No counsel were employed in the district court. I wanted confirmation of that. I move:
That the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration.
As the House is aware, we had on the Order Paper, in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, a motion dealing with some of the matters which are taken in this Supplementary Estimate. As the Minister has indicated, the Supplementary Estimate deals largely with the Singer case and the ramifications arising out of it. Our motion dealt solely with that case and called upon the Dáil to condemn the Government for their failure to bring charges against Dr. Singer before the courts in such appropriate legal form as would enable the courts to give effective judgment on such charges.
You, Sir, as Ceann Comhairle, have ruled in your wisdom that such a motion goes beyond what Standing Orders permit. While we might differ with you on that ruling, I want to make it clear that we in this Party have always accepted the rulings of the Chair as being final. One of the matters about which, all through the years, we have been very careful has been to ensure that the rulings of the Chair are supported, by our votes in the lobby, if necessary. That is a course which we, I am glad to say, have always followed but which other Parties in the House have not always followed if it did not suit their convenience. Indeed, I well remember one case in which the Taoiseach himself was prepared to subordinate his principles for temporary petty expedients, and to walk into what I am sure he now realises was the wrong Division Lobby.
Be that as it may, you having ruled in this fashion, we bring the matter about which we and the country as a whole have such reason to complain before the House in this motion to refer back for reconsideration Vote 18 in respect of Law Charges, which the Minister for Finance has now introduced. The question of Shanahan Stamp Auctions and Dr. Singer and the charges that are made against him were considered somewhat by the House on the Estimate for Law Charges last year on 20th July, 1961. Some things were said then which I must now repeat so that everyone can understand clearly and beyond question that the same observations apply.
I want to make clear that in condemning the Government—for of course a motion to refer back an Estimate is tantamount to that—we are not in any way casting any reflection or aspersion in any shape or form on any judgment of any court. The courts have given their verdict on the evidence that was brought before them and on the evidence that was brought according to the forms in which the Executive brought it. Our complaint is not against the courts, and nothing that I shall say can in any possible circumstances be construed, or could or should be construed, as in any way a criticism of the courts or of their decisions.
What we complain of, and what we accuse the Government of, is their failure as the Executive to bring before the courts the proper legal form of the charges which should have been brought. We all understand, whether we are lay people or whether we are lawyers, that matters being brought before any court on any subject, be it criminal or civil, have to be brought before them in the appropriate and proper form. So far as criminal law is concerned I am in just the same position as many other Deputies in the House. I know nothing of criminal law; I have never practised in criminal law; and I do not propose to pose as an expert in any way in criminal law.
It is an undoubted fact that the constitutional position which we have here, as in most other democratic States, lays upon the Executive, for the time being, the duty and the obligation of bringing to the Judiciary those charges and that evidence which the Executive feel are relevant and proper, if any person—I was going to use the word "citizen" but it is not necessary that it be a citizen—has contravened the law of the land.
Equally, it would be quite disastrous to our good name here if we were to attempt to decide in Dáil Éireann whether or not Dr. Singer was or was not guilty of any charges. I do not propose to do so. I do not propose to ask the Dáil to make any comment whatsoever in that respect. The people can come to their own conclusions from such evidence as would be available, if it were put in appropriate and proper form before the courts. According to the question answered today, question No. 82, this case was before the courts in one form or another for 240 days, not all of the day perhaps, in certain cases, but on no fewer than 240 days the time of a court was taken up in connection with it.
We are all aware that there was involved in the complaints made a sum of at least £750,000. Some would put the figure a little higher but certainly no one can gainsay that the charges in all covered at least £750,000. It transpired in the course of the hearing of these charges that some 30,000 people were involved; that 30,000 people, the vast majority of whom were Irish citizens resident in Ireland, had invested money in Shanahan's Stamp Auctions. The germ of the case by the Executive was that these people had not got a fair run for their money, putting it in non-legal terms. This case, as I say, involving that sum of money and that number of our people, was one in which it clearly behoved the Executive to take every possible precaution to ensure that it succeeded in bringing to the courts all the surrounding circumstances and facts in such a way that the most exacting court could take no possible objection.
We all subscribe to the view that according to the law, a person is innocent until he is proved guilty. As I say, without going into the question of guilt or innocence, the very magnitude of the case, both as to the amount of money involved and the number of our people involved, laid a very much heavier and more stringent burden on the Executive to ensure that everything possible that could be done was done to give the courts a free and unfettered opportunity of judging on the merits the facts surrounding this case.
Under the Constitution, there is a clear and express duty imposed upon the Taoiseach to ensure that as head of the Executive, he brings those facts to the notice of the courts in the appropriate way because to him and him alone—not to the Government as a whole, but to him and him alone— is left the duty of choosing the first law officer of the Executive. It is with the Taoiseach and no one else is left the job and the task of selecting an Attorney General, just as it is the task of the Attorney General to ensure, as the guardian of the public interest, that he brings the facts and the evidence to the court in proper legal form.
It is therefore no excuse for any member of the Government or for the Taoiseach himself to say that it is not in any way connected with their functions as an Executive. It is the head of the Government, because he is the head of the Government, who has the responsibility and the task of choosing the first law officer of the State, and if the first law officer of the State does not fulfil the task with which he is entrusted, it is the duty of the Taoiseach to ensure that such failure is made good and to make certain that the public weal cannot be disturbed thereby.
In this case, the Executive brought to the court in the initial instance a series of charges. I shall not weary the House by going over all the charges or by going over the various periods and dates involved. Suffice it to say that it took no fewer than 63 days for the taking of the first depositions, before those depositions were concluded.
One of my charges against the Government in respect of that is that they did not take adequate care at all to ensure that during those 63 difficult days, adequate precautions would be taken to present the charges in proper form before the courts. The Minister for Finance has, at the instance of the Minister for Justice, agreed that the ordinary precaution in a case of this size in that respect was not taken, that the Attorney General did not instruct any counsel to act for him in the district court and that is one of the reasons why the indictments that followed were not followed in due and proper order.
Having, as I said, taken 63 days and wasted and taken up the time and the expense of the district court, quite apart from the cost otherwise for that hearing, a trial followed after a considerable delay. The Taoiseach was naive enough to expect the House and the people, apparently, to believe that the delay between January and May for the hearing of the indictments following that district court hearing was due solely to the difficulty of typing copies of the depositions. No matter how long they might be, anybody knows that it would have been perfectly simple to get photostatic copies in a very short time, perhaps, admittedly, at the expense of deferring other matters that were required. Perhaps it would have meant taking over one of the machines from one of the other courts, but in a case of this size, it was not merely desirable but essential that proper steps should have been taken to ensure that there would be no complaint of delay. There was that delay.
There was then a trial. At that trial, there was a conviction by the court, and that went on appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal. Anyone who has read the judgment in respect of the Court of Criminal Appeal, as, I am sure, many members of the House have read it when it was placed in the Library, can only come, from reading that with a clear view, to the conclusion that the court was passing stricture on the law officers of the State for the manner in which they drew their indictments and for the manner in which they, by so doing, prevented the courts from passing judgment on the merits of the case.
In the early part of the judgment, the judge himself remarked how essential it was in a case of that magnitude to make sure that more than usual care was taken, but in fact, as appears from this judgment, no charge of false pretences was laid at all: in fact, as appears from this judgment and from the statement made by the Taoiseach the other day, no effort was made to inform the court in open court that one of the jurymen was an investor in Shanahan's Stamps; and, in fact, as appears from the judgment, no effort was made to frame an indictment applicable to the case of a person dealing with money which had not come into his own hands but had come into the hands of a company with which he himself was dealing.
The judgment that has been written on these three items alone makes it clear that the court in passing judgment not merely passed judgment on the conviction as such but passed critical judgment on the manner in which the charges had been framed, and the Taoiseach himself accepted last Tuesday that the ultimate responsibility for the framing of the charges must and did lie with the Attorney General. Without going into details or further technicalities, there are the facts that the Executive considered there were charges involving £750,000 and that there were charges in respect of which no fewer than 30,000 people felt they had a complaint, and yet according to the verdict of the court, the indictments were not so drawn as to enable the courts to pass judgment on the merits of the facts before it.
That failure can be laid in one place and one place only—on the Government. If people here cannot now categorically say that, according to a court judgment, they were defrauded, cannot say that, according to a court judgment, their case had merits, then the failure can only be laid and must be laid at the door of the Government, who failed to bring those charges before the courts in the proper and accepted legal form.