That is the Annie Oakley piece. We are coming to that. I am describing the strip tease politics as they divested themselves of every rag of decency when they embarked on their campaign. Their raiment was old-fashioned. It was a bit shabby. It was the 1948 design, but at least it covered their nakedness. They passed the post limping and naked and then came the bargain sale. To-day Deputy de Valera is the Annie Oakley of Irish politics: "Anything you can do I can do better." Is there any one single feature of the Plaza Toro programme, produced not on the eve of the general election but on its morrow, is there a single item of that programme that does not represent a synthesis of the speeches made by members of the inter-Party Government during the campaign? Is there a social security scheme? Are there increased old age pensions? Is there a land rehabilitation programme? Is there even my modest proposal for Connemara? It was no great thing, a very poor thing, but mine own. It now appears as the plume in the bargain hat of the Annie Oakley of Irish politics, but though it be a poor thing, little to boast of, nothing for which any rational man claims gratitude who professes to be conscious of the obligations and the duties of the office which I had the honour to hold, it was precious to me and I do not like to see it as an adornment of any Annie Oakley's bargain hat without acknowledgment.
It degrades Irish politics; it degrades us all, that a Party can come into this House boasting of the fact that it claims the suffrages of the Deputies of this House on a programme, not a programme that it did not dare to produce, but a programme that it was not fit to produce before the campaign began, because to every single particular of that programme it was converted by the members of the inter-Party Government in the course of the campaign. I know that because I personally kicked them off compulsory tillage. My colleague the Tánaiste kicked them off the wage freeze. My colleague the Minister for Finance exposed them with the documents that Deputy Lemass had inadvertently left in the waste paper basket. Have they no shame or are there no depths of servile degradation to which members of the Fianna Fáil Party are not prepared to sink? I would not care if it simply meant the degradation of a political Party, but they do represent a large minority of our people—no one can deny that. And their conduct, their demeanour, their standards are seen in the world as the standards of our people. They are shameful standards, they are contemptible standards, and it is a grievous thing that a large Party, a great Party—any Party which returns 69 Deputies to Dáil Éireann is a great Party in my estimation—should stoop to clamber into office over the prostrate bodies of men whom they derided, misrepresented, insulted and outraged for three years until such time as they saw an opportunity to use their folly to serve their ignoble ends.
I do not deny that I hate the doings of this day when I think of the impending ruin of so much work in which I was proud to have a share. I was proud to find myself a colleague of William Norton. I was no stranger to the Taoiseach; we had been colleagues before. I was proud to find myself a colleague of Seán MacBride's. Three better colleagues no man ever worked with, and I am not unconscious of the fact that I am not the easiest colleague in the world to work with. That is, perhaps, one proposition that is unanimously accepted in this House. If it is, is there not something dear, is there not something admirable, is there not something precious in the inter-Party Government that got so much done and that found in its doing that to talk of ideological differences within our own tribunal is to label the man who speaks of them as mentally remote from 99.9 of our people? What ideological differences, if words retain their meaning, divide any two Deputies on any side of this House? I think of ideologies as representing democracy, dictatorship, Fascism, Nazism, Marxism. Who says that there are differences of that character between any two men in the public life of Ireland? I am a politician and I despise the sneering tone of the neo-politician who speaks contemptuously of politicians. I am a politician and proud to be a politician. My father was a politician and my grandfather was a politician and, if every Deputy in this House has as good reason to be proud of his forebears as I have of mine, I congratulate him. I am proud of them because they were politicians and I am proud to be a politician in the public life of Ireland.
I vacillate between sympathy for folly and something closely approximating to hatred of evil when I hear Deputy Dr. Browne saying: "The past is past. The incident associated with my departure from the Government is all over so far as I am concerned." I give him the charity of thinking that that is the folly of childish inexperience and lack of capacity to appreciate the nature of his acts. But people on all sides of this House who know the devastating reverberation of the tale he purported to tell all over the world wherever there are enemies of Ireland or wherever there are enemies of the Catholic Church cannot say grandiloquently: "It is all over as far as we are concerned"? The echoes have only begun to roll and not all the eloquence of every Deputy can catch up with the mighty army of lies which is marching behind that standard at this moment all over the world to prove that in Ireland it was true what Salisbury, what Balfour, what Carson said—that Home Rule was Rome Rule. That is the brief for every slanderer, for every libel merchant of this country all over the world and, what is worse, for those who do differ from us most fundamentally in the ideological sphere that is their brief to prove that to be free men you must destroy the Church. I know he never meant that. I know that ideologically he and I think the same. I know that if my Catholicism were compared to his, the comparison would, in all probability, be to my disadvantage, but he must forgive me if it makes me sick with horror that his inexperience, his lack of wisdom, his incapacity to understand the consequences of the things he said and did, should bring upon us the irremediable disaster of his published allegations. I am aghast that in the presence of that situation I should hear him say: "It is all over so far as I am concerned." It will not be all over in the lifetime of the youngest man in this Dáil. If it was folly, God forgive him for his folly. All I can say is that it would be hard to believe, in the atmosphere in which I worked beside him, that it would be hard for any man who wanted to succour the poor and protect the afflicted from the consequences of poverty and the knowledge of want not to find a way and a dozen willing hands to help him inside and outside the Government to which he belonged.
I do not want to say all the cross things which Deputy Cogan seems to live in dread of my saying about him. But, as he was repudiating his colleagues, as he was declaring his great conversion, as he was binding himself to the chariot with a silken cord, to which he may shortly discover hemp will be added when the Fuehrer is installed, I noticed a benign smile spread across the face of Deputy MacEntee and his head seemed to nod like the wise old mandarin, rejoicing on the lost groat being found, on the vagrant sheep returning. As I turned from that pleasing spectacle of avuncular solicitude, my eye lit upon the Official Report of Dáil Éireann, column 30, Volume 110. On this occasion, Deputy Cogan was also speaking, but I venture to say that on this occasion the oscillation of Deputy MacEntee's head was horizontal rather than vertical, because here is what Deputy Cogan was saying in those halcyon days, while he was still a carefree, vagrant sheep:—
"Just as King Herod sought to destroy an Infant rival, so Éamon de Valera sought to destroy a new Party in the field. He had failed to destroy that Party completely but he has succeeded in destroying his own. When I tried to instil into the mind of that senile delinquent, the Minister for Local Government, some sense of responsibility and when I reminded him of the danger of a midwinter election which would inflict a grave injustice on a large section of the rural population...."
I trust that Deputy Cowan and the senile delinquent and King Herod between them will be able to restore the circulation of Deputy Cogan's feet. Will he think me unkind if I say: Ave Salve atque vale? Travel softly lest those feet grow cold again. He is not the first simple, kindly creature who has walked into a parlour and found there nothing so exotic, nothing so arresting as King Herod, neither a Tetrarch nor a chief priest, nothing but a hairy spider. The Tetrarch and the chief priest at least went through the form of giving the victim a trial, but the fly that walks into a spider's parlour is like the young lady from Riga who went out for a ride on a tiger —I know the poem goes on that they both came back from the ride with the lady inside and a smile on the face of the tiger. Whether it be a tiger or a spider, Deputy Cogan will find the accommodating stomach of the spider or the tiger waiting to wrap him in a consoling animating warmth which will guarantee him against his senile and delinquent friend's anxiety lest his feet be unduly cold.
Surely these Deputies must be ashamed; surely these Deputies who gloried in their resolution to be all or nothing, surely those Deputies who, ten days ago, confidently prophesied that the inter-Party Government would acquire by purchase the votes wherewith to command a majority, will feel our people justified in saying to them: "It was you who spoke of these votes as being up for auction. In whose shop window are they now displayed?" We never bought them; we never said they were for purchase; we never indicated that a single one of them, no matter how strict his censure was upon us, was corrupt.
We are not ashamed and we make no apology to argue with, to reason with, to urge on any Deputy of Dáil Éireann to lend us a hand, but I challenge anyone in this House or outside it to maintain that, despite the ferocity and the bitter injustice of some of the criticisms levelled against us, it can ever be said by any of these men that we said they were for sale. It was Fianna Fáil who said that; it was Fianna Fáil who repeated it. Am I unjust if I say to Fianna Fáil now: "How come they in your shop window?" They are your only claim to form a Government in this country, and it was you who stigmatised them as the purchasable dross of Irish public life. How can men accept that stigma and serve those who put that stigma on them? Do they deny putting that stigma on them? Do they deny that day after day since the final count was published their newspaper had no comment to make upon it but that? There was bargaining; there was an open market. They are the people who now assert that the highest interest of the public life of Ireland is to be served by reneging all they put before the people when this campaign began by getting their title deeds from Deputies whom they thought it right to stigmatise as potential articles of commerce.
If I thought of any Deputy in this House as someone eligible for purchase I would cut off my hand before I would disgrace this country by constituting part of a Government returned to office by a man who would sell his trust for money. It is a dreadful thing to say of a Deputy chosen by our people. God knows we are not all angels, and we do not profess to be. God knows this Dáil is not a kindergarten, and thank God it is not. It is an arena of free men where hard blows are given and taken in the ordinary course of our public life. That is what it should be and it is as that that I am proud to belong to it. I am not suggesting that election by the Irish people is a certificate of angelic virtue for any man, but it is a certificate that he is a decent man or he would not be a representative of our people in our Parliament. It is Fianna Fáil who choose to withdraw that certificate of character, and, having withdrawn it, to lean on those they slandered to get power. Thank God, the inter-Party Government never had to do that; thank God, the inter-Party Government never proposed to do it; thank God, the inter-Party Government never had to seek, and no one would have dreamt it would accept the support or suffrage of a purchasable man.
I should like to go on with the work we are doing. It was hard work and it was work in which there was little monetary reward for those who undertook it, and God knows that that is true of our predecessors just as much as it is of us. Our predecessors who served as Ministers of this State were shamefully, meanly and contemptibly underpaid, and that should be redressed at an early date. I claim no credit—nobody dare do so, standing in front of men who served for 18 years as Ministers of this State —for forgoing the right to adequate monetary reward for serving as a Minister. Dozens of other men have forgone it in similar circumstances in this country and made no moan about it.
I do not deny for a moment that I gloried in being afforded the opportunity of doing something to complete the work on the land of this country that had been begun in a previous generation. I am not ashamed of the record of myself or of any of my colleagues. I think it is a record of which all of us have a right to be proud, and, if there is one I would mention who did as much as or more than any of us to give this country its rightful place in the world, to raise it in the estimation of every nation and to give those of us whose duty it was to go abroad in the name of Ireland pride in our office wherever we went, that man was Seán MacBride. He and I were for many a long day at diametrically opposite poles in the political life of this country. To-day, in regard to many matters relating to economics and possibly to politics, we might not see 100 per cent. eye to eye, but we found it possible to work together for common ends. It was an honour and a privilege to work with him and some day those who poured slander upon him, because it was safe to slander him for he had so many enemies who rejoiced to see him slandered, will regret much of what they said and will feel the bitter wound themselves of the man who throws a weapon unaware that the weapon he is using is a boomerang.
I value my repute in the public life of Ireland. I am proud to remember that a part of my public life was in the closest possible association with as distinguished a public servant as this country has ever had, Seán MacBride. I am proud to have served under as good a Taoiseach as this country ever has produced or ever can produce. I deal in no hyperbole. I do not describe him as the unprecedented God-sent leader of the Irish people. I describe him as as good a Taoiseach as this country ever had or ever can produce. There will be his match in every generation. Our people have not ceased to produce them and, with God's help, they never will. I envy anyone who comes after us who is privileged to have the very high honour of serving in an Irish Cabinet under so splendid a Prime Minister.
Perhaps it is too early to deliver a valedictory address. I have been 32 years on the roads of Irish politics and that pilgrimage leaves no space for wishful thinking. If the decision of this House requires us to leave down the work we are just beginning, so be it. That is the fortune of politics and only a fool engages in politics if he is not prepared to take the rough with the smooth. I lay it down, if I have to, with reluctance for I loved to serve. I only hope and pray that the work we have started, that we have only just started, will not be destroyed in malice or envy or spite. I heard so many of the Fianna Fáil Deputies jealous of our achievements denigrate the things we had done. I knew they were doing it because they were jealous. I implore them, if they do not consider it a sin against consistency to label the Deputies of this House as purchasable merchandise and glory in their right to form an Irish Government by their suffrage, so far to strain their consistency as to allow the plans they so much blew upon to carry on for the benefit of our people. If they are not able to build, let them not destroy; if they are not able to create, let them not sterilise; and if they are not able to treat the work of governing Ireland as a glorious adventure, in which it is a privilege to give all that one has, let them not turn it into a base, mercenary traffic of corruption and intimidation.