This faction, although it is a minority in this country, to-day enjoys a position of unexampled power and privilege. It is powerful within the counsels of the Executive Council. I might go further and say to the Minister that it controls the Executive Council, and I challenge him to deny it. To serve the purpose of that party, to secure its support in the House, the President introduced this Bill. Was there ever in all history so disgraceful a bargain, that the rights secured to the people by the Constitution should be stolen from them by the Government, taken without their consent, and virtually, on account of the attitude the Press has taken up, without their knowledge, stolen from them and used to purchase the support of a faction whose votes are necessary to maintain that Government in office?
There never was and never will be a bargain of that sort that did not inevitably and eventually drive those who made it to the potter's field of politicians. Clare and Castlereagh are not the only Irish politicians who found dishonoured graves. I have referred to the price which the Government has had to pay in order to secure themselves in office, in order that they might carry out and make dominant the political principles which the Minister for Lands and Agriculture avowed here openly, for the first time I believe in this House, a few minutes ago. This man who does not want dishonest political issues raised in Ireland, who says that the people are sick of politics and want to have a rest from them, is afraid to put before the people an issue which is not, in the sense in which the word is being used as a term of contempt or as a sneer, a political issue, but a big fundamental issue—he is afraid to put before the people a principle to which the Government you have to-day gave lip service in their Constitution. This Minister will not allow the people to vote and decide whether, in fact, they want to have the last word and the final judgment upon the action of the Executive Council, not five years afterwards when it may be too late to save the country from the ill-consequences of that action, but at the moment when the action is contemplated and before it is carried through. The people are not to have the last word upon such an issue. The Minister for Lands and Agriculture says that it is a dishonest trick to ask that they should, before this House passes a Bill which proposes to delete the Article of the Constitution that provides that every amendment practically to the Constitution shall, if a significant minority in the House require it, be submitted to the people for a final verdict. The Minister for Lands and Agriculture, who avowed himself a politician so unscrupulous, so determined and so incurably a politician that he was determined to use every article of the Constitution, every trick and every artifice which that twopenny lawyer's mind of his, as he said himself, could think of in order to defeat the policy of the minority party in this House, says it is a trick. I make bold to say this: that not only is it the policy of the minority party sitting here on the Fianna Fáil Benches as avowed Republicans, but that it is the policy of those sitting on the Labour Benches who, I verily believe, are Irish Nationalists. It is also the policy of a good many who, still misguided and still afraid to stand up and to assert their native manhood and still afraid to stand up for the rights of their country, nevertheless follow that Minister with distrust and with uneasiness, at the same time believing in the same fundamental principles of Irish nationality that we do.
The Minister for Lands and Agriculture, who thinks that the people are tired and sick of polities, because he himself is sick of politics, sick and tired of the politics which he expounded in order that he might rise to position and power on the ladder up which he has climbed, now when he finds himself entrenched in a position which some years ago he never dreamed of occupying, wants to kick that ladder aside and to say to the people: "Forget everything I told you and forget everything I preached to you, and above all things forget what I told you six years ago—that this Constitution which we are framing is going to be a weapon that you can use to secure the full measure of your rights," to secure, as the late Kevin O'Higgins himself said, "the things that you have written upon your banners."
I was going on to refer to the fact that there had been a bargain made in this House, a bargain which I said was a disgraceful and dishonourable bargain, and a bargain which I believe will ultimately end in disaster for those who have been parties to it. The minority in this House think that they have secured something by that bargain. That thought is wholly illusory and vam. They have secured nothing. When the majority of the Irish people, as I said at the beginning, declare for freedom, nothing that is in the Treaty, nothing that is in the Constitution, no power vested in the Seanad and no power vested in any officer of this House, no instrument of that Government is going to stand between them and their rights. The chain that Deputy Cooper set the Executive Council to forge for the Irish people will melt like a rope of snow, but before that happens something else will have disappeared. The Imperialists, notwithstanding the power which the present necessities of the Government has endowed them with, have purchased nothing, nothing of any permanence and nothing of any value. They have purchased nothing, but for the first time they have given all. The only practical safeguards that a minority had under this Constitution were the safeguards provided by Articles 47 and 48.
The character of the people, according to the Minister for Lands and Agriculture, was a great safeguard, but the character of the people, the justice and the sense of equity which is innate in the people, never can become operative when Articles 47 and 48 are removed. Those who sit on the Benches on this side know from sad experience that there is no safeguard whatever in the character of this House and of this assembly. This House is not a legislature. This House is not a deliberative assembly. This House is the instrument of a caucus which dominates, controls and determines for the majority Party in this House. Let us realise what constitutional government has come to. Since we came into this Dáil, was there ever upon any single vital issue a free vote of the House taken with the Whips off, when every man might vote as his own judgment and conscience dictated? Has that ever been known?
Many of you have been here for the last six years. Did any one of you, on any vital issue of truth and justice where a man's conscience had to decide for him, ever have the privilege of exercising that conscience and voting according to its dictates? When the time came, as Deputy Lemass said, you were driven like sheep by the Whips into the Lobby. Is not that the great defect of representative government at present? There is no open decision. The decision is by a caucus sitting in secret for a purpose which it never divulges, and the decision is made effective by the majority in this House. That is my answer to the Minister for Lands and Agriculture, and I tell him that, as the experience of the past few weeks has proved to us beyond denial, there is no safeguard in the character of the Deputies here, that the majority which could deprive the people of the rights conferred on them by Article 47 of the Constitution, without allowing that important issue to be submitted to the people directly in order to have the peoples' own unmistakable verdict on it, whether by five per cent. or fifty-five per cent. they declare for it, does not matter. But the majority that could do that, and is capable of it, that has the power under Article 50 of prolonging the life of this Parliament indefinitely, and suspending every member of this Party indefinitely, and of proclaiming a military dictatorship if it cared to do so, is what we are living under.
This Constitution has been time and again suspended. This Constitution never became a reality. It was never given full, complete, and unequivocal effect. When there was a measure that infringed Article 6, when there was a measure which affected the liberty of the person, which under this Constitution is declared to be inviolable, the President produced a resolution in the self-same terms as he has produced the Resolution to-day, and virtually suspended the Constitution in order that he might govern without it. We are told that there are certain fundamental Articles in the Constitution, but that Articles 47 and 48 are not fundamental Articles. Would any person in this Dáil tell me what are the fundamental Articles of the Constitution? We are told we are a free people living under a free Constitution, and yet we are told that the Articles which make the people undeniably and effectively sovereign over this Government and Dáil are now to be taken out of the Constitution on the grounds that they are not fundamental to the Constitution and can be dispensed with. What are the fundamental Articles of the Constitution? Are Articles 2, 3, 4 and 5 fundamental? Article 6 has been suspended time and again. Apparently one fundamental Article is Article 17, which compels every representative of the people sitting in this House to take an oath of allegiance that "I will be faithful to His Majesty King George." The Article of the Constitution which cannot be abrogated or deleted by this House, the only fundamental Article I know of, according to the arguments that have been put forward in justification for these Bills, and in justification for the motion, is Article 17 of the Constitution, "That I will be faithful to His Majesty King George V., his heirs and successors by law." When was that throne ever faithful to this people? What claim has it on the allegiance of this people?