I did. When I was in office, I said that this system of election was not in accordance with proportional representation, that it was not fair. My majority of 12 went down to three because Fianna Fáil filched the seats of the minority. That is not proportional representation and I was denounced by Deputy MacEntee, of all people, for saying that. Here in the Irish Times there is a letter which verifies my contention of that time that this is not proportional representation. When Deputy de Valera was Taoiseach in charge of putting the present Constitution through the Dáil, he had this very principle which they are now trying to get rid of copper-fastened and riveted into the Constitution. I put down an amendment seeking to suggest that this was too rigid and suggesting that the phrase used in the 1922 Constitution: “Should be on the principles of proportional representation” should be used instead. He said “No”. He wanted it confined and riveted to the principle of the single transferable vote while I wanted to leave it a little more flexible. He insisted on putting this rigid system of the single transferable vote into the Constitution.
I wonder do Deputies remember the rumpus kicked up in this part of the country in 1927 or 1929 when the Northern Ireland people were taking out of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, the obligation on them to have their elections under proportional representation? We raised Cain down here at that time, and properly so. That provision was put into the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, by the British Parliament in order to safeguard in some way not merely the Catholic minority in the North but also the Protestant minority down here in the South. It was taken out of the system in Northern Ireland by the British Parliament and since that time the Catholic minority in the North have had little chance of getting proper representation in the provincial Parliament of Northern Ireland. The result of that decision was that it froze the pattern of political life in Northern Ireland as it stood 40 years ago. Any time there is an election now, even in a constituency at one time regarded as a safe seat for what were then called the Nationalists, all the Unionist Party have to do is to get somebody to go up and split the votes of the minority and the Unionist gets in. That is the system we want. Once you split the vote in the single-seat constituency, put up a stooge, there is an end to anybody having any chance against the official candidate.
Apparently, we now are going to say that Northern Ireland did right in 1927 or 1929 to deprive the Catholic minority of the North of their right of representation as a strong minority in the Northern Ireland Parliament and that we should do it now. I certainly will not subscribe to that. The Catholics in the North are getting very little, even though they have gone a long way and even though the Taoiseach has gone across the Border several times and the Prime Minister has been down here several times. How much influence had to be brought to bear on the British Lord Chamberlain to get a Catholic appointed to the judiciary in the North? That is the result of doing away with it in the North. Is that any guideline to us to do away with it in the South?
We stand and have always stood since 1922 for a representative Parliament, a Parliament in respect of which the voters will be electors and not merely voters, will have a proper choice in the candidates they wish to vote for and will have two, three, four or more, if necessary, TDs who will go into a Department, write letters to a Department, attend meetings and look after their constituents' interests. I certainly would not like to consider their position under the first-past-the-post system where a man with one more than 50 per cent of the votes gets in and all the rest are disfranchised. Every one of the others has to go with his hat in his hand to the fellow who is in who will probably tell him to go and have a jump at himself: "You did not vote for us the last time." Under the proportional representation system, they have their own Deputy who will look after their interests because he is put in to represent them. Under the proportional representation system, we have a really representative Parliament, formed from the people, bringing the people close to the Parliament and not the position where you will have somebody with less than 40 per cent of the vote with a very big, artificially inflated majority in the Parliament.
This system of proportional representation, this part of the voting system affected by the Third Amendment of the Constitution, is part of the structure and fabric of the State. I have the respectable authority of Edmund Burke to sustain me in my belief and contention that no person should venture to pull down any edifice or any fundamental part of the structure of the State, which is serving tolerably the common purpose of society, without infinite thought and infinite care. What thought has been given here to this? They dug up all the old arguments and brought them forward again. There is not even a new look about them—all the same old stale clichés we all dealt with nine years ago in this House and up and down the country all over the place.
I would like, first of all, to bring Deputies here, and some of the younger people in the country, to the realisation that this is an Irish system. It is our system, adopted by this House, conceived by Irishmen for Irishmen and to suit Irish conditions. We are asked to adopt a British system we do not know anything about as far as its operation in this country is concerned. The present system was conceived and designed by Irishmen for Irishmen to suit Irish conditions. It has had its roots even away beyond the establishment of the State. It comes out of our own conditions. It was created in this country and sustained here in Irish tradition over the years since it became an actual practical realisation. We felt it was the best system for our own peculiar problems and our own concerns.
On the last occasion when this matter was being discussed here, the present Minister for External Affairs—I forget what he was then—suggested it was the British imposed this on us. We answered that in Volume 172 of the Dáil Debates. May I quickly and succinctly refer to some of the matters to which I directed attention at that time? It is of importance that this thing should not be got out in any sort of way that conveys a wrong impression. As far back as 1911, Arthur Griffith declared that the principle of proportional representation is the one just system of election in a democratic Government. In the issue of Sinn Féin for January, 1911 — I quoted this at column 1009 of Volume 171 of the Dáil Debates. He said this:
We believe the strength of the Irish Legislature will reside in its including from the beginning representatives of every section of the nation. We desire to see the evil growth of political bossism checked under Home Rule and every section of the community given free speech in an Irish Legislature.
In a further issue of Sinn Féin of 25th February, 1911, he wrote:
PR secures that the majority of the electors shall rule, and that the minority shall be represented in proportion to their strength. It is the one just system of election in democratic government.
That was Arthur Griffith. The Proportional Representation Society of Ireland secured its inclusion in the Home Rule Bill which was passed through the British House of Commons in 1912 and it formally became law on the outbreak of war in 1914. It was also put in the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. In 1919, it was used at the express request of the local people in Sligo to deal with a local situation that existed then, it having been put into operation and having given complete satisfaction. Mr. de Valera gave it his approval at that time, as he did in 1927, and I am sure he had very eloquent words to say when the Northern Ireland Government took it away from the Government of Ireland Act in 1920 and left the Catholic minority to the tender mercies of the wonderful system of first past the post. I have already indicated this and I will not go through it again. He insisted on this particular system being riveted in any system of PR. He would not leave any elbow room at all. He insisted that this system should be inserted into the Constitution of 1938. It is there now. He tried to get rid of it. He made his effort in 1959, but it was unsuccessful. His successors are now trying to get rid of it again, and I hope they will be equally unsuccessful.
Arthur Griffith was still alive in 1922. He did not remain alive very long, but he had something to do with the Constitution and with General Michael Collins, he directed that it should contain the principles of PR. That did not copperfasten the de Valera system. It left elbow room. Mr. de Valera insisted on this rigid system being adopted. People who were alive then knew the conditions that existed before 1922. It was essential that we should have this principle of PR at that time. It is hard to understand now, in these ecumenical days, the fierce hatred and bitterness that existed in this country between what were known as Unionists, Nationalists, Sinn Féiners and all the rest, prior to 1922. I remember a famous newspaper advertisement headed: "A call to Unionists", issued before the Treaty. Protestants were genuinely convinced that if anything like Home Rule were given —not to talk of the great measure of independence we got—they would be destroyed. We heard talk of Rome Rule, that their religion would be destroyed, and their businesses and property taken away. They felt that genuinely. In order to meet that situation and to show that they would be entitled to a square deal from the new Government, this was put in by Collins, Griffith and O'Higgins as part of our political life. It has remained there ever since and has worked very well.
I saw this Dáil from 1922 up to the present. I saw Party after Party being formed. I saw representatives of the business community as Independents, and I saw representatives of Trinity College and Protestants sitting in this House. The Cosgrave Government gave them fair representation in the Seanad. The result is that there is now no whisper from anyone that anything could happen to the Protestant minority in this part of the country. It was a very serious problem at that time. It was part of our principles that we should give fair representation to the minorities. The Protestants were only one minority: there were various others. As I said, I saw Party after Party going through this House. I saw the National Party. I saw the Labour Party which gave great service to the country in the first years of the State. I saw the National Labour Party coming up before Kevin O'Higgins was murdered. I saw the Farmers' Party, the ordinary workers Labour Party, Clann na Poblachta, Clann na Talmhan and the National Democratic Party. They are all gone. This Parliament is still here and still stable in spite of the fact that it was put up by Mr. de Valera and others that the system leads to unstable Government.
I want to pause for a few moments to give some indication to this House and to the country of the effects of the British system we are asked to adopt here. Let me recall in this context what the Taoiseach said. He referred to the impressive array of old-established states like Great Britain, the United States of America and Canada that have this system of first past the post. The British system of election in its actual operation in other countries has demonstrated that that system can produce a Government which instead of being a reflection of general public opinion represents a minority of such opinion and in fact exaggerates a minority into an inflated majority. I gave some examples of elections in England in a speech I made on the Second Reading of a Bill like this before.
As reported at column 1022, Volume 171 of the Official Report, I referred to the situation which existed in the years 1911 and 1912. I was a student at that time and I remember it well. There was a great fund of excitement and anxiety. The Home Rule Bill was at last going through the House of Commons. There was a Liberal Government which had been elected on the first past the post system which should have been a stable strong Government with a big majority, but the Government had not got it. They were depending upon a few Labour men and a few Irishmen to keep them in office. Every vote counted. They had to face by-elections with almost disastrous results. There were three by-elections. I shall quote what I said then:
There were three by-elections within a short space of time and in each of three constituencies that I am taking as examples, the Home Ruler as the person pledged to vote for Home Rule was the sitting Member of Parliament, and this was the result. At Oldham in Lancashire on the 13th November, 1911 the anti-Home Ruler got 12,255 votes: the Liberal Home Ruler got 10,623 votes; the Labour representative who supported Home Rule got 7,448 votes.
So, the two pro-Home Rule candidates in this first past the post election had nearly 19,000 votes whereas the man who won the seat and wanted to vote against it got 12,000 odd votes. This is the system we are being asked to adopt. It produced a result of that kind and will still produce it. I went on to say:
The anti-Home Ruler got in with a majority of something like 6,000 votes. That meant a difference of 2 in the British House of Commons.
I went on to give another example:
At Crewe in Cheshire on the 26th August, 1912 the anti-Home Ruler got 6,260 votes. The Liberal Home Ruler got 5,294 and the Labour Home Ruler got 2,485.
The anti-Home Ruler got in although there was a very good majority against him. Another example I gave was Midlothian (Edinburgh) on 10th September, 1912. The anti-Home Ruler got 6,021; the Liberal Home Ruler got 5,989 and the Labour Home Ruler got 2,413 votes. Again, the anti-Home Ruler got in on a substantial Home Rule vote.
I took these two examples as being startling examples that might bring home to the people what they are asked to do. That is why I repeat them here. But you can still get examples if you have the industry and resources to go through the various election results in England. In the 1945 election, which I think was the one that knocked out Churchill and put in the Labour Government for the first time, the British Labour Party got a nearly two-to-one majority over Churchill in that election in the House of Commons and they had only 48 per cent of the votes. One hundred and seventy-seven Members were elected with fewer votes than all their opponents combined and all or any of these 177 results could have been changed if the votes of the bottom candidate could be transferred. That is a fairly recent result.
Very small shifts in the voting pattern under this first past the post system can produce quite disproportionate changes in the composition of Parliament. Thus a one per cent increase in a Party's vote can give it three to four per cent more seats in Parliament and a one per cent drop in votes can similarly lead to a three to four per cent drop in the Party's strength in the Dáil. Under this system an opposition securing 60 per cent of the votes can quite easily be deprived of the opportunity of forming a Government under the straight vote system.
The figures I have mentioned put beyond all controversy that a Party by reason of the operation of the straight vote system can, by securing merely 40 per cent of the popular vote, secure 60 per cent of the seats in Parliament. That is not a system I would recommend for this country, particularly, as I said some nine years ago, when you are asked to take a leap in the dark. You do not know what you are facing into. Nobody can give even an approximate forecast of what the results will be in the election if this changeover takes place except that there will be undoubtedly a disproportion between votes cast by the electors and the seats secured by any Party in the Dáil.
It would not be proper for me to pass any comment upon the Mother of Parliaments, the British Parliament, but I think I am entitled to comment on the operation of that Parliament in the last few years in its relevance to this context of the competition, if I may put it that way, between the straight vote and the PR system. Going back a little before the present Parliament, the history of that Parliament and the working of the British system clearly show that it has not consistently given the government desired by the majority group of voters, nor has it led to the avoidance of coalitions. We all know that the examination given to the matter here is out of date, since it was made nine years ago, but it may be more obvious and striking now to point out that 2,600,000 Liberals were able to get only nine seats in the House of Commons; the rest of them were disfranchised under this system, in eight of the ten general elections prior to the consideration of this matter here in this House, prior to 1959. The majority of the seats in parliament went to a party with less than half the votes. During the 62 years prior to that, over 70 per cent of the British Governments were coalition governments.
Does anybody think that we would be happy here if we had the situation that is confronting Mr. Wilson and his Labour Government at the present time? Although the British Labour Party got an overall majority, having got only 45 per cent of the votes in 1945, nevertheless from that on when they were put out there was a series of governments, Tory and otherwise, that were hanging on, as we would say, by the skin of their teeth. Certainly, there was the sort of thing which Fianna Fáil would say was the kind of parliament we would expect from PR. But it came out of the straight vote and there were coalitions when governments, not able to get in with a Party that had an overall majority, relied on other Parties for support. This is the sort of thing that it was alleged you would be likely to get from PR but in fact you did not get it from PR but you got it under the straight vote system in England.
Look at the present Labour Government in Britain. They formed a Government with a very clear majority of about 84. Everything seemed grand for them; they had a clear majority and nothing to stop the Labour Party from doing what they wanted. Did they have a happy time since? I would say, to use the phrase used by Deputy Norton, that the situation has been very yeasty and very uneasy since Mr. Wilson came into office. I have the utmost sympathy with him and I am not criticising them at all. They have difficult problems to meet, difficulties in world conditions and economic conditions at home and abroad. Yet they have a clear majority and it would be argued here logically, I suppose, by the Taoiseach that if the Government have a clear majority in the House, they are perfectly happy and can meet any situation and solve any problem.
But the British Labour Party are very far from solving any problem. While they may not have a very solid Opposition, they have a very solid Right and Left conspiracy in their own Party when they are facing difficulties. That is the system we are asked to adopt here, to get this Parliament into something like the situation the British Parliament has been in since they got a clear majority in the last general election. That is a very broad outline of the British Parliament that was referred to by the Taoiseach in his opening statement in introducing these Bills, the old-established and old reliable British Parliament, the Mother of Parliaments, under the straight vote system. It is not a very happy result from that system, to put it mildly.
Then he referred to Canada. In Canada, the Liberal Government had, in 1953, only 48 per cent of the votes but it had a two-to-one majority of the seats. I do not know how that squares with the question of equality and fair representation. Certainly it is not our idea of a representative parliament. But, at the following general election they were overwhelmingly defeated by the Conservatives who polled fewer votes than the Liberals. That is Canada, that he holds up to us as a prototype to follow. The Liberals were defeated at the general election by the Conservatives with fewer votes. In the very short time that they have had this much vaunted system of first past the post, they have had a coalition in the present government and for some time past in Canada. So that the examples the Taoiseach took in recommending that system to this country fall apart in his hands on examination.
There is also the contention—I think it was put forward by the Taoiseach and certainly by some of the speakers since—that the system of proportional representation entails danger of a Government Party not having a majority of the seats in the Dáil, not being able to carry on a government. That contention is belied by the record of this House. Only four times have Fianna Fáil ever secured an overall Dáil majority but for 24 of the 41 years since they entered the Dáil, the country has been governed by Parties which did not secure a majority of the Dáil seats at the preceding general election and for 13 of these 24 years of non-majority governments the Government Party was Fianna Fáil. And yet, they come in here and say that this system leads to unstable government. We have had more stable government here since 1922, in spite of the Civil War and the revolutionary times that we went through for years afterwards, in spite of change of government and all that was involved in it when Fianna Fáil became government, than any other country in the world under the system of proportional representation.
They then fall back on this thing that we are to have a lot of Parties and that proportional representation leads to a lot of Parties. It leads to representation of minorities and if they are strong enough in the country then they get representation, as they are entitled to, in this House because this is a representative Parliament, or ought to be and certainly is under this system of proportional representation, as it would not be under the straight first past the post system. Under the present system we have had governments which remained in office on majority from 1922 to 1932. The people then voted for a change and the Fianna Fáil Government came into office with majorities at each election which held them in power from 1932 to 1948. In the 1948 election the people did not give a majority to either of what have been termed the big Parties and from that decision came a uniting of Parties in inter-Party Government. After two periods of inter-Party government, the people again gave a decision in favour of Fianna Fáil, giving them a substantial majority in the Dáil and, in 1957, they gave them 78 seats—an overall majority. In 1961, they had 70 seats and, in 1965, 72 seats.
What is wrong with that? Why is the country to be put into turmoil to do away with a system that produces those results and gives the most stable government in Europe, not to say Europe and America, not to say the world? Why the necessity for the change? We all know that Fianna Fáil are now afraid that because of the changing views of the younger people who are coming up to vote, they can no longer rely upon the allegiance of Fianna Fáil of the Civil War and there are not enough jobs to go around to bribe the rest of the voters, as is their habit.
We have held the view and, in so far as we could, have put it into effect, that the guiding principle of the Constitution under which this country would be governed should be the principle that Parliament shall be a representative Parliament and not merely a machine for creating an all-powerful Government—which is what is achieved under this system of the single vote. Election to this Parliament, under the present system, has had, and still has, the fundamental purpose of securing the rights of minorities. We have always stood for that principle and that is the principle we commend for confirmation and continuance in this referendum. It is a system that is peculiarly fitted to safeguard those rights and liberties without which a free democracy is nothing but a sham.
There is more to government than merely securing the election of a government so powerful that it will, as all such governments in history have done, govern at their whim to the detriment of minority rights and individual liberties. It was all the "yes-men" of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin that destroyed liberty in Germany, Italy and Russia in the past 35 years. It is vital, I believe—and we on this side of the House believe—in the future of this country that this referendum should not produce a nation of "yes-men".
Over all the range of policy and government, the fundamental case against Fianna Fáil is not their mismanagement of the economy, bad as it is; their system of government by gimmicks; their lack of any consistent or fruitful endeavour in agricultural and social affairs; but, rather, their debauchery of public life. Now, the Party seek further to limit our powers of expression and protest by attempting to exclude minority opinion from Parliament itself, the democratic arena where not alone the general opinion of the nation but that of every section in it should be voiced and listened to, where free inquiry in debate can compel the justification of any act which is the subject of question.
It is difficult to see what is the purpose of these proposals that are put before the Dáil now and will subsequently be put before the people. They were defeated some years ago in a referendum, free and deliberate, of the people. I thought we would see them no more and would hear no more about them, that they would have learnt their lesson. That is not so. We are now here again facing an unnecessary disturbance in the public life and economic life of this country at a time when this country cannot afford to be disrupted in its economy or to be diverted from its efforts to bring back the country to an economic level and to improve it. We cannot afford that now. There is no reason why we should not have gone on as we were before. There is no reason why they should not have taken the lesson learned at the last referendum, except that they are afraid now that at the next general election they will lose their seats because of the drop in their voting power, and perhaps because of the oncoming of Labour.
We think it is the duty of all sections of the community to unite for this purpose, to defeat these proposals of Fianna Fáil. We do so, not in the interests of political Parties, Fine Gael, Labour or anybody else, but in the interests of the people, the interests of the country. We believe, as we believed some years ago, in 1959, when we persuaded the country to defeat Fianna Fáil at the time they were led by their "magic" leader, Eamonn de Valera. We defeated them at that time. I thought we would never see another proposal of this kind in my lifetime. They must be afraid again of losing their hold over the country and over their jobs. Therefore, in my view it is essential that both Parties, Labour and Fine Gael, as well as Independents should join together to put this Government out, to defeat them on these proposals and to secure that we would have again a Government who would at least have principle and not be guided solely by expediency or jobbery, and that they would bring back some decency and prosperity to the country.
