Vol. 3 No. 19
I beg to move. "That a sum not exceeding £28,854 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the charge which will come in the course of payment during the year ending 31st March, 1924, for the salaries and expenses of the Criminal Investigation Department."
A sum of £18,700 has already been voted on account.
I do not think this particular Department is one upon which the Minister for Home Affairs can be wholeheartedly congratulated. Looking at the figures for last year and for this year I observe, with some surprise, that the figures have gone up this year to more than double. One might have hoped that with the dawn of peace a peace policy would be possible, even in the C.I.D., but these figures do not seem to show it. The first question that one asks oneself is a question which I hope the Minister will be good enough to deal with. It is how many Criminal Investigation Departments are there, how many detective forces are there, and into how many sub-divisions is the C.I.D. divided. One hears of detective departments of various kinds, but official information on the subject is difficult to get. One has heard, during the past few months of crimes which all the detectives and all the detective departments put together have been unable to trace. If we are spending £40,000 a year, and more, on secret service, it should not be possible for crimes of a political character to be committed and to recur—for it has happened more than once or twice—without evidence being obtainable to convict the guilty parties. It is a very serious state of affairs in a new State that such things should be possible, as some of the undetected crimes that we have read of in recent times. Now, I have a good deal of sympathy with the normal decent detective as such, because he has a very unpleasant job and a very difficult task, but I cannot help feeling that a section of the present detective force has not been recruited in the right place or from the right source. Comparing some of your men with the Civic Guard you will see what I mean. We should have as fine a force in Oriel House as the force which commands universal respect under General O'Duffy, but we have not. One of these C.I.D. men the other day put it very frankly. There are, he said, 200 of us natural gunmen. Well, that somehow, is not my idea of a State detective I quite understand that circumstances have been abnormal, but I should like to hear the Minister inform us that the service is going to be combed out, and that the men who are not satisfactory will not be retained. One has to make a great deal of allowance for propaganda in times like these, and I make every allowance for it, but there is no man in this Dáil but is well aware that the conduct of certain members of the detective forces has been exceedingly reprehensible. There is no doubt at all that it has become a habit with some of them, when making a raid to treat the person raided, ipso facto, as an enemy of the State whom they are called upon to punish, and to launch forth all kinds of threats, and to do a good deal of damage in the house, to use language which ought not to be used and to pilfer and purloin. I am not making this as a general charge, because, as I say, one does not know where propaganda ends and where truth begins, but one does know that that charge is true in a large number of cases. I should like to have a little more evidence of strict control, a little more evidence of real discipline, and a little more certainty that a man in the detective force who misconducts himself will know that he is going to be punished for it, instead of having the matter treated lightly as a casual incident. The Dáil must remember that the persons whom you entrust with this very invidious duty must necessarily be given very considerable power, and, therefore, it is doubly necessary that you should be exceedingly vigilant to see that you have only the right men, and, if a wrong man gets in, that he is punished for wrong-doing. I am not satisfied that that is being done. I am satisfied that there is an element in that force that is not what it should be, and that should not have been allowed to enter it. Now, during the past months, of course, these men have been doing a good deal of political work as well as ordinary criminal work, but surely it is not anticipated that that will go on indefinitely, or at all events, not on the scale on which it has been going on for the past nine months. I ask the Minister to tell us why it is that this very substantial increase should be necessary at a moment when we are beginning to resume something like normal life.
When we were discussing a similar estimate before, I asked the Minister for Home Affairs to increase the amount and enlarge the service, as I considered that this was an absolutely essential service. At that time the country was reeking with crime, and I am certainly much surprised to hear Deputy Gavan Duffy criticise so severely the members of the C.I.D. I have not met them, but I move around a good deal among the people, and I have not heard people find fault with them. You cannot expect to raise a body of archangels or immaculates when you are dealing with a horde of criminals who go out at dead of night with revolvers, and give you half an hour to pay up £20 or they will burn your house. When they go, bomb in hand or with land mines, and blow up your house and all it possesses, or when they go with the petrol tin and saturate children in bed, what can you expect? I think it is just as well that a person should express what he feels, and I feel that the country is well satisfied with the work which the C.I.D. have performed, and it realises and appreciates it. £40,000 in this Estimate is, to my mind, very small for a Criminal Investigation Department that has broken the backbone of the greatest conspiracy that was ever engineered to destroy a Government. For the past two months in the City of Dublin it was absolutely necessary to destroy that criminal organisation. The C.I.D. started out to destroy it, and they did it remarkably well. As in all sections, there may be black sheep amongst them, but, as a whole, I think I am right in saying that they have been a splendid and highly discipline organisation. I am sorry that we did not have them in Cork and other parts, for, if we had, the crimes that were committed would not have been heard of. I hope we shall have the C.I.D. with us for some time.
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.
This is the third time the Minister has misrepresented me. I specifically stated that I was attacking that section of the force that has misbehaved itself.
Incidentally it is an excellent way of signalling to a certain section of the population by condemning the C.I.D. They are both hated and feared for the work they have done by that section, and it is a way of signalling to that section to condemn them. My position and that of my Department is clear. We do not face this Dáil stating that everything in that institution is as it should be. We do state that in view of the difficulties of the last year, in view of the pell-mell, haphazard way in which the institution was formed, simply a bunch of tough men, if you like, being sent in under their own officers, by the late General Collins, considering the circumstances of that time since, as much has been done towards bringing that force into a state of efficiency as is humanly possible to do. I have no apologies to offer for it. The time will come when the country will have some real appreciation and gratitude for the work those men have got in within the last six or seven months. Its future is under consideration. I have no definite conclusion to lay before the Dáil on this Estimate, and essentially it is a thing which is receiving consideration. But if the country gets as good value for all the Estimates as it got for that particular sum, it would have reason to congratulate itself.
