I am about to tell the story of that. I know it. That is what I want to prepare the House for. He put a lot more on record which the Minister can very easily produce from his files and let the House examine it and pass judgement on the fate of the proposals which he put on record. You know, I have been in Government since Mr. Deegan put these notes on record. All of these files were available to me as well as to the Minister. Now, remember, it was the Minister for Lands who produced the memorandum of the late Commissioner Deegan and submitted it to the House as coercive evidence of the propriety of the present Minister's proposal. Let us not hear one side of the story: let us hear both —and I know both.
I did not become interested in Land Commission affairs today or yesterday. I became Minister for Agriculture because I wanted to be Minister for Agriculture. I have long felt that the Land Commission should be part of the Ministry of Agriculture. Feeling so, I took a considerable interest in the Land Commission and, on occasion, as the Minister will learn if he cares to consult his records, acted as Acting Minister for Lands. So it was a foolish thing for the Minister to quote extracts from his files if he was not prepared to hear the further extracts from his files that he is now about to hear.
I challenge the Minister to consult any ex-Land Commissioner—any of them—and to quote him in support of the proposal to have a Land Commissioner Secretary of the Department of Lands. The Lay Commissioners should have no say whatever in staff matters which should exclusively be controlled by the Minister through the Secretary of the Land Commission. By law, the Lay Commissioners have vested in them sole responsibility for dealing with what the statutes term excepted matters. They are 14 in number and are of great consequence to the citizen, vitally affecting some of his most fundamental rights.
The special onus on the Commissioners, because of these serious duties, has been recognised by the Oireachtas by giving the office a special kind of statutory protection analogous to the judicial one only to deal with the most important of these excepted matters—the power to deprive a citizen compulsorily of his land. It has been truly said that next to depriving a citizen of his life and property, this is by way of being the most drastic power entrusted to any individual. It is all the more so when it is realised that there is no appeal from the order of the Commissioners to any court whatsoever.
Let us recall at this stage that if you are sentenced to death or sentenced to imprisonment for theft you have an appeal from the jury's decision on fact, not only to the court of appeal but to the Supreme Court as well. Therefore, it is obviously of great importance that in the exercise of this sweeping power, the cardinal legal principle of not only doing justice but of being seen to do it is strictly honoured. How then can it be said to have been done when one of the Commissioners is a Secretary under the Minister controlling the staff who in that capacity is responsible for selecting the particular person or persons to go on people's lands and make the necessary report and recommendations leading to the acquisition and who, in the final proceedings, may be a member of the court that hears the decision on the citizen's very natural objection to the alienation of his land and property?
There is a further vice in this set up of great gravity. I believe it is the law here—I may be wrong and I stand subject to correction if I am—that the only witnesses called to give evidence for the acquisition of land are the inspectors of the Land Commission and those inspectors have their careers controlled, very properly, by the Secretary of the Department of Lands who may be one of those adjudicating on the evidence tendered by the inspector. But even if they have, as a result of the Dunleavy case, to give evidence now on oath, where heretofore they had not, and the rebutted evidence can be heard and called on at the instance of the objecting landowner, the fact remains that inspectors who are asked to take an oath may find themselves in the dilemma of being called upon to give evidence, on oath, which is adverse to what they know is the view of the Secretary of the Department on whose good opinion they depend for the ordinary promotion and advancement which is their legitimate ambition. I want the House to note these words because they accurately represent a wide consensus of opinion among experienced men in Land Commission business.
Some time or other it is virtually certain that decisions on excepted matters come to, or participated in by a Commissioner-Secretary of the Department of Lands, will be challenged before the courts and it is impossible to foresee any judgement on such an issue other than one declaring the proceedings null and void. Over the years the Land Commissioners' orders have been many times upset by the courts on issues trivial in comparison. Such a decision would obviously be extremely serious and the matter will have vast retrospective effects because all people affected by such orders over the years would bring actions against the Land Commission for the return of land illegally alienated from the status quo condition and looking for heavy damages or the return of allotments and with the new owners of these allotments pressing their case in return. This, of course, would call for a rectifying Act being rushed through Dáil Éireann to stay the spread of such a distemper throughout the country.
Now I am going to tell a little of the history of this story. This issue of the Commissioner who is also going to be Secretary of the Department of Lands is not of today or yesterday. It goes back at least 30 years when the late Mr. Deegan joined the Land Commission as Secretary. Mr. Deegan was certainly one of the most distinguished civil servants in the public service of this country. It would be true to say of him, by those of us who knew and admired him, that he was the quintessence of all civil servants, possessing all the civil servant's most admirable quality, in his case one might fairly say more on the executive than on the administrative side. On the other hand, superbly as he displayed the finest qualities of a public servant, he had some of the shortcomings of the bureaucrat. It would be too harsh to say some of the vices of the bureaucrat but if I use the term in that sense my colleagues in this House will understand that it is not today or yesterday that some of us have been inclined to speak critically of bureaucrats. They have their virtues but they have their vices, too, and one of the vices of the bureaucrat is a complete lack of comprehension of legal principles, or, indeed, of the necessity of the rule of law at all.
The Minister in his brief spoke of unfavourable judgments, or some such expression, of the courts and said that certain sections of the Bill were necessary to rectify the consequences thereof. The bureaucrat's view is that if the courts agree with the individual against the bureaucrat the courts are wrong and the best way to put it right is to pass appropriate amending legislation at the earliest possible opportunity. That, of course, is not a view shared among the sovereign people of a democracy but it is a feeling one can recognise in a highly efficient public servant because his anxiety is to get business rapidly despatched and anything which hinders that distresses him unduly.
It is true to say of the late Mr. Deegan that he had small use for any lawyer. I now remember the phrase the Minister used and I think it was from Mr. Deegan's pen it came—"adverse decisions". He had small use for lawyers and adverse decisions of the High Court caused him acute distress. It was fair enough to say of him that in his heart he felt the courts had a kind of animus against that body of public servants to which he was so proud to belong, the civil servants. I believe Mr. Deegan thought that whenever the judges could take a rattle at the bureaucrat, they always leaped at the opportunity. He was, then, the great civil servant who felt that the executive head of the Department of Lands should also be a Commissioner and it was in his brain that this concept was born, but Mr. Deegan did not stop there.
Here is the interesting part of the story; this is the part of the story the Minister has never told us heretofore; this is the story of which the Minister has a record in his Department. As he told one half of the tale, I think he should have told us the rest. Mr. Deegan did not stop at believing that the Secretary should be a Land Commissioner. Mr. Deegan drafted a Bill when he was Secretary of the Department of Lands. Did the Minister ever see it? No. I saw it. The Minister for External Affairs, Deputy Aiken, was then acting Minister for Lands. If the present Minister will search the files, he will find this interesting little vignette of history.
The then Minister for Lands, Deputy Aiken, and Mr. Deegan had a conference. To the astonishment of nobody, it was quickly discovered that on a great many topics of the kind to which I have been referring, the present Minister for External Affairs and Mr. Deegan found themselves ad idem. One of the facts on which they found themselves ad idem was that there should not be any Land Commissioners at all, that, in fact, the whole question of reserved matters should be abolished and placed under the control of the Minister and his Secretary.
They drafted a Bill. If the Minister searches the records of the Government, he will find a record of that Bill. It did not last for long, because the Bill in question never reached Dáil Éireann. When it was circulated in preparation for submission to the Government, with the Blue Paper attached, the roof blew off Government Buildings. The acting Minister for Lands, Deputy Aiken, and Mr. Deegan met the then head of the Government who dictated to them the terms of the kind of Bill they ought to have drafted and laid down very explicitly that there were to be independent Lay Commissioners and that there were to be at least six reserved matters. In regard to the reserved matters, his instructions were carefully carried into effect. I do not think the person concerned at that time knew that, in fact, more than one of the Lay Commissioners at that time were executive officers of the Department of Lands.
But this interesting fact emerged. Having been frustrated in his efforts —done from the highest motives, of that I have no doubt—to abolish all reserved matters and to make them all the subject of direct control of the Minister for Lands for the time being, Mr. Deegan recommended to the then Minister — I think it was the late Deputy Derrig, but I am not quite sure—that the Assistant Secretary of the Department and the Chief Inspector, the late Mr. Waddell, should both be made Commissioners, and they were made Commissioners.
I now assert that every single one of these men—and the late Mr. Nally, too — having attempted to discharge the dual duties of Secretary and Commissioner, all of them went on record as saying that they found it was impossible to do it satisfactorily. I say that on the records of the Irish Land Commission, which the Minister can find, there will be clear evidence that the late Mr. Brown, a Land Commissioner appointed by the Fianna Fáil Government and a man of notoriously Fianna Fáil sympathies, emphatically went on record that he dissented from the proposition that there should be an executive officer of the Department appointed to the Lay Commissioners. I do not think I overstate the case when I say that the late Mr. Commissioner Nally finally prevailed on the then Minister for Lands, Deputy Blowick, to relieve him of his executive duties on the grounds that he could not discharge the two satisfactorily. Consequently, he ceased to be an executive officer of the Department of Lands and elected to continue as a Land Commissioner.
I want to submit to the House the view that this whole concept of Mr. Deegan's was utterly fallacious and arose from the peculiar and distinguished qualities of the man—his passionate desire to come straight to the heart of every matter, his ruthless impatience with the slow processes of the courts and of the law. These are all admirable qualities, but when brought in contact with the infinite delicacy of the whole question of land tenure in this country, they are qualities fraught with volcanic danger unless prudently controlled.
It is perfectly true that the late Mr. Deegan held the view that the Secretary was hopelessly handicapped—I think those views are recorded in the memorandum the Minister says he left behind him in the Department of Lands—if he was not at the same time a Land Commissioner. In my belief that matter was frequently canvassed in the Land Commission between Mr. Deegan and several of his colleagues. I want to put it here expressly on record that some of his most experienced colleagues perennially asked him this question: "In what way are you handicapped or in what way would you be handicapped?" When that question was put to him he never could answer it. His colleagues' view was that he could not answer because there was not any answer. He had just conceived this notion and nothing would shake him. When pressed to say why, there was no answer. He believed it and that was all. He had convinced himself of its truth and nothing would shake him.
He was very much of the same sort of mind as the Minister is about this Bill. He regarded it as a determined, irrevocable decision, and nobody was going to change him. This was reasonable to do and he was convinced of it. His colleagues urged on him the view that the Commissioners' power is prescribed in precise and detailed terms in a sealed order made by the Minister, which anyone can see and read. If the Commissioners meet in conference, the Secretary must see well beforehand the agenda the Commissioners propose to discuss, and any and all decisions arrived at in such a conference must be forthwith communicated to the Secretary of the Department of Lands.
Of course, all this boils down ultimately to the universally-held view that every stage in the proceedings to acquire a man's land from him, from beginning to end, should be outside any suggestion that the Minister or the staff under him have had any say in the decision.
We have argued at length the whole question of expedition and so forth on previous sections and the net point here is whether we should have a man who is Secretary of the Department of Lands a Lay Commissioner as well. I know the Minister can produce a Finance memorandum from Deputy McGilligan in 1949 approving the arrangement whereunder I think Mr. Nally and Mr. Waddell were Land Commissioners as well as executive officers. I want to point out to the House, if there is anybody really concerned to judge of the merits of this— and I have not discussed this with Deputy McGilligan as I have not had the time or opportunity; as the House will readily understand, I have been engaged elsewhere——
