Well, Sir, wherever they come from, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs intervenes to say that the weapon which was potent in the hands of the representatives of our people in those days was requisite because it was used in a foreign Parliament. I want to warn the members of this House that such weapons are equally potent in a country where the Executive of the Parliament is indifferent to the interests of the people of the country, and that these are the only instruments or weapons which the people have left by which to hold up that Executive and by which to enforce their rights so as to make it possible for them to live.
The Minister for Posts and Telegraphs would seem to suggest that to draw an analogy between the situation that existed in those days in connection with a foreign Parliament and anything that might arise in this House is to misrepresent the facts. It was not the question of its being a foreign Parliament that justified the use of those weapons. It was because there was a Government in office which sought to oppress our people, and the potent weapon to prevent it was the right to speak in Parliament. Have we any guarantee, have we any right to expect from our past experience, that there never will be on the Front Benches of the Government a Government which some minority in this House believes is oppressing, cruelly oppressing, a minority in this country, and are we to strip ourselves now of the instrument which our fathers demonstrated to us was absolutely vital if those who represented minorities were to be free to do their job?
It is all very well to say: "How can you expect Taoiseach de Valera so to conduct himself as to warrant the use of such weapons against him?" I am not talking of the Government of to-day; I am thinking not only of to-day, but of to-morrow, and of the years ahead, when those who come after us may require the very weapons, which we threaten now to throw away, to protect the interests of minorities who may then stand bitterly in need of protection. There are minorities in this House—labour minorities and agricultural minorities—who may require the use of these weapons of free speech to-day. Either of these two might constitute the Government in the morning and against whom then these weapons would be requisite to some other section of the community for the protection of their legitimate rights.
I will be answered: "No one is asked to throw anything permanently away at present," and told that all we are asked to do is something to facilitate the transaction of business in conditions of acute emergency. If that were true, if it ever could be true, we could argue the expediency of this case, but I know from bitter experience that that plea is never valid. Once compromise the principle that a Deputy should be free to speak as he thinks best—not as the Ceann Comhairle thinks best; not as the Taoiseach thinks best; but as he thinks best—and I tell you to-day that you may as well shut up Parliament. Parliamentary institutions in this country are dead, and a tyranny more loathsome than the tyranny of an individual dictator is on its way, that is, the unrestricted tyranny of a majority, the most cursed form of tyranny under which any people could conceivably live.
I am fighting in this moment for the preservation of the essential liberty of our own people. I am fighting against the slanderers of our institutions who describe this House as a talking shop; I am vindicating now against all those who have said during the last 20 years that in this House nothing happens but fellows getting up and talking to hear themselves. I am trying to demonstrate that that right to talk is the very keystone of the arch of freedom in this country. Take it out and the whole thing will ultimately crumble about your ears. Only the fools who do not understand the essentials of liberty talk about Parliaments being talking shops. Every tyranny in Europe was established by gentlemen who described the democratic parliaments of their respective countries as talking shops. The Duma in Petrograd was torn down as a talking shop; the Reichstag in Germany was not rebuilt because it was a talking shop; every free Parliament in the world was torn down because it was a talking shop; and I want Deputies to realise that, if we go on record as saying that we ourselves believe ourselves to be a talking shop, which, in the hour of emergency, ought to be stopped talking, as an unnecessary luxury in time of crisis, we are making an end of Parliament in this country.
I do not care what crisis or how grave the situation—there is no consideration for which I would surrender Parliamentary rights and Parliamentary institutions in this country. If we have to surrender these, then the greatest disaster of all has come upon us, and any other disaster would be preferable to it. I do not charge the Government of this State with a dark conspiracy to put this thing over on us. I am addressing my words as much to the Tánaiste and the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs as to the Labour Party, the Farmers' Party, Fine Gael or any other section of the House. It is because I think we are in danger of doing inadvertently that for which we shall curse ourselves afterwards for doing that I press the House so strongly to reject this proposal.
To-day, when we were considering the question of how the transport matter might be best disposed of this evening, I suggested that I was prepared to give an example by abstaining from my undoubted right to intervene in the discussion, and by leaving it to a selected few, because I thought the occasion one on which we rather wanted information from the Minister than to make suggestions to him. Deputy Donnellan at once asked: "Is Deputy Dillon proposing to restrict debate to certain individuals?" No, and there is the distinction I want to make. Any individual Deputy can impose upon himself a self-denying ordinance to refrain from speaking, but it is quite a different thing if any Deputy, group of Deputies or majority of Deputies claim the right to prevent the humblest member of the House from speaking his mind.
Some of us may get impatient with Deputy Flanagan, but he may get impatient with us. I may get weary of listening to Deputy Cafferky, but he may get weary of listening to me, and if I claim or any group claims the right to silence him, some time the day will dawn when he will claim the right to silence me. If we abuse our rights, sooner or later the Irish people will deal with us, but, in the meantime, we have to bear with the Dillons, the Flanagans, the O Ceallaighs, and the de Valeras, God help us, until the Irish people eliminate them. But so long as the Irish people send them here, they have a right to complete freedom of speech which no representation should induce this House to limit or take from them. If they misuse it, the people will see that they do not come back. What we may consider misuse to-day, posterity may bless them for, on the ground that what to us was no more than nuisance, in its ultimate effect produced some blessing for the community which, without their action, would never have been forthcoming.
In conclusion, let me say this: the indictment of every person who wants to destroy representative institutions in a democratic country is the description that the Legislature is a talking shop. Is that not so? Is that not the universal cry? Are we going on record at this stage as saying that, in our heart of hearts, we agree with that estimate of Dáil Eireann—that there is too much talk here, too much worthless waste of time by Deputies talking to hear themselves talk? I have been as bored as any Deputy listening to my colleagues, and I suppose I have done my share of boring, but I want to say that although taking the individual phrases spoken by Deputies, many of them may have been nugatory, looking back over 12 years' of experience, there has not been a word said in this House which I regret permission having been given to let it be said. The most verbose, the most irrelevant, the most explosive Deputy who has got up and talked and talked, until he was tired talking, has at least sat down feeling that, in the Ceann Comhairle, he had somebody who would insist on his being heard, whether those listening wanted to hear him or not.
It may have taken longer in the case of one Deputy than another to carry conviction to his mind that Parliament was not such a bad place after all, that it was not such a bad thing to have some place to come to where where you could speak your mind, no matter what your neighbours thought, and where there was an uncontrollable authority constantly sitting in the Chair to protect your interests, no matter how much you were despised by the high and mighty who looked down upon you.
That right is the most sacred right our people have—the right to send a simple man or a sophisticated man into this House, in the certainty that he will have the same right of speech as the Taoiseach, the Leader of the Opposition or anybody else. Compromise it, circumscribe it, or reduce it and you have set your feet on the slippery slope which will end with the destruction of Parliament. You have then vindicated every traducer of representative institutions who has described parliament as "a talking shop." I say that the right of Deputies to debate is no luxury, it is the keystone of the arch of our liberty. However grave the crisis, I will not be party to circumscribing that right. I say that, however deep my own personal feelings may be against what any other Deputy may say, or the length of time he takes in saying it, I recognise in his right to bore me, in his right to flounder through the rules of this House, seeking guidance from the Chair as he goes, in his right to indulge in every irrelevancy that the Chair will permit, a monument to the freedom of our people; and I realise that the day on which you take from the humblest and simplest Deputy this right you strike, not at me, but at freedom in Ireland.
It is queer that, on what appears to be a motion of the utmost simplicity, such immense issues should arise. I do implore of Dáil Eireann to realise that this is no simple matter of administration or of disposing of business expeditiously. If a false step is made to-day, you are opening the dykes through which the avalanche ultimately will come. If a false step is made to-day, our action will be quoted by everyone who wants to see this Parliament destroyed, as a vindication of the thesis that this is "a talking shop" where there is too much talk, and that everybody in this House realises that, when really serious business falls to be done, the talking ought to be stopped. I reject that contention; I say that the right of every Deputy to speak and the speeches they have made are all woven into the fabric of our people's freedom. I will fight for every thread of it, by every Parliamentary weapon that I can employ, by every resource that I can think of, because I am convinced that we are fighting now, not for the right to speak in Dáil Eireann but for the right of the Irish people to live under democratic institutions and have a Parliament of their own.
