Yesterday I asked the Minister, in substance, why he had withdrawn from the members of the British Legion the protection which is accorded to minorities in this country by Article 40 of the Constitution, with special reference to paragraph 2 of Section 6 which says that:—
"Laws regulating the manner in which the right of forming associations and unions and the right of free assembly may be exercised shall contain no political, religious or class discrimination."
What is that right? That right is to combine for any lawful purpose, to assemble in public demonstration for any lawful purpose and to march peacefully, without unduly obstructing traffic, through the streets of any city or town for a lawful purpose. Were these citizens law-abiding men? I do not think there is anyone here who will challenge the fact that the members of that body, the British Legion, are, taken by and large, good citizens and law-abiding men, whether we agree with their political convictions or not. In any case the Minister believes that because, in the copious note I took of his replies to my supplementary questions yesterday, he said:—
"I never said these men contemplated a breach of the peace. The Deputy need not read that into my reply."
So there is common ground that they never contemplated any breach of the peace. Now, what was their purpose? Their purpose in marching from Smithfield to the Garden of Remembrance was to commemorate their dead. I do not think any section of the House, no matter how violently they may feel, will demur to any part of our community commemorating, with affection and with pride, comrades who are dead. I do not deny—rather I glory in the fact—that they walked publicly to renew their faith in the ideals for which their comrades died and for which they fought and were proud to see their children fight. I make no apology for submitting to this House the nature of that ideal, enshrined in glorious lines by one of them who died and who wrote these verses for his daughter on the threshold of his grave. Tom Kettle, facing a death which came upon him, wrote:
"In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor king, nor emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor."
Have the men who marched to glory in that ideal anything to apologise for to their fellow-countrymen? I glory in the ideals that inspired those men. To me the names of Redmond and Kettle are as precious as the name of any Irish patriot who ever gave his life for Ireland. And I have a right to speak on that, for I come of people whose voices have been heard in the public life of this country, not for the last decade, but long before many of those who posture as the only patriots were heard or thought of.
Let this be the acid test. The Minister says that these men who marched had no intention of perpetrating any breach of the peace, but that the police spies in, presumably, illegal organisations, had warned him that there were persons who, in the event of these men peacefully and legitimately marching, would precipitate trouble. I ask the House to pause. If Taoiseach de Valera announced his intention of marching with the Fianna Fáil Party from Nelson's Pillar to Glasnevin lawfully and peaceably and within the terms of the protection provided by the Constitution, and ill-disposed persons announced that they intended to attack that procession and precipitate a breach of the peace, would the Minister for Justice issue, at the request of the Gárda authorities, an Order prohibiting Taoiseach de Valera from marching, or would he say to the Commissioner: "The Taoiseach and his supporters have a right peacefully to march, and if any persons challenge that right let all the forces of the State be deployed to prevent them from successfully challenging it"?
If he would do that for the largest political organisation in this country, why will he not do it for a minority for whom the Constitution was written? Powerful majorities do not require constitutional protection. They are able to fight their own corner. Constitutions are written to ensure that no matter how powerful executives may become or mobs may become, the full panoply of the State will always be deployed if the fundamental rights of the most powerless sections in the whole community are challenged.
Here I charge the Minister with meanness and with worse, because he says: "I took these precautions at the instance of the Guards who feared that there was danger of a disturbance of the peace consequent upon the events that transpired outside Trinity College earlier this year." Are a body of law-abiding, decent citizens to be made responsible for the act of a brat, one isolated, ignorant brat who, from the top of Trinity College, burns the National Flag? Is it or is it not true that the Provost of Trinity College waited on the Taoiseach to express the regrets of that venerable institution for that incident? Is it or is it not true that the Taoiseach bade the Provost to dismiss it from his mind, that his regrets were most fully accepted and it was amply understood that no precaution could invariably prevent some irresponsible and ignorant brat from perpetrating, solus and alone, an outrage which had been contemplated by no responsible person of the institution to which he belonged?
Is this body of respectable men, who undertook to carry their flags furled lest their march might be interpreted as in any way an aggressive challenge to the prejudices of any part of our people, to be told that, because that one individual brat behaved as he did behave, all their rights under the Constitution were to be swept away, that any mob which announces its intention of preventing them from doing that which it is admitted they have a constitutional right to do will be bowed to by the State and that the orders of that mob which says: "We will not let them do what they have a legal right to do," will be transmuted into a statutory prohibition? If that is allowed to pass unchallenged, I warn this House to-day—I am long enough in politics to realise that it may be a popular thing to insult and to tyrannise over the kind of men who believe in the thing which I have sought to communicate to the House in the words of Tom Kettle, the kind of men whose comrades died for these things—that if they stand idly by while the rights of that minority are trampled in the dirt, before the brazen-throated clamour of ignorant would-be tyrants has died in the ears of those who are consoled to hear it, they will hear the tread of Nemesis, for if tyranny over one minority is protected to-day, tyranny over another minority will manifest itself to-morrow.
If tyranny be once established in this country, whether it be exercised by a Party or an individual, it sets our people, on the bloody and slippery slope to civil war. Our people will not surrender their right to be free and the measure of freedom is the right of minorities to be free. No powerful majority need worry about its rights— it can take them, vi et armis. The hallmark of freedom is when the defenceless, the weak, the little man, is as safe in the enjoyment of rights as the most powerful citizen or combination in the State. Does Dáil Eireann now assert the right of all men in this State to be equal before the law, or does it accept the doctrine that if you are small, if injustice to you commands the plaudits of ignorant mobs, you ought to be trampled upon, your rights should be ignored and those who wish to oppress you should be given the sanction and approbation of the State?
If that be the decision here to-day, to-morrow worse will happen, and ultimately the struggle for liberty will pass from this Chamber to another arena, and the world will have it to tell that we, the elected representatives of Irish people, proved unequal to our trust as the trustees of these liberties so dearly bought. Freedom is either freedom for all men, or it is tyranny of the vilest kind masquerading as a whited sepulchre before the world. I am asking for nothing but this, that there shall be equality before the law and here is the test which I submit to every Deputy. The British Legion asked leave to walk from Smithfield to the Garden of Remembrance. A mob challenged their right and the Minister forbade them to exercise it. If Taoiseach de Valera had proclaimed his intention of walking from Smithfield to the Phoenix Park, and a mob challenged his right, would the Minister for Justice have forbidden the Taoiseach to walk? If to that question he answers "yes", and means it, and if the country believes him, no injustice has been done; but if Fianna Fáil had the right to walk, the British Legion had the right to walk, and if the British Legion had not the right to walk, Fianna Fáil had not the right to walk. Is it to be mob law or Irish law?
