When I was coming up from the country to-day, there were 60 young fellows going from the County Mayo to England, fleeing the country as emigrants. Up to this, the exodus used to be confined to the Friday train, but now it has overflowed on to the Tuesday train. We are now witnesses, for the first time since I was a very small child, of the old traditional picture of the relatives down at the railway station caoining the departing emigrant. In the face of that fact, the President of the Executive Council and his Ministers have answered "Well, we admit that this tide of emigration is flowing, but if it is, it is flowing no faster than it flowed in the days of our predecessors, and therefore, it ill becomes our predecessors to upbraid us." I do urge on the President to come down from the Olympian heights on which he has dwelt for the last few years to a recollection of the circumstances with which he is familiar, having been reared in a country house in this country. During the years 1921 to 1929, the United States of America was an expanding country where there obtained a standard of living far higher than any that obtained in Europe, and the result of it was that from Ireland, Germany, Greece, Italy and every European country there was a strong tide of emigration flowing to America because they wanted there to enjoy the higher standard of living that was available.
It was not a case of people fleeing from Ireland because they could not get a livelihood in Ireland. It was a case of people deliberately saying to themselves: "The livelihood we can get in Ireland, plus the amenity of living at home, cannot be compared with the standard of living we can get by going to live with our relatives in America." I saw them going and I knew them personally. I knew their fathers and mothers and knew all their belongings, and they did not go as emigrants, in the old sense of the word. There was no lamentation about their going; on the contrary, their parents were eager to see them go for two reasons, firstly, they thought it provided the means for these boys and girls to get on in the world and, secondly, to be quite frank, they looked forward to the cheques that would come home from America, and they came in a golden flood. Far from having the American wake that we used to have in the old days, they were eager to see them go and, mind you, the wake at the departure of emigrants for America was in many ways as grievous and as sorrowful a function as the wake for a deceased relative. There was just as much grief and sorrow, when I was a child, about the departure of one of the young people to America as there was if they were mourning his death; but in the years to which I now refer, from 1921 to 1929, there was no mourning. There was universal rejoicing. Their parents knew they were going out to relatives; they knew they were going to a good job; and they knew they would be coming back within a decade, rich visitors, and come back bearing riches with them, they always did, and then went back to America again and in 90 per cent. of cases, married and settled down. By the time they had acquired family responsibilities of their own in America, younger brothers, nephews and nieces went out after them and so you had a steady stream of money coming home to Ireland and a steady efflux of emigrants from this country not in any spirit of desolation or despair, but in a spirit of eager anticipation, facing a new world and confident that they were going to do better for themselves and for those they left behind than if they remained in Ireland.
The emigration that is going on now is of an entirely different character. The emigration that is going on now is the emigration of boys and girls who are going to England looking for work, not because they anticipate they are going to have a very much better time in England than they had when at home, but because they cannot get work, and cannot get any profitable occupation at home at all, and because the farm will not yield sufficient to justify the employment of growing children in the way it used to do. There is no use telling me that the girl of 15 years, who emigrates to Brondesbury to become a servant in a lower middle-class family in London, looks forward to a higher standard of living than she would enjoy on her mother's place in Ballaghaderreen because she does not. She is enjoying a very much lower standard of living. Bear this in mind, because it is time somebody spoke out plainly on this question: parents would not let girls go into those positions if they could keep them at home. There is grave danger, both to the morals and to the faith of many of the girls going to England at the present time. I do not want to exaggerate the problem, nor do I want to suggest that the Government would not attempt to deal with these difficulties if they could devise a plan, but I am stating with absolute certainty that these evils do exist, and I confess that they are evils of a type for which I find it very difficult to propose a remedy, other than that of raising the standard of living here and raising the standard of the people's prosperity at home and so keeping the people at home.
A case came to my notice recently of a girl who went from our district to work in London as a domestic servant, and when she was there for a while, she wrote home to her mother—in this case she got quite a good job as a domestic servant—and she said she was very happy. I will tell the whole story because I do not want to reflect on any race or class or creed, and it does not reflect on them, because I suppose this lady was acting according to her belief of what was right. She said that she was staying with a Jewish lady in Brondesbury who had joined the Anglican Church; that she was very comfortable; and that she was well looked after, but that she had to go to church every Sunday morning with her mistress. I am sure that that was a good pious lady in England who wanted to look after this girl as best she could, and who felt it was right that she should bring her to the true faith, and this innocent country girl was trotting off every Sunday morning to an Anglican service. I am not suggesting that the Government is standing by indifferent to that. I am sure that that fact, brought to the attention of the President, shocks and dismays him just as much as it does me, and I am sure that if the name and location of that child were brought to his attention, he would exert himself to get whatever steps should be taken in the parish where she is resident to have her properly looked after and to have it explained to her mistress that it was not right and proper to bring a Catholic girl to the service of a church to which she did not belong.
Those, however, are the kind of evils that exist because these girls are going to look for work in England and because they have to go. When the girls went to America, what happened was that they went to an aunt, an uncle, a cousin or a relative of some kind. There was no emergency to get a job. Everybody was well-off and they stayed a week, a fortnight or a month with the relatives until a suitable position was found, and they always had somebody to turn to if anything went amiss. The emigration going to England at present is of an entirely different kind, and when Deputies on the back benches of the Fianna Fáil Party who are living in the country get up and say, in President de Valera's presence: "It is the same emigration that always went on," they are not doing their duty. The President and members of the Executive Council, because of the work they have to do, are to a greater or lesser extent, detached from the everyday life of the people. They can only get their information from the reports brought to them by civil servants and members of their Party and correspondents in the country. If any Deputy compares the emigration that went on between 1921 and 1929 with the emigration going on at the present time, he is not speaking the truth—it may be that he does not live close enough to the people to understand the difference; or it may be that he is closing his eyes to something he does not want to see; but whatever the reason is, he is not speaking the truth. The two types of emigration are fundamentally different.
It may be politically indiscreet to say so, but I say quite frankly, with an intimate knowledge of its character, that I do not believe the American emigration did this country a haporth of harm. On the contrary, it strengthened this country, sent wealth home to the country, provided an opportunity to young people to advance further in temporal affairs than they could ever hope to get in this country; and in building up the immense prestige they enjoy in America they immensely strengthened this country in its international relations. The boys and girls who went to America in these days served this country just as truly and effectively and splendidly as their brothers and sisters who stayed at home.
I think the vast majority went, not because there was any pressure on them to go, but because they wanted to go. They went in the same spirit as Englishmen went in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries to build up an Empire, except that ours was not an Empire of conquest, but of going where we were welcome and making our contribution to building up a great new nation. We did make that contribution and, as a result of that, we own great wealth there. We have no one to thank for it. Anything we own there, or any prestige we enjoy, has been well and truly earned by the people who went out. For anything we have had from America we have given in our children, and in the people who helped to build up America, ample return and are giving at the present time.
I say to the President that the present emigration is an evidence of the disintegration of the economic life of our country. In Great Britain, in France, in European countries, you would have a revolution, because people would not go. You take England; you have the depressed areas there, and one of the great problems there is that the people will not leave them when offered jobs outside. They will not go; they assert the right to get employment or maintenance where they have always lived. If they had a problem anything like the problem we have here, there would be a revolution in England. But our people have a different tradition. For that kind of cause they do not revolt; they simply fold their tents and slip away. They are going in tens of thousands. What maddens me is to see them going from want.
I often despair of making Deputies see the country as I see it. I sometimes cannot understand why they do not. The vast majority live, as I do, amongst the people. Take this case; Deputy Mrs. Concannon may have seen this kind of case. I have a particular woman in mind. I remember that woman when she used to come to Ballaghaderreen; she would have a good hat and a nice blouse, with a piece of lace on the neck, and a respectable coat. She was a very independent woman. She dealt in whatever shop she liked; and, if she was not courteously received, she had plenty to go to elsewhere. For the last four years that woman has often stuck in my mind as a type of what I have seen going on around me. First, I knew by her demeanour that she was unable to meet her bill. I knew her to be a respectable woman, and I knew her husband to be hard-working. I knew that she had met with severe reverses—that she had to sell cattle below their value and could not replace them. I have seen her try to keep out of the way for fear she would be spoken to in public about her bill—she had never been spoken to about her bill. I saw her begin to get shabby. I have seen the hat that I knew gradually beginning to get crushed. You could see eventually that, instead of the good black skirt, she was coming to town in a skirt she used to wear about the house. Gradually her coat, instead of being the market or Sunday coat, was obviously a coat she would throw about her shoulders going about the stables or something of that kind. Lastly, I saw that woman come in and, instead of a nice blouse, she had that kind of blouse made out of cotton cloth, gathered with a safety pin at the neck with no lace collar on it—she was a poor woman.
A few nights ago I met her in great distress late at night. I had been called up to the Gárda barracks to answer a telephone call and I met her in great distress hurrying up the street. I stopped her and asked her what had her in town at that hour of the night. She said her boy had run away to England; that he got a scholarship in an agricultural college and she scraped up the money to let him go there; that he asked leave to come home for a holiday and that she borrowed the money to make it possible for him to come home; that he had taken the money and gone to England, and she was trying to get him back. He was only between 16 and 17. I am as sure as I am standing in this Dáil that that boy went to England to earn money because he was ashamed to be at college when he knew his home was as poor as it was. It was only four or five years ago when his father and mother were comfortable and independent. He saw the house getting poorer and saw his mother's clothes getting poorer. That child hooked it to England rather than do the grand fellow in school while his parents were getting poor. I happen to know that woman personally since I was a child. She is a violent supporter of the President's. The only time I ever had a cross word with her was when she thrust her head into a motor car in which I was and bellowed "Up de Valera" in my face. She was a very good friend of mine and her husband was an extremely respectable man.
That kind of thing is going on in hundreds of cases of my own acquaintance. Possibly it was because she was my friend and, at the same time such a strident supporter of the President's, that I noticed her more than anybody else. Although I have not traced through the whole period of decline in other of my friends, I do now see people coming into Ballaghadereen who I remember a few years ago were smart, well got-up, independent generally, and who now have in their faces all the hall-marks of people experiencing the utmost possible stringency and finding it terribly hard to make ends meet. I do not think the President's supporters are telling him that—I think they do him a terrible injustice when they do not; I think they tell him what they think he wants to hear. They must know just every bit as much as I know, they are living amongst the people, as I live amongst the people. What I find so hard to bear is that I see banquets held in Dublin and wealthy manufacturers getting up and congratulating each other and saying how proud and happy they are to have the Minister for Industry and Commerce here and, "He has here seen by this splendid banquet and the spirit abroad how the country is progressing." I see millers and bacon curers and every vested interest in this country waxing fat and growing in wealth and prosperity and arrogance. And I see these unfortunate people whom we all know, and whom it is terribly hard to get to speak for themselves, sinking steadily.
It has been one of the most notorious things in Irish politics that you cannot get the farmers to organise themselves. They are the last element in this country who will constitute themselves an organised body to look after their own interests. It is regrettable that those who should be defending the farmers against the vested interests are letting them down. There is not a single Deputy in this House who is not in a position to say that these are his own people. Yet, they are being surrendered to the vested interests in this country and to the insane political programme of the Fianna Fáil Party. I am saying this because I see that those people all over the country are steadily declining to poverty and misery arising out of the loss of a market for their goods. The big man can trim his sails to any wind but the farmers of the country, the ordinary small farmers, as most of them are, cannot do so. They depend on getting a profit on what they produce when they produce it. Dislocate and wreck their market and you crush them. The fathers and mothers are getting poorer and the children are fleeing the country. Surely it is time that those Deputies who know that position should make the members of the Government aware of it. Whether Fianna Fáil are coming back as a Government or whether they are going to come back as an Opposition they should be made aware of these facts, because these ought to colour their every activity in public life; they have not done so up to now.
I want to pass from that to a question to which I attach immense importance. All of us in this House, to a greater or lesser degree, identified ourselves, or our parents or grandparents indentified themselves, in the struggle to make this country sovereign and independent. I want to put this to the President. I admit that the League of Nations, when it was in its full and pristine glory, was an immense bulwark for the freedom of small nations throughout the world. We had all hoped that in our day we would see it a fold in which the small independent sovereign nations would be perfectly safe against aggression from anyone. That security of freedom has been dissipated for the time being in any case. The League of Nations is now in a dangerous morass into which I believe it is still our duty to go. I believe it is the duty of every nation of goodwill to be represented at the League of Nations with a view to changing it from a morass into solid ground in which all the nations of the world can stand together. But the fact is that at present, far from being a safeguard to the nations it is a form of menace. That being so, and the condition of Europe being what it is, can the President honestly say that the sovereignty and independence of this country would be safe for one hour outside the Commonwealth of Nations? We reconstructed the British Empire. We went into the British Empire. I do not believe that a single person in this country enjoyed going into the British Empire. But we went in there and for ten years we took the British Empire to pieces, and built up, out of these pieces, the Commonwealth of Nations.
I was recently in London attending the Empire Parliamentary Union. I there found that, if you leave the French-Canadians out altogether, more than half the delegates from the Nations of the Commonwealth were Irishmen. I listened time and again to British statesmen, Australian statesmen, South African statesmen, New Zealand statesmen and Canadian statesmen congratulating themselves that through this period of stress, this one political association had survived the storm and had come out stronger than when it first began. They all said it is all due to the extraordinary genius which devised this intangible bond, which in practice means nothing, but which in theory holds this League together. The President smiles at the description of the Crown having, in fact, any function other than as a Commonwealth link in the domestic affairs of any State in the Commonwealth of Nations. I think the President would do this country a great service if he could realise what a powerful bulwark we have in the Commonwealth of Nations. That fact struck me as I heard men from all parts of the world congratulating themselves on that state of affairs. Many of them must remember that the genius that devised that scheme and the genius that destroyed the Empire and created the Commonwealth of Nations was largely the genius of this country. It was Ireland very largely that led the Empire into the Commonwealth and provided the Commonwealth nations with the framework which survived the stresses and difficulties through which we have passed. Ireland is the genius which devised the formula which established, as it never before had been established, the independence and sovereignty of every one of the State members and which holds the Commonwealth nations together, while the League of Nations itself is apparently breaking up.
Some of the more obscure and silly members of the Fianna Fáil Party may think that there was something wrong in going into the Empire Parliamentary Association. I think that is absolute insanity. It is absolute insanity for our people not to realise that the preservation of our sovereignty and independence is absolutely impossible except on the basis of the British Commonwealth of Nations. I think it is deplorable madness that our Government cannot realise their duty in this matter. Instead of cowering in their tents and running away from international responsibilities, their duty, not only to this country but to the world, is to go into the Commonwealth of Nations and to carry on the work of developing the Commonwealth to which we belong until eventually it may help to constitute an effective substitute for the League of Nations which is, I am afraid, collapsing at the present time. If this Commonwealth took the lead, and it may take the lead without us, in opening up freer trade between the nations of the world, in helping to form a block sufficiently powerful to restore economic stability, what greater contribution could Ireland make to world stability and peace than by helping in that work? It may be the difference between a devastated world and the destruction of our country, and something approximating permanent peace if the Commonwealth of Nations and the United States of America can be induced to co-operate in any way in this great work. We could thus make an immense contribution and the greater the contribution we could make the greater the bulwark we would raise around our own sovereignty and independence, not only as against foreign nations but against Great Britain herself. Some of us forget that ten or 20 years in the life of a nation is a short period. It has happened that England is in a pacific frame of mind at present. She has been so since the War; she will continue to be for some time to come. It is our prime duty to preserve the independence that has been handed to us.
What I am afraid of is that what we are doing is throwing away what those who went before us tried to win. Our job should be to consolidate and complete it by getting national unity, and that is possible of being done in our generation. But, far from consolidating our position of independent sovereignty, we are pulling the props away as quickly as we can, and we are trusting to God that by leaving one pin point for the whole structure to survive on, it will continue to balance there and will not fall off. But it only balances there so long as Great Britain remains a pacific country. I want to safeguard our independence and sovereignty. Every independent small nation should be concerned to safeguard its independence and sovereignty, not only against its remote neighbours and its present probable enemies, but against its close neighbours and its remote possible enemies.
Let me direct the attention of members of the House to an interesting fact. Recently a question was rather offensively addressed by a member of the British House of Commons to Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, the Secretary for Dominion Affairs in the Government of Great Britain. He asked if Irish nationals could not be prevented from going into Great Britain. Mr. Macdonald said they could not, and that it was not the intention of the Government to try. Then somebody else got up and asked if something could not be done to restrict their ingress, and Mr. Macdonald made this immensely significant reply. He said:
"No, it would not be practicable, but even if it were, we could not do it, because if we did it would give rise to questions of principle upon which the Dominions feel very strongly and Canada and Australia would object."
I ask Deputies to understand the significance of that. For seven centuries we made friends with Great Britain's enemies, and we tried to use them for the purpose of getting Great Britain in control or of overthrowing her, and for seven centuries we failed. Whenever Great Britain's enemies wanted to desert us, they deserted us and left our people to be hanged and slaughtered in whatever way an antagonistic Great Britain desired to slaughter them. We then discovered, very largely owing to the genius of the men who manned the first Government of this State, that a much more effective way of adjusting the balance caused by the act of creation, which put Ireland beside England, was to make friends with England's friends, and with that idea in our minds the Commonwealth of Nations was evolved, establishing an automatic alliance for all time, so that whenever Great Britain sought to infringe the rights of this State, every Dominion of the Commonwealth of Nations, every State member of the Commonwealth of Nations, was on the qui vive, defending our right, lest the precedent established by admitting Great Britain's right against us should subsequently be quoted against them.
For the first time in history we succeeded in establishing a position that whenever our interests conflicted with Great Britain, Great Britain, instead of facing us with the immense might of an empire behind them, confronted not us alone, but all the sovereign and independent State members of the Commonwealth, all concerned to vindicate our sovereignty and our independence, because upon the principle enshrined therein depended their own sovereign existence as independent States. I am solemnly told that to cherish or support an idea of that kind is to betray the sovereignty and independence of this State. I will say this —and I do not now address those of the people who have not the brains to understand these things, but anybody who understands international affairs —that in the present state of affairs the only hope of maintaining effective sovereignty and independence in this country, or indeed in any State of the world—the only hope of recovering the unity of this country is by maintaining and using our membership of the Commonwealth of Nations.
Let me direct the attention of Deputies to one other matter. At the present moment President de Valera says: "Here is a Constitution." He claims it has been drafted and presented it as if Great Britain were a million miles away. Do Deputies understand the significance of that claim? It may be true. Let us assume it is accurate and true. It means this: that we can legislate in any capacity in regard to any matter concerning the interests of our people 30 miles away from the most powerful military power in Europe without having any regard whatever to her feelings in the matter. Austria is a sovereign and an independent state with ten centuries of independence behind it. If they wanted to pass, say, a Poor Law Bill, they have to get permission from Rome, and there are negotiations going on with Italy, and unless they had that complete dependence on Italy they would be running hat in hand to Berlin. Take Denmark, a nation very similarly circumstanced to ours. They frequently find themselves in the embarrassing position of being obliged to say, "We sympathise with that objective, but our proximity to the German Reich makes it quite impossible for us to take up a definite stand." We alone of the small nations of Europe are in a position at Geneva, in London, in New York, or anywhere else, to speak our minds, whether it is pleasing or displeasing to anybody, to Germany, France, Spain, to any country in the world, or to Great Britain. And the machinery which is provided by the men who devised and planned the Commonwealth of Nations gives us absolute security against them all.
I have heard things said in this House and if they were said in any Parliament in Europe the Foreign Office would be bombarded. There is not a State in Europe dare quarrel with us. Is not that an astonishing thing? Here we are, the poorest country in Europe, probably with one of the smallest populations, with no navy, with a nominal army, and there is not a State in Europe dare pick a quarrel with us. Why? There is not a State in Europe dare insult our flag going into any port in Europe. Why? There is not a State in Europe in which a citizen of this State is not in a position to have his rights vindicated. Why? And I am told by imbeciles in this country that if you go out honestly and openly before the people and say to them that you believe in the Commonwealth and that it is your public duty to exhort your own people to support it, it takes something away from the honour, the independence and the integrity of this country. That such imbeciles can be abroad, and that they are not locked up in lunatic asylums for their own protection, is a thing one cannot understand.
I do not wish to delay the House too long, but I must confess that, knowing, as I know, the President of the Executive Council to be an earnest student of Machiavelli, to have carried it with him to New York, to have browsed in it in the aristocratic purlieus of Fitzwilliam Square, whenever I find myself at a loss to understand the devious ways of his mind I hurry to the Library and there I get The Prince and I try to find in The Prince what it is that the President is up to.
I think in this instance the President has consulted his own master and I am going to suggest to him that, as he misinterpreted certain of his own Articles in the Constitution, so too he is losing his power as adroitly as he used to do to interpret certain passages in his own master, Machiavelli. I have no doubt that he has recently been reading how to retain a principality which he once obtained. His principality is coming to an end in a few weeks, and I suppose he looks for guidance to the old sources. I think the President has misread the passage. It comes at the end of the chapter on "A Principality Obtained":—
"Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a State, the prince ought to examine——"
That can be translated President or Uachtarán or even Taoiseach if you translate it not into base Béarla but straight from Italian into Gaelic.
"——closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily";
That is the mistake you are making. The President thought he had done them at one stroke, and the silly Yes-men that he has surrounding him keep telling him that the injuries are all forgotten: that they are all over, and that the people are suffering no more. They are.
"and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits."
This is the part that he has put into practice and has made a thorough mistake.
"He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer."
And this is the piece that he has forgotten:—
"And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you for them."
Neither the Pensions Bill nor the Governor-General's pension will turn away the wrath he has brought on his own head, not through folly but by evil advice. The Yes-men told him that the injuries arising out of his actions were all over, but they are not.
