No. They could go further. In exactly the same way a man in relation to his own individual life can exercise the whole liberty of that life in one single act to surrender himself in perpetual obedience to authority.
There is nothing undemocratic in the act. There is no violation of personal liberty in a man rolling up all the possession and exercise of his liberty into one single moment and in that moment handing the control of every act of his life, of the properties of his life, and of the functions of his life freely into the authority of someone else. Therefore, such a question as the question of whether you should set up a manager with complete authority, or with any degree of authority leading up to completeness, does not in my opinion, raise in any way the question of either liberty or democracy. But what does immediately raise the question both of liberty and democracy is that anybody else should surrender any portion of my liberty to somebody else without my consent. If machinery can be set up by which the will of the people of Dublin can be ascertained, and their will is to hand their liberty, the control of their property, and the exercise of their functions over to some man on their behalf, that is democracy as sound as you can get it. But it is a very different thing indeed when a majority made up from Sligo, Kerry and Cork, from Donegal and Waterford, comes up here and hands over the liberties of the citizens of Dublin without ascertaining the will of the citizens into the possession of somebody else. There is nothing democratic about that.
It is not a question of the degree in which you do it. You may carry devolution as far as ever you like within the ambit of your own authority, but as soon as you get outside of that authority you are simply handing over and dealing with other people's property. That is the radical difficulty, that not the citizens of Dublin, but the central government of the country is handing over the powers of the citizens of Dublin to this authority. If we want to be democratic and do this, then this central authority must provide all the funds the control of which it hands over to its representative. If this Dáil sets up machinery of any sort or kind to choose any particular man and then hands over all property to him, it should be the property of this Dáil, if it hands over to him the exercise of any liberty, it should be the liberty of this Dáil; and if it hands over to him the exercise of any authority, it should be the authority of this Dáil. This is nothing of the kind. This is a Local Government Bill for Dublin so-called, and what it is in practice is an interference of the central authority in the country to decide what Dublin citizens shall do with their property and their liberty.
It does not really matter from that point of view what amount of power you give or take from them. This act is an invasion of their right. That being so, it seems to me that the duty of people like myself— people from Wexford, Wicklow and other counties—is, as far as is humanly possible under the circumstances, to stand in the place of the citizens of Dublin and do on their behalf what the citizens want. I personally, from no communication of any sort or kind that I have had with any Deputy or any Party in this House, or from no communication I have had with any citizen of the City of Dublin, can say that they want this Bill. I think that is the position as far as the ordinary member of this House is concerned. That being so, quite apart from any question of Party or anything else, our responsibility is to see that, as far as possible, we do not allow the citizens of Dublin to have imposed upon them a Bill such as they do not want.
As to the general question of whether you should govern by a City Manager or govern by what is called a democratically elected council, I personally have no special opinion. All sorts of experiments of this kind have been tried. They tried it out in New York, to the extent that eventually they decided to elect a mayor. At the moment of the coming into office of the mayor, the existing town clerk, the city solicitor, the scavengers and everybody else went out of office. They tried that experiment. That is probably twenty-five years ago, so that the question we are discussing now is an old one. It was summed up in this way: that they were going to make a Czar; if you got a good Czar you could not do better; but if you got a bad Czar, Heaven help the State. Under the Bill of which this is an imitation—to some extent a pale imitation—you have set up a Czar in Cork. Deputy O'Higgins told us that we should approach this Bill on an assumption. You have not got to approach this Bill on any assumption. You have got to approach this Bill on a knowledge of the facts, on the actual experience of other people who have lived under a similar one. The toad beneath the harrow knows. It is not a question of what you think the toad ought to feel; he has felt it.
Why have the Cumann na nGaedheal representatives in Cork, the representatives of the Party which introduced and forced through the Dáil, by a majority of about four, the Cork Management Bill, turned against it? They have not done it because they wanted to turn against it. They certainly have not done it to provide an argument for those who opposed that Bill that they were right in opposing it and that the Government were wrong in introducing it.
Why have the Independents turned against it. They had nothing to gain one way or another; they had no prejudices and had expressed no opinions on the subject; no party loyalties of theirs were engaged in the matter. Why did they want to walk out of the council. Why have the members of the Business Party, individually, cursed and sworn at the Cork Act all over Cork. They seem to have had the effrontery to defend a Bill in public which they had attacked in unmeasured language in private. Men whose speeches you will find in the papers, saying that the Bill is a good Bill, have personally protested to me against the action of the Lord Mayor in not allowing the Bill to be broken up sooner. They did not start out to do that, but they have lived under it. They did not approach the Bill under an assumption. They came there full of ambition, many of them thinking: Now we are a City Council; we can do something; we can function and be important in our city. They might just as well have been stuffed pillars for all they could do. And that is the opinion expressed to me, time and again, by the very men who to-day can be quoted as saying in public: "Well, on the whole perhaps, yes; it is a very nice Bill"; that is just about the sort of speech you get from them now.
Now why should we in Cork who have actual experience advise or allow, without protest, other members of this House, who do not represent the City of Dublin, to impose by the authority of this Dáil that sort of legislation upon Dublin? The Lord Mayor of Cork, whose patience in this matter has been almost wonderful—certainly my patience would not have been anything like adequate to the strain—has told you some of the actual instances in which they came up against their own futility and helplessness. I shall give another, to me perhaps the most fundamental one, but that may be my way of looking at it. Under the Electricity Supply Act power was given to the Supply Board—amazing power—to cut off any area from the supply area of the City of Cork Electric Lighting and Tramway Company, and to light that area themselves. Now whether the Electricity Supply Board did that or did not do it might very materially affect the amount of money that would be paid for that undertaking, and the amount of money which, under the Act, would remain as a burden on the City of Cork. Under the Act the E.S.B. decided to consider whether or not they would cut off the richest area from the point of view of possible useful supply, and a very critical area from the point of view of development, in so far as that if it was not cut off plant would have to be put in which would then have to be bought out. They set up an inquiry under the Act to decide whether they would do so.
Now if ever there was a question of policy for a city it was there. That inquiry was held. The City Manager and city solicitor gave evidence at that inquiry, and evidence of such character as influenced the decision in that inquiry. Neither before, during or after that inquiry was there any intimation of any sort, kind, or description given to the council that such a question had arisen, that such evidence had been given or what evidence had been given, or what the decision was, or anything about it. Are we, who are not citizens of Dublin, having that experience, entitled either to advise the citizens of Dublin to take such a Bill, or to ask the Dáil to impose it upon them?
As far as I can see the Bill, the only effective rights that the Dublin Corporation will have, as the only effective rights that we in Cork have, is to go on strike. Now we have that right. We do not draw up the estimates and we have no power to alter them. We have power to accept or reject the estimates, and we can keep on rejecting estimates long enough to shut down the services of the city. And that is the only effective powers that we have. Deputy O'Higgins told us that the power of the purse was everything. If your power over the purse is restricted to not spending money on something that you want to spend it on, what is the value of the amount of the control? Nothing. I have power to starve my family by refusing to provide supplies. But that is not any good. We have not under this Bill power to decide the sort of supply, or the nature of the supply or the amount. We have got simply one-sided control. You have negative control of the purse; the manager has positive control. I do not advise Dublin to accept that. Deputy O'Higgins made his whole speech in the first half sentence. He said: "I approach this Bill as a 100 per cent. supporter of the Government." As to the question of reserved power of the manager, he said: "Yes, things are really bad. The House is not liking this Bill. But if it is a question of for the Bill or against the Bill, the Bill will go. Let me put the case ad miseracordiam. Let me see if we cannot clarify it in Committee." That was an ingenious speech of the kind that we used to get from Deputy Cooper. I always admired Deputy Cooper for the way he responded when called upon to get the Government out of a difficulty. The Bill as it now stands, if left to an honest vote of the House, would be thrown out.
An honest vote of Cumann na nGaedheal alone would throw out the Bill so we must not do that. Let us go into Committee, and, he asked, "may I be permitted, always on the understanding that if I am denied I know that I am denied because it is for the best, to make a few suggestions?" His suggestion is that if the council disagree with the manager by a two-third majority then the decision goes back to the Minister for Local Government. Well, it is still in Dublin anyway. When we were discussing this in Committee the last time we tried every possible variant of method of attempting to get alternative control. Every one of them was thrown out. The Cork Bill was the perfect method. What would have happened assuming that provision had been in operation in the Cork Bill in the last year? This Bill is the same as the Cork Bill. We would have been coming during the year to a Minister who, after a year, drafts exactly the same Bill. That is the man to whom we are to go and ask really you ought not to give us more powers when after a year's meditation he throws at the City of Dublin the same thing he threw at us. That I think probably was what Deputy O'Higgins referred to when he spoke of certain kinds of muddled thinking. At the present moment the meetings of the council are just a nuisance to the manager. They just impede him in the function he now performs as the sole controller of the city. As far as I know, there are only four meetings which there is any necessity under the Bill to have. We have in Cork a vain attempt made to put some life and reality into this thing. We had arranged to have some other meetings; but as Deputy French said it is purely a matter of courtesy whether the manager comes to them or not, and it is purely a matter of courtesy whether he comes to the four statutory meetings or not. As far as I can see there is no particular reason why he should supply, even to the four statutory meetings, any information of any importance. Yet this is the skeleton around which flesh and blood have to be put to make a great and greater city out of the Dublin of the Pale.
They have introduced another very interesting clause into this, and again it is one I personally am not going to say I wholly and completely disagree with. That is a clause in which some representation is given on a varying basis founded on the particular nature of your holding in the city. I would be inclined myself, if it were a question of that kind, if a man could show that he had one hundred employees, to consider him very much. If he was engaged in a business of manufacture as distinct from a business of distribution, I could see quite a case for that if the case that is put forward is that those people cannot be represented under the ordinary franchise. But what has been our experience in Cork? There was a council of twenty-one elected. Fianna Fáil got two members. I much rather that they had not gone forward at all. I did not want them to go forward. Cumann na nGaedheal got either two or three. Those were the two big organised parties, and that is all they got out of the twenty-one. Labour got two. The three organised parties together, with all their resources, did not get one-third of the representation. Now, it does not look, on that basis, as if an individual with an individual outlook, and individual interests, were likely to fail to get elected. These very people for whom you are now manufacturing a special franchise got six votes. They got as much as the organised parties put together. Now, under this Bill you are going to give them another four. That makes ten. Is there any case shown in regard to the success which what are called business candidates met with in the City of Cork for the necessity of making special provision for business candidates? Personally I think not. If, for instance, we had been using the Bill in Cork for some years, and due to the fact that there was better organisation in political parties than there was in economic parties, who, it had been shown, could not get representation on that basis for what are called the business community, I personally would have been in favour of providing machinery by which they would, just as if I found that the operation of any other law of election of that kind meant that there were permanently excluded from representation a section which ought to be represented, obtain representation. That has been found in this Dáil, and in other elections by proportional representation, but certainly on our experience there and on the comparative successes, the amazing successes, if you like to put it, of the business party in that election, you cannot found a case that they must be spoon-fed with special votes in order to be elected.
Now some people suggest that all this Bill wants is that in some little detail here and there the things that are obscured shall be made clear. Well now, on the face of our experience, does it look as if it were a question merely of clearing up details? It looks to be a case of radical alteration or nothing. The structure is so ruinous and of a design so bad that it calls for complete reconstruction with different material, and of a different design in another place. That would be my definition of the clarification that is required in this Bill. Dublin, in six or eight months of the use of this Bill, would be sick of it, sick not merely of the party who gave it, but sick of this Dáil as a whole, that had the effrontery to take into its hands the power, the rights, the liberty and responsibility of the citizens of Dublin and put them into this form. I am perfectly sure of it. I have nothing to alter as far as I am personally concerned. In anything I have said in relation to the Cork Bill from the very beginning, I have always been absolutely in favour of the clearest and most distinct dissociation between the regulation of policy and the control of executive acts. Take out of the power of what are called democratically-elected representatives patronage and you can give them any other power of any kind you like, because the wrong ones will not go there, as there will be nothing for them to go there for. Set up, if you like, a Czar if the City of Dublin wants him, and let him govern, and I certainly will not interfere and say that the City of Dublin is undemocratic in setting up a Czar to govern. Set up a council, if you like, which has authority and which has continuous control. That is the issue, continuous control of policy, power to continue it or to change it, but do not put up a camouflage of a council. The only effective thing that the City of Cork Council were able to do was to give the Freedom of the City to an actor-manager who played mixed hockey with the population. Nothing else. I challenge anybody to show any other single executive act which in all that time they have been able to do. You can, if you like, give the Freedom of the City to an actor who plays mixed hockey with the population. You have that power, but it does not seem to be enough power to go through all the machinery of having to elect a council for it. Either give your council an amount of responsibility of that kind, a power which will bring to the services of that council responsible men who will have pride in the work they are able to do, or frankly and honestly go on administering, as an act of authority of this Dáil, through its Minister for Local Government, the whole business. Do not fool with it. Do one thing or the other. Let us either have a Czar or a council with some authority, but do not let us make a fool of ourselves. And we are making a fool of ourselves. Do not let us make a fool of the capital city of this State by offering it what everybody knows will be simply a mockery of self-government.
