I rise with some sense of compulsion, because I feel that there is a necessity upon me personally to do something that so far has not been done in this House, and that is to defend Deputy MacEntee against what I feel has been a very unscrupulous and very unfair campaign from one side of the House. I can quite understand that members of my own Party have felt somewhat annoyed with Deputy MacEntee, and have given expression to their views. But I am in a most peculiar position. Deputy Linehan has stated that he thinks it is a very valuable thing for any candidate to attract the attention, even the unwelcome attention, of his opponents. I succeeded, without any effort on my part, in doing that in my election, and I think that I must in all gratitude admit that, if it had not been for Deputy MacEntee, I would not have the opportunity in this House to-day to express some words of defence on his behalf. I also feel that Deputy MacEntee has done a service to the working-class movement in this country. For many years we have been suffering from some kind of a fear complex. Whenever certain words were thrown at us we felt we must immediately hide our head in the sands or take refuge in retreat. So far as that particular campaign is concerned — and I think Deputy MacEntee learned his lesson from our friends on the other side of the House some years ago—when even some small groups of unemployed men in remote parts of the country came together and, honestly and in an intelligent manner, tried to deal with their small problems, when certain words were shouted at them they were driven apart like a lot of geese and scared out of their wits. Passing over our treatment by Deputy MacEntee, we of the Labour movement will realise that that ability to scare us with words has gone for ever, that working men and working women will no longer be led astray by catch-cries, but will try to use their own intelligence and rely on themselves.
When I say it is necessary to defend Deputy MacEntee, it is not because he has been attacked from the Labour Benches, or that any other member of the House, outside the Fianna Fáil Party, has expressed distrust of his attitude during the election. I think the most dastardly attack made upon him was made by members of his own Party, particularly Deputy Cleary. I agree that, in any election campaign, anybody who sets himself up as a candidate must expect to have brickbats and mud thrown at him. But to state, as Deputy Cleary did, that mud slinging can become an accepted and settled policy, not merely on the part of an ordinary candidate—some of us ordinary candidates have to be allowed a great deal of liberty because we are inexperienced—but that it should become the sole basis of a political campaign of a responsible Minister, who has been a member of the Government for a long period of years —a man serving under the Taoiseach, who has attained a reputation for probity and personal honesty—is, I think, the most defamatory statement which has yet been made about Deputy MacEntee. Therefore, I think we should—those of us who are under a sense of gratitude to him—raise our voices in protest.
I think it is even worse that, during the campaign, Deputy MacEntee was left entirely on his own in this particular field of activity. Not one of his colleagues in the Ministry, not even Deputy Cleary, gave him one word of comfort or sustenance during that campaign. Surely they had equal knowledge with Deputy MacEntee of all these peculiar happenings, not only in the Labour Party, but throughout the country. Surely they were aware of the terrible menace that was hanging over our heads. They were charged equally with the responsibility of telling our people about the dire consequences that faced the country if these terrible people in the Labour Party were returned to power. Perhaps they were unaware of these things; perhaps within the Fianna Fáil Cabinet all the wisdom and perspicacity centred in Deputy MacEntee; perhaps, because of his long political record, spread over so many fields, it was felt that he possessed qualities which placed him over his colleagues. I do not know. I only know that not one of the leading spokesmen of the Fianna Fáil Party followed Deputy MacEntee. They left him isolated. Even when I went out of my way to induce Deputy Lemass to refer to some matters in the area where they were properly raised, he seemed to be loath to stand by the side of his fellow Minister.
Deputy MacEntee was a lone bird. Many times he has been a lone bird. He has passed backwards and forwards on many occasions and often he has been a lone bird of passage and I think he will do some more passing movements in the years to come. I feel that my presence in this House is the only fit and proper answer to a Deputy of the type of Deputy MacEntee. Intelligent men and women who have read and listened to Deputy MacEntee's speeches have taken him at his, true worth and they have registered their opinion of him. Of course, it is quite correct that in Dublin City South the Labour Party was low on the poll and the Fianna Fáil Party, as represented by Deputy MacEntee, was at the head of the poll in the Townships, but I think it would be preferable if the candidate of any Party, who had any pretensions to a national outlook or a political outlook, and who had the welfare of the Irish people at heart, was returned at the bottom of the poll in a working-class constituency like Dublin City South, rather than be at the head of the poll in that well known and accepted centre of reaction and British ascendancy, such as the townships, the constituency where, year after year, nobody but a true blue could head the poll or stand a good chance of being elected. It is worthy of note that Deputy MacEntee, the Minister of a Republican Party, is to-day at the head of the poll in the Dublin Townships.
I noticed that during the course of the debate the Labour Party were chided very kindly and were instructed very eloquently by Deputy Dillon, Deputy Morrissey, Deputy Linehan and other members of the Fine Gael Party. They said that we were not doing the duty with which we were charged by the electorate. It is amazing how often some political spokesmen discover that someone else is not discharging his duties and how often they forget to discharge their duties when they have an opportunity of doing so. We are charged that, because we did not vote against Deputy de Valera as the Taoiseach, we are committed to the acceptance of his policy. We may seem very child-like and inexperienced in politics, but not even Deputy Dillon, with all his Churchillian eloquence, is able to convince us.
If Fine Gael want to form a national Government, they have only to cross the floor of the House and take their seats along with the Party that they should have been with long ago. When Fine Gael look across the House at Fianna Fáil they can see themselves, perhaps in a slightly altered form —the same programme, the same incompetency, the same inefficiency. And when Fianna Fáil look across the House at Fine Gael they can see what has happened to a Republican Party that has lost all contact with the common people. We have the same internment camps, the same imprisonment of Irishmen, the same executions, the same unemployment, the same emigration, the same swollen bureaucracy and the same poverty and degradation. There is really no difference, except that Fianna Fáil are operating on a larger scale and the results have been greater and more intense on our people.
If Fine Gael are disappointed that some of them to-day are not Ministers in the Government, they can still remedy the position by taking their seats in their proper political home and, by so doing, they can free our country once and for all and enable our people to concentrate upon the real issues, the economic, issues that mean bread and butter for the masses, instead of being torn apart, separated through the conflicts between our two so-called National Parties. I suggest they should end their disputes and let us face the only real division in the country, the division between those men and women who give service to the community through hand and brain, and those who live upon the community, who give no service and who are largely responsible for the state of affairs that exists here to-day. If those Parties would do as I suggest, things would become much simpler and clearer, and my friends in Clann na Talmhan would find their position easier. They would not be drawn between the devil and the deep sea, as apparently they are to-day.
It has been suggested that if we vote against the Taoiseach's proposal we need not necessarily take that as a vote for Deputy Cosgrave. Are we all children, or are we unable to follow logically the political process? There is a responsibility placed on every Party to bring about the formation of a Government. Each of the main Parties put forward a sufficient number of candidates in the hope that they would be given the sole responsibility of governing. We of the Labour Party were not favoured and Fine Gael and Clann na Talmhan have not been favoured. Even the Taoiseach was not favoured. He was very much rejected, because his Party forfeited ten seats and they lost 100,000 votes, and the only reason he occupies the position of Taoiseach to-day is not because of any endorsement of his internal policy—there is no denying that that is the source of much discontent in the country—but because of his astute and very clever political move utilised during the last 24 hours of the election, the move which stampeded a lot of the people into final support.
I suggest to the Taoiseach that he has a double duty, as a political leader and as a statesman. I think he has not yet discharged his duty as a statesman by repudiating the electioneering tactics of his followers on the eve of the poll and on the polling day.
The people were told that the preservation of the neutrality of our country and its protection against external aggression were carried out by members of his own Party. In the heat of an election campaign many of us do things that, afterwards, we feel should not have been done, but I do not think that any of us realised—we should, probably, have been prepared if we had—that Fianna Fáil would have so imperilled the unity existing between the three main Parties as to descend to the form of propaganda they did that day. That is why I say that the Taoiseach, in his capacity as statesman and as the recognised leader of the Irish race, has still a duty to perform. I hope he will perform it in his closing speech in this debate.
On this question of voting for Ministers and policies, we are questioned and criticised by Fine Gael. They do not seem to realise that one inestimable thing which the Labour Party has to-day is of more worth than twice the number of seats we have in this House, and of more worth than our programme, our leadership or our organisation. That is that, at least, Irish Labour has its own political independence. We have won that at very high cost. We have had to live down the years of Fine Gael Government and the charge of submission of Labour to that Government. We have had to live down the following years of Fianna Fáil Government and the charge of submission of Labour to that Government. Through a long process of trial and error, we have had to find for our own feet a basis in the political and economic life of the country. We have done it, and neither to Fine Gael, because of its desire for office, nor out of any feeling of responsibility to the Taoiseach, is the Labour movement going to sacrifice that independence. We, in the Labour movement, although we may be poor political prophets, are the future of this country, and we are going to be—it may be long or it may be short—the dominant political Party of this country. The suggestion that we should tack ourselves on to a Party that is the rejected and the outcast of this country does not appeal to us. Deputy Coburn said that Fine Gael could offer some new blood to Fianna Fáil. New blood from those benches, when every single one of those who have any ability has been rejected, when out of the whole group you could not get two capable of acting as Ministers! When a transfusion of blood is needed it is this Party that offers new blood. To suggest that the Labour Party should become associated with it is an insult to the Labour movement, and to those who sent us here.
I am sorry for Clann na Talmhan, because they are in a very dangerous position. It may be quite true, as Deputy Donnellan has said, that there have been no bargains or agreements. We quite accept that, but "Paul went down to Damascus and was converted". I suggest—and I do so in all sincerity—that if Clann na Talmhan are to retain their independence and homogeneity as a Party, they will have to be careful how they tread, not only in this House, but more particularly outside. They have got a very difficult position to face, and a very difficult task to carry out, because they have not the advantage we of the Labour movement have, in that they are not homogeneous. They do not represent a single economic force, a single social grouping. They represent many varieties, from the agricultural labourer to the small farmer working 16 or 18 hours a day, from the medium farmer who works his land himself and employs hired labour, right up to the big farmer who is of the same type as the big employer of the city. Amongst men of that character there is no common denominator. Deputy Donnellan will find in due course that it will take all his ability as a leader—I do not know how good a leader he is, but I hope he is capable of measuring up to his responsibilities—to keep that Party together in the years immediately ahead. He will find, in course of time, that there will be closer affinity between some of his Party and the working-class movement, and closer affinity between others and the Fianna Fáil Party. That will be the line of development he will have to face and I think he should commence to realise it now and face up to the problems that will be thrown up.
While it is quite correct that the Taoiseach should present us with a team and ask us to accept or reject that team as a whole, we also are entitled to express our views on the ability and probity of his nominees, and on the possibility of those individuals fulfilling the functions which it is proposed to allot them. I think that it would be impossible for the Taoiseach to allow us to criticise and vote upon each name separately. Not one of these men could stand on his own individual feet or on his own individual record. They must be covered by the cloak and mantle of the Taoiseach. To suggest that, even at this hour, it would be possible for the Taoiseach to make improvements in that team from the ranks of the Fianna Fáil Party would be very foolish.
I am not going to say that it could not be done because of all the Fianna Fáil Deputies being "yes-men." Possibly, that is true. I do not know. I know that some of them have very deep disagreements with the Taoiseach in his policy and disagreements on the basic factors of his programme in relation to those economic and social considerations which are most important to our people. But I am afraid that he would have to search very diligently through all the ranks of the Fianna Fáil Party to get any improvement whatever on the team he presents to-day—and God knows it is poor enough. I am not concerned with that. I think that we could go from Minister to Minister and make out a very good case why none of them should be a Minister. But we have very little choice in the matter. We could take Deputy MacEntec, a very famous boxer, a very good sportsman, a man who has had no bones broken and point out that, while he has a whole body, little children in the city are having their bones twisted and malformed by disease because of his incompetency. We could remind him that we have 700 human beings on a waiting list for admission to sanatoria for treatment and that, before some of them will have been admitted, they will have died of T.B. We could go down the category. We could remind him that his knowledge of Dublin workers was so far from reality that, once upon a time, in the presence of the Taoiseach, he told us that he could envisage a situation in which Dublin dockers would sit down and eat a meal while their own children watched them with hungry eyes because dockers are essential producers. We could take Deputy Lemass and go back to his famous speech of recommendation to the hoarders. We could take up the question of the Trade Union Bill and Order No. 83, issues which are not going to be settled to-day.
I think there are bigger issues facing us. Right through the whole election campaign it struck me that there was one point on which our people were at one. It was not on the merits of political Parties or candidates, not on the programme of Fianna Fáil because there was no programme put to the people apart from very eulogistic and very untrue statements about the last four years, indicating that if returned they would continue on the same old path, and no one knew what that path was. The one thing the people were interested in was that while it might be true that even under Fianna Fáil we could weather the remaining years of the war without complete physical extinction, when the war is over there will be problems so great in magnitude that it will require all the ability and all the intelligence of our people to overcome them.
Right through the whole of the election campaign I think you could search the speeches of the Taoiseach and of Ministers and not find one word of a plan or a programme as to how they were going to meet the years after the war. Deputy Lemass has a plan somewhere in the remote and inaccessible pigeon holes of his Department. He reminds me of another gentleman who, during the election, had a beautiful plan which could not be changed in any form. It was not suggested that it would have to be changed, but six months after it was drawn up he had to change it himself. I am very much afraid the plan of Deputy Lemass is like the plan that we heard of during the election campaign, that it is the kind of plan that is being kept in pigeon holes, lest the common people find out what it is, because there is no plan except one, and that is to drive the standard of living of our people lower than it has been during the past four years, to make helots of them.
James Connolly said many years ago that if the Irish people were going to enter into the field of external competition in the industrial markets, that could only be done by bringing the standard of living of our people below that of any other European people. That has been the Fianna Fáil policy. The plan they set out with in 1938 had already become a failure. It was not the war that brought it to a standstill; it was not the war that made it necessary to export human beings; it was not the war that drove 33,000 Gaelic speakers from the West; it was not the war that reduced the number of children attending national schools; it was not the war that leaves many people ravaged by disease; it was not the war that compels ten of thousands of people in the City of Dublin to live in bug-infested tenements. It was the failure of the Fianna Fáil policy, a policy which started wrong, a policy which went on wrong and a policy which came to a wrongful end. No Party in this country will ever succeed in building up a standard of decent living until we realise that the first and basic consideration for economics, for industry and for agriculture, is to give to the mass of the people not merely work at sweated rates of wages, not merely relief work for three or four days weekly, or a pittance of 10/6 to single men to keep body and soul together, but to give to our people the means of buying the things they need, to give them consuming power and purchasing power. If our people get the means of buying, their requirements would be very quickly produced here. When it becomes a question that nothing can be produced here except to provide a profit for some gentleman with a balance in the bank, who is seeking an opportunity for investment, then we are foredoomed to failure, because the touchstone of that policy will be low wages and that means under-consumption for the mass of the people.
I suggest to the Taoiseach and to Deputy Lemass that they should reverse their whole policy, and should try to look at the matter from another angle. It would be a very good thing for a man sometimes to stand on his head and look at himself in a looking-glass, so that he can get an unusual perspective. Fianna Fáil requires a very unusual perspective, and if they did what I suggest they might begin to realise what the Taoiseach said some years ago—that if they could not solve unemployment they would be prepared to go outside. He has gone outside in many things. He has gone outside his own convictions and his own programme. Even yet it is time to see if he might not get enlightenment which would give some ray of encouragement to our people.
I want to close on a point that was of paramount interest during the election campaign. What is going to happen to us after the war? There was continual harping about a coalition and a national Government. That is no longer possible. I do not think the Taoiseach or his Ministers will deny the gravity of the magnitude of the problem that will face them and members of this House when the war concludes. We may possibly have flowing back here 200,000 or 300,000 of our people—one-sixth of our population. If we are not prepared to accept them, does that mean that we have to tell our brothers and sisters that there is no place for them in the homeland, that they will either have to work in their own country at a wage insufficient to enable them to live as human beings or throw themselves on the charity and good-will of foreigners? Is it possible even on the basis of equitable sharing of all the resources and all the wealth amongst all the children of the nation to give to those who will be coming back at least an equal share of whatever small ration we might have when the war is over? There are the problems of agriculture, of housing, as well as the problem raised by Deputy Flanagan as to how we can reconcile our so-called political and economic independence with complete subjugation in the field of monetary and financial matters to the Bank of England. All these problems face us, and I suggest to the Taoiseach that he should now consider what has been put before him on many occasions, and that is that if not for the problems of to-day, at least for those of to-morrow, there would be set up an economic council not confined to members of the Dáil, because on one side of the House we have those who failed in the past, and on the other side those who failed in the present, but to pick generally throughout the country trained and educated men, not necessarily from the universities, because a man who has learned his education in the old-time school of adversity is often more practical and more helpful than a trained university professor or a man with scientific degrees.
We should take men and women from all walks of life and charge them with a specific responsibility, the responsibility of having ready, before this conflict ends, ways and means whereby we as a people, as the Irish race, can save ourselves from the threat of destruction and extinction which will come with the end of the conflict; ways and means of aligning ourselves with the new forces of life which will be let loose throughout the continent of Europe, and taking our place in the civilisation of Western Europe, so that, instead of living behind the paper wall set up by John Bull or the paper wall set up by Deputy Aiken and his censors, we will have the courage and the independence to enable us to meet all men and talk to all men while retaining our identity both as individuals and as a race; ways and means of finding that common denominator here in our own country which will make it possible to bring back the exiles of our race and to give to them as well as to those who have remained here that way of life to which they are entitled.
I would urge upon the Taoiseach then the immediate setting up of an economic council to consider post-war problems. If that is not done, I am afraid the days ahead will be very dark indeed. I am convinced, both as an individual and as a member of this Party, that Fianna Fáil is not capable of dealing with that problem. Fine Gael is equally incapable. The Labour Party could deal with it, not on the basis of a political Party but because it represents those young, enthusiastic forces that have not yet been given an opportunity of tackling this problem. When I say that, I refer, as I have already mentioned, to the men and women who gave service to the country —the men and women throughout the countryside generally, who have never been allowed to devote their intelligence to that problem. Some day they will come together. When that day arrives, we of the working class will not have to bother about Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, because their whole basis of existence will have disappeared. They will be merely a small minority representing a small selfish group, who will at last have been put into the corner by the mass of the common people of this country. But we are not dealing with that day now. That is why I suggest that the Taoiseach should establish machinery to tackle the problem. If he does that, while coalition does not appeal to him he may find that something useful will come out of this other form of cooperation.
I want to deal with one other matter. I do not know whether we have yet arrived at the stage where we can succeed in arousing within the minds and hearts of the Taoiseach and his Ministers that feeling of ordinary humanitarianism, that feeling, if you like, of being Irishmen; I do not know whether we can now, on the 39th day of this hunger strike on the Curragh, get them to do something, fine, something gracious. I believe the Taoiseach is a great man personally, although I differ from him politically, but I still wonder whether or not he is so great that he can behave like an ordinary human being and think of those four boys down on the Curragh who are living in the shadow of death. I suggest that it would be a great and gracious thing if those four boys, those untried prisoners who to-morrow may be dead, were released, along with several others who are also untried and who to-day are being denied the assistance and protection of the very Constitution for which the Taoiseach takes credit.
