I think "in so far as it may be repugnant to the Treaty." The section is:—
The said Constitution shall be construed with reference to the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland set forth in the Second Schedule hereto annexed (hereinafter referred to as "the Scheduled Treaty") which are hereby given the force of law, and if any provision of the said Constitution or of any amendment thereof or of any law made thereunder is in any respect repugnant to any of the provisions of the Scheduled Treaty, it shall, to the extent only of such repugnancy, be absolutely void and inoperative and the Parliament and the Executive Council of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) shall respectively pass such further legislation and do all such other things as may be necessary to implement the Scheduled Treaty.
It is quite clear, therefore, that by means of this section Great Britain can veto and does purport to veto legislation passed by the Oireachtas. Again I would like to ask the Minister for External Affairs, whose duty it will be to reply, to show how so long as that section in the Constitution Act remains and is operative Great Britain and ourselves can be co-equal in status.
If Great Britain and ourselves are co-equal we are equally a sovereign State with her. It does not require any acute exercise of logic to follow that. A sovereign State is one which exercises full and exclusive control over all persons and things within the territory occupied by it. Have we undisputed and exclusive control over all persons and things in the territory of the Irish Free State? Have we, for instance, undisputed and exclusive control over the Governor-General in his executive capacity? Have we undisputed and exclusive control over our harbours, over Lough Swilly, Berehaven and Cobh? Have we full and exclusive control, or has any person the right to veto the laying of submarine cables or the establishment of wireless stations upon our shores, or can we refuse to permit Great Britain to run such cables and to establish such stations for communication with places outside this country? If the Minister can answer these questions in the affirmative, then I will admit that he has gone a long way to prove we are co-equal with Great Britain. If, for any reason, he cannot answer them in this way, then the statement that we are co-equal with Great Britain is untrue.
The declaration of 1926 asserts that the Dominions are freely associated with the Commonwealth of Nations. The test of free and voluntary association is the power to discontinue such association should the associate so desire. There seems to be no doubt that that is the position as far as Canada, South Africa and Australia are concerned. Mr. Bonar Law, on the 31st March, 1920, declared in the House of Commons:
There is no man in this House who would not admit that the connection of the Dominions with the Empire depends upon themselves. If the self-governing Dominions chose to say to-morrow: "We will no longer make a part of the British Empire," we would not force them.
Later, in 1923, Viscount Sandham, in the House of Lords, declared that any self-governing Dominion was free to secede at any moment it wished. Sir Robert Borden, then Prime Minister, asserted in the Canadian Parliament, on the 17th August, 1925, that Canada was free to leave the British Empire if it chose. Later still, in 1927, General Hertzog, in South Africa, declared that the right of secession had been acknowledged by the Conference of 1926, and that there was no longer any doubt in this regard.
We have those statements by the Dominion Premiers on the one hand and by British Ministers on the other. I ask the Minister for External Affairs do these statements apply unequivocally and without reservation to the Irish Free State? The right of secession has been granted in the case of South Africa and Canada. Does the Minister claim that right in the case of the Irish Free State? I think the Minister is bound to answer that question. The Minister has put this Report before this House; he sponsors it here. I think he is bound to stand over its statements and have the courage to declare, as the South African and Canadian Ministers have declared in respect of their people, that in the present circumstances this is in reality and in fact a free association, and that this country has the right to secede, peacefully secede, from the British Empire should the majority of her citizens so desire, and that that right in the case of this State has been freely acknowledged by Great Britain, as it has been in the case of South Africa and of Canada.
I think it is all the more necessary that the Minister should make a statement of this sort in view of the statements which have been made elsewhere as to the purpose and value of the Report of the last Imperial Conference. For instance, in the Canadian Parliament, Mr. Bourassa, dealing with the 1926 Report, upon which the present Report is based, pointed out that there was a fundamental contradiction between the conception of Canada as remaining within the Empire and being at the same time a fully sovereign independent State. Dealing with that point, Mr. Mackenzie King replied that the declaration as to status had served the important purpose of allaying the discontent in the Irish Free State. Later, a further authority, Professor Keith, dealing with the position which the Conference of 1926 had created, made this statement:
Nor in any evaluation of the work of Lord Balfour and his colleagues can there be forgotten the real value of the Report in enabling the Governments of the Irish Free State and the Union of South Africa to make headway against those elements in their Dominions which were pressing for the adoption by their Governments of the doctrine of absolute independence and the secession of membership of the British Empire.
I think that statements like that make it incumbent upon the Minister to clarify the position. He tells us this is the biggest constitutional record which has yet emanated from an Imperial Conference.
The Minister for Defence has asked us to point out any ambiguities, any anomalies, so that they may be clarified and all doubts removed. I should like, in regard to this question of free association, that the Minister should clarify the doubt which is in our mind and the minds of the people of the country, the doubt which he and his colleagues have traded upon for political purposes. Are we a free association or are we not? Have we free association, and have we the right to secede? If so, will the Minister, in virtue of the fact of our free association, declare to the Irish people that they have the right to freely and peacefully secede from the British Empire any time a majority of them may so determine?
The Imperial Conference of 1926 also declared that the States of the Commonwealth are in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs. Is this a true statement of our position? Are we in any way subordinate to Great Britain? The Minister, I take it, in virtue of the fact that he has presented the Report containing the paragraph upon which my speech has been mainly based, declared that we are not in any way subordinate. Very well. Let us examine it. If we are not a subordinate State, then we should have full and exclusive right to make laws for the inhabitants of this State, and our actions in this regard should not be subject to any interference by any other State, not even by Great Britain itself. We should, therefore, have full control over our representative institutions and be able freely to determine for ourselves how they shall be constituted. In particular, it ought to be possible for us to abolish, if we so desire, all tests or conditions limiting the right of any representative chosen by the people to sit in this Dáil. If, therefore, the statement that we are not subordinate in any way to Great Britain be true, it ought to be possible for us, without interference from Great Britain, to abolish Article 17 of the Constitution, and to remove the great barrier which at present prevents this House from being truly representative of the people of the twenty-six counties.
I ask the Minister, in view of the statement that has issued from the Imperial Conference, and the text of the Report which he presents to the House, has the Oireachtas power to abolish the oath of allegiance? Will the Minister, in the course of his reply, deal with that question, or is it falling upon deaf ears? "There are none so deaf as they who will not hear." It would be very difficult for the Minister to say that the terms of the Report that he has presented to this House are consistent with the terms of the Treaty. As I said in the beginning of my speech, one or other must go. If the Report is valid, then the Treaty falls. If the Treaty stands, the Report is a sham and make-believe, and the Minister is conscious of that fact. If we are not subordinate in any way whatsoever, then no outside or external power has a right to exact or to extort from the citizens of this State an oath of allegiance which no honest Irishman would ever freely or truthfully give. The fact of the matter is that the more we analyse this Report, and the more we analyse the Report of 1926, the more we see that the Conference was one demanding unusual talent in devising formula which would command general acceptance but which would also allow each of the Dominions to claim that its special point of view had been given full effect to.
The Minister made great play with the question of reservation and the question of disallowance. The power of disallowance has been lopped off, but the fact of the matter is that the power of disallowance had not, in fact, been exercised since 1873, and I do not think that in latter years the question of reservation arose at all. These were merely accidental prerogatives of Great Britain. They had been abolished years ago, and the only thing that the Conference of 1926 and 1929 did was to lop off the dead timber. But in the Report the trunk of British hegemony still remains. But not even one shoot in which a vestige of life remains has been pruned, as witness the legislation effecting trustee stocks. In this regard, the official organ of the Government—"The Star"—whose editorials, I believe, are sometimes written by a very important member of the Executive Council—states that the present Treasury requirements in this matter are clearly more political than financial in their object.
That, of course, is not the view the Minister for External Affairs put before the House and the Minister for Defence. They stress the point that the provisions of the Trustee Acts are purely financial in their intention. The "Star" for some reason or another has spilled the beans upon the Minister and contends that—and so the Minister and those associated with him contended before they went to the Imperial Conference—that the provisions of the Trustee Acts are political and not merely financial.
There is one other point I want to touch on. This Report of the Imperial Conference does propose a very real and a very vital change in the Imperial relations. That change strange to say, was not stressed at all by the Minister in the course of his speech. I refer to paragraph 60 of the Report, which says:
Inasmuch as the Crown is the symbol of the free association of the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and as they are united by a common allegiance to the Crown, it would be in accord with the established constitutional position of all the members of the Commonwealth in relation to one another that any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Style and Titles shall hereafter require the assent as well of the Parliaments of all the Dominions as of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
I think that is the real reason why this Report has been brought into the House and why the Minister is asking the House to approve of it, in order that the House may be committed to the paragraph I have just read. It is clear that the argument of the Minister hitherto has been that the Dominions have full sovereign power, full right of legislation in all matters appertaining to themselves. This paragraph proposes to impose a limitation in one particular matter which is of primary and vital concern to us. As I have already said, declarations have been made by responsible Prime Ministers of other Dominions claiming the right to secede, and Great Britain has admitted the right so far as they are concerned, and this new convention which is to publish and clearly record in the Report of the Imperial Conference seeks to limit and take away that right.
Again, in the words of the editorial in the official organ of the Executive Council, "the effect of this Convention will be that a Dominion can constitutionally do everything except declare itself a republic. It can only separate itself from the Commonwealth by revolutionary and extra-constitutional action." Mark the change! Responsible Prime Ministers in other Dominions have claimed, and Great Britain has acknowledged the right of those Dominions to secede. That claim and its acknowledgment by the British Ministers, that action in admitting that in the particular circumstances governing the British constitutional relations, the Dominions have a right to secede, created a constitutional right, and therefore a right which the Dominions could freely exercise without Great Britain saying yea or nay. But according to the "Star," and not only to the "Star," but to the plain commonsense interpretation of the paragraph, it is clear that if the House approve of this principle, and if it be also approved by all the other Dominion States, that that constitutional right to secede will be denied to everyone of them, and that in the words of the "Star," henceforward "a Dominion can only separate from the Commonwealth by revolutionary or extra-constitutional action."
Therefore, if the people of this country were by a majority to declare for a republic, it might be asserted by Great Britain that not only in view not only of the adherence of the present Minister for External Affairs, and of the present Government, to the Report now before the House, but in view of the approval of that Report by this House, the Irish people had surrendered their natural right to secede, except with the full consent of the Parliaments of the Dominions and the Parliament of Great Britain.
This paragraph raises also another very important issue, because it is an attempt to exercise group control over individual Dominions. Hitherto it has been contended that the Dominion States were autonomous, sovereign, independent States. It has been contended that this is a perfectly free association in which every State had the fullest liberty of action, apart from the fact that considerations of courtesy and goodwill might require that there should be, from time to time, consultations between the States as to lines of action. But that consultation was merely an act of grace and not an act of duty, and if as a result of that consultation other States objected to the course of action which a Dominion proposed to take, that did not and could not be held to prevent the Dominion from pursuing its original intention irrespective of the views the Dominions consulted might have in regard to it.
This creates a perfectly new situation. It is clear that in so far as this particular question of the Crown is concerned the individual Dominions are going to be placed in a condition of subordination to the aggregate group which is being called the British Commonwealth. It is clear, therefore, that in this connection the sovereignty of the King of Great Britain is only being exchanged for the sovereignty of the King of the British Commonwealth. Moreover, if the Commonwealth as a group takes powers, and if such powers are given to it to legislate in this one particular matter, how can it be said that later on the aggregate group will not claim further powers to abolish a bridge or alter the existing constitution of any one or more of the groups taken individually? I think that is an important factor.
The Minister for Education in the course of his speech emphasised the fact that this Report does not take a set of circumstances and freeze and fix them there for all time. I shall apply that to the recommendation in Article 60. For the first time a responsible Minister has gone to a State which, whether we like or not, we have to regard at the present time and for present purposes as a constituent State of the British Commonwealth. He recognises that the sovereignty which he hitherto has claimed has been full and absolute in all matters pertaining to the State including, no doubt, the headship of the State. He asks that Dominion to cede some portion of its full and absolute sovereignty to the Dominions as a whole. You cannot fix and freeze, as the Minister for Education said, these circumstances for all time. Once the principle of group control is admitted in this important matter it must extend to others. What I said before will hold good, that in this matter we are not only exchanging the sovereignty of Great Britain for the sovereignty of the British Commonwealth, but we are definitely making a change in status and we are receding even from the position which the Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Defence have contended has been maintained by them since 1922. They have held that they were free, sovereign and automonous States. In this matter they will be no longer autonomous and no longer sovereign. They can only act with the permission and full assent of every other constituent in the British Commonwealth.
I ask the House, in view of that fact, not to accept this Report. I notice that most of the people who used to be associated in the old Republican movement are no longer in the House. I notice that Deputy McKeon is absent, that Deputy Conlon has left the House, and I notice that all those who used to belong to the I.R.B. wing have left the House. The Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Defence, whatever else may be said against them, will have this to their credit, that in presenting this Report to the House they stressed its importance and they did not disguise or conceal from the House the step which they are asking the House to take. If you ratify the Report as a whole, you accept as binding upon yourselves paragraph 60, and the effect of that paragraph, in the words of "The Star," will be that a Dominion can constitutionally do everything except declare itself a Republic. It can never separate itself from the Commonwealth by a revolutionary or extra-constitutional action. The declaration, therefore, is intended to prevent the future peaceful evolution of this State towards complete and sovereign independence. It will bar all progress along the road upon which the Irish people have stood and the goal towards which their faces have been turned for countless generations. We should, therefore, not endorse by our vote any Report which would do this. I appeal to any member of the Cumann na nGaedheal Party who still has the old instinct strong within him, and who seriously regards the Republican oath which he swore, not to stultify himself and not to bind the hands of future generations by voting and approving of this Report.