four years if you had not built up around him national institutions. You find yourselves to-day without a national leader, and—who knows?-without a National Party. And we are concerned in the Army, at any rate, in providing you with, and holding for you, a national institution that will be at the service of this Government and that will be a strength to this country. When people lightly talk of the Army and lightly criticise the Army, let them consider that particular position, and let them also consider that those who are controlling the Army at the present time and dealing with the military situation are digging deep down the roots of that institution. I think those who control the Army to-day have fairly well made it to be realised to the country what they feel with regard to the Army. We do not believe we are organising an Army here in Ireland for war. We do believe that it would be as disastrous at any time to get into war with a neighbouring country—whether we were to emerge from it successfully or not—as it was disastrous for France to get into war with Germany. We are not building a war machine. We are not building a machine that, as somebody said, is simply "a band of armed men preying on the country." We are building a machine that, in the first place, has pulled the country through the very difficult situation it got into, and which, in the second place, will be the home for the development of all those particular characteristics which will go to make an Irish character we may be proud of.
The newspaper which has been quoted from has for several years set itself out to libel every man in this country who is trying to do good work in the national cause. The Dublin special correspondent-a very able, flippant newspaper writer-has been particularly offensive in his regular attacks upon the character of those who have been leading public affairs in Ireland during the past few years. He has sometimes been able to get hold of information respecting intimate matters concerning Government. Frequently he was able to get hold of such matters under the old regime, but he has occasionally been able to get hold of such matters under the new regime. But no matter what truth there may be in any specific statement, the general character of his writings discounts everything which is truthful in his articles. Nobody on this side of the Channel, and I do not think very many on the other side, will read those articles except for the purpose of extracting a laugh, or feeling that he is a word-manipulator at any rate. The statement of the Minister for Defence is reassuring—I should not say reassuring—it is a further assurance that he, at any rate, desires to keep the Army under the control of the civil authority. I, for one, never doubted that that was his desire and intention, and I believe that if the Army were under his control we would have much less to complain of and to criticise than we have. I fear that it is not sufficiently under his control and that that fact is responsible for many of the things that we would much prefer we did not hear of or see. I shall not pursue that at the moment, because I shall have to take another opportunity of raising matters in connection with the conduct of the Army. I feel that we ought to say that the Minister has our confidence as the head of the Army, and we hope that his spirit and his determination will really and in fact inspire the Army, and that it will not be allowed to be over-ridden by those who would undo the good work he tries to do.
The Dáil adjourned at 6.15 p.m.