When speaking on this debate on the last day I pointed out that this Bill proposes to amend the Constitution and that it does not state specifically that it amends it. Leaving that point I just want to put before the Dáil before this Bill goes to a vote that we are asked to vote a sum of money which amounted last year to over £200,000 and which amounts almost to the same thing this year, and that no one in the country has any definite information as to where that money is going. They only know that a few members of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party and a judge appointed by the Cumann na nGaedhcal Government sat for a while and made up their minds that it was a good thing from their own point of view to give certain moneys to certain people throughout the country. We have pressed time and again for lists of names and addresses of the pensioners throughout the country and we have been refused these addresses. A couple of years ago we asked for a list of addresses and names and we got lists of names with no addresses. The Minister made the excuse that it would entail a great deal of work in his Department to give us the addresses. I think it entails very much more work in the Minister's Department to jumble up the lists which he gave us in the fashion in which they were jumbled up, than would have been entailed by giving us the lists and the addresses. We got a long jumble of names from all over the country. They were jumbled up. They were neither in alphabetical order nor in counties, and we had to go to the trouble of compiling them from the counties and putting them into alphabetical order in order to make some effort to find out who were getting pensions.
I think the people of the country have a right to know who are getting military service pensions, and the only way by which they will be able to know that is by the Department of Defence publishing lists containing the addresses of the different pensioners. The Minister has made no case why those addresses should not be given. I hope before this debate concludes that he will, at least, promise to publish a list with the addresses. On the Second Reading in Committee Stage we examined this Bill very thoroughly. It was shown definitely that a large number of the pensioners did not receive their pensions until 1927. Some of those pensioners were located in the Co. Monaghan. They did not receive their pensions until the two elections of 1927. The Minister has given no reasonable explanation whatsoever as to why, if these men were entitled to their pensions, they did not get them until Mr. Blythe got into a tight corner in the Co. Monaghan. Deputy Ward asked questions about a few of the pensioners whom he located in Co. Monaghan. The Minister gave no reasonable explanation as to why these men did not receive their pensions until 1927. On the Committee Stage the Minister made some effort to gloss over the facts, but Deputy Ward's case is still there to be answered. I think anyone reading Deputy Ward's speech and the speech of the Minister for Defence will see that the Minister for Defence failed to answer the case put up by Deputy Ward. I hope Deputy Ward will point out to-day exactly the points which the Minister glossed over, and how futile was the case made by the Minister.