There is no use in our getting into a conflict about adjectives of that sort, because we do not know where we should arrive. It might be considered, as I have said, that, as the Constitution is peculiarly a child of the Taoiseach, he should be allowed to rear it and dress it up in any way he likes and that he should be given all the stages of this Bill to-day. However, that is a position which, on consideration, might be misunderstood. There are some points about this Constitution and about these amendments which it is worth while to make on the Second Stage because, from all the auguries, it would appear that no opportunity for real amendment of the Constitution will arise on the Committee Stage.
The Constitution ought to be a fundamental document and it should be the object of every good citizen to have the Constitution respected. Above all, the Government itself, in its framing and treatment of the Constitution, should foster that respect. The Constitution will only be respected if there is knowledge amongst the people of straight-dealing between the Government and them on Constitutional matters. My principal difficulty about this Constitution (Amendment) Bill is that the amendments are of a very minor character and that what appear to me to be the real problems of the Constitution and the real amendments required have not been introduced at all. In the times as we know them, written Constitutions are not as important as they were once deemed to be, and by no means as important as they were deemed to be in the period of the last war or in the years afterwards. I think they are less important to-day than ever before.
This Constitution contains a great deal of make-believe and a great many of things are set down in it which are fundamentally untrue. For example, the Preamble to the Constitution says: "We, the people of Éire ... adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution." The name "Éire" is most unfortunate and the people who adopted it were not the people of Éire but the people of Saorstát Eireann. On that point the word "Éire" is inserted in the Preamble of the Constitution for the purpose of supporting the pretence or make-believe that when adopting the new Constitution the people were dealing with a new State which, of course, was not so. The new Constitution is but an amendment of the other Constitution but for the existence of which this Constitution would have no validity in law or in fact.
I wonder if the Taoiseach has given any consideration to the extraordinarily bad effect the insertion of the word "Éire" has had. It has created a new name, Éire, for the Twenty-Six Counties of Ireland, and it has fortified the claim of the people of the Six Counties to call themselves Ulster, to adopt for the Six Counties the ancient and historic name of Ulster and apply it to the Six Counties as if they were the whole of the province. The Taoiseach believed that he had a right to do something in the Constitution which would make a change and bring in the name "Ireland". It is only the English people and the people of the Six Counties and some people here at home who know no Irish who can use the word "Éire", but, of course, Ireland could not be commonly used without doing violence to common sense. Instead, we proceeded to use the word "Éire" and so the great majority of people who do not understand Irish think that the name can be properly used for the Twenty-Six Counties.
I had to preside at a debate recently in which the subject for discussion was: "Go gcuireann aithbheochaint na Gaedhilge cosc ar aondacht na h-Eireann" which, of course, means "That the Irish language revival interferes with the unity of Ireland". They could not use the word Éire for Ireland because in the course of the debate they would have had to refer to the Twenty-Six Counties as Éire. They had, therefore, to leave out Éire and say "na tíre seo". Those people who are unfortunate enough to have to pay income-tax will notice that the document says that the use of "Éire" should be considered in accordance with certain Articles of the Constitution.
There was an attempt made to use the word Ireland, curiously enough, in an Eggs Bill which came before the Oireachtas. The question arose about exporting eggs from Ireland to Northern Ireland. A Ministerial suggestion was made that we should put in a sub-section that Ireland did not mean Ireland but territory in the jurisdiction of the Oireachtas. These people, unfortunately, failed to consider the number of difficulties that the use of the word Éire would give rise to in connection with certain Articles of the Constitution, and so they are compelled in so many words to say in many places: "We are sorry but Éire is not Éire in reality but only the Twenty-Six Counties." It is very unfortunate that a name should be chosen and should run current in English-speaking countries which lacks its proper meaning, and that has the effect of solidifying and fortifying the claim of people in the Six Counties to call their area Ulster. There is a great deal of make-believe in connection with the Constitution. We have had a number of amendments which instead of being translated from the fundamental document in English by the translation staff were entrusted to people in whom the Taoiseach had more confidence than he had in the staff which for over 16 years had been translating legal documents from English into Irish for the Oireachtas.
The attitude of the Government is that this Constitution was passed by the majority of the people. No concession was made to anybody or to any Party no matter what arguments were put forward. The new Constitution was framed, not by a committee of any kind, but by the Taoiseach, with an object of his own, presumably. When it was brought up for discussion in 1938, no important concession was made to the Opposition. Nothing could be more discouraging than the Committee discussion of this Bill a couple of weeks ago in the Dáil. Again no concessions were made. The Constitution has proved to be unworkable first and foremost because of the absurd name given to the State and, secondly, because of matters to which the Taoiseach himself has referred.
Take the case of the President. There again there is a certain amount of make believe, because the President is head of the State only for certain purposes and not for other purposes. It is provided that the President is to be elected by the whole people; but at the first moment that particular provision of the Constitution was to be worked steps were taken to avoid an election. Why? Because it was considered that an election was not desirable. We have a provision that an election should take place and then we come to the conclusion that an election was not desirable. An analogy might be drawn with the President of the United States, but the President here has very little power. I think the whole object was to give power to the Government not only against the citizens but also against the President. There is no analogy between the President here and the President of the United States. The President of the United States is head of the Government and is chief executive officer. Here the President is no such thing. It seems to me very undesirable that the President should be able to say to the Taoiseach: "I have been elected by the people and I derive my authority from the people as much as you do."
The President could even say that he derives his authority from the people more than the Taoiseach does as he might, in fact, have received a bigger majority than the Taoiseach in an election. It is a very undesirable position. I do not know whether the Taoiseach still thinks an election desirable—though, of course, it may be undesirable at the present moment.
Another objection is that, if a man becomes a President after a bitterly-fought election, he surely would have the taint of politics. Surely the head of the State—even in the situation envisaged by this Constitution—is always looked upon after an election as a person belonging to a certain political Party and to whom other people have an objection. I do not know of any method which could be worse than this one of a general election by the people.
In a great many other ways this Constitution has been made less flexible, less workable and more irksome than its predecessor. Let us consider Parliament. According to this Constitution, the Dáil must be elected by proportional representation with the single transferable vote. I wonder why the Taoiseach put that in and ordained that method. This is not a matter of politics. All that the previous Constitution said was that the election would be according to the principle of proportional representation. You could have very many systems other than the system we have at present, and still be in accord with the principles of proportional representation. Yet, for some reason I do not know of, we are bound down to election according to proportional representation by the single transferable vote, and we cannot adopt any other system without a referendum—which I will deal with later. I do not know why that restrictive power should have been inserted.
The Taoiseach says that the question of the election of the Seanad was discussed in the Dáil before, and that the scheme embodied in the Constitution was approved by the people. Much has been said in praise of the Taoiseach and he has incurred a certain amount of censure now and again but nobody ever thought that he was a political simpletion. Surely the Taoiseach is not sufficiently simple to think that the people of this country actually, by their approval of the Constitution, have approved of the method of electing the Seanad which is provided in that Constitution. I do not think they have. I do not think that any appreciable percentage, any minority of any of those who voted for the Constitution—or indeed of any of those who voted against it, but particularly of those who voted for it—ever allowed the method of electing a Seanad to enter their thoughts. At any rate whatever was approved in 1938, they were not getting the exact type of Seanad required.
Through natural delicacy, I refrain from describing the dreadful example of what happened under the Constitution in the election of a Seanad. Take the position as we know it, without considering the kind of Seanad this is or how competent or otherwise it may be. In the Constitution there are proposals for a Seanad with certain liberty to decide certain details by a Seanad Electoral Act. Surely there are certain things in the Constitution which may need amendment at any time. It prescribes that the number of members shall be 60. If it is desired to reduce that to 50 or 40, a referendum will be necessary after the 26th June. Surely that is absurd.
The position should be that a very small number of provisions would be in the Constitution—stating that there must be a Seanad—and the whole question of its election and constitution should be left to the ordinary law. At the present moment, we have a Commission on Vocational Organisation presided over by a member of the Hierarchy. They may find a vocational system which would give an entirely different Seanad from that envisaged in this Constitution. The Taoiseach, who is so sure of his views being right, wished to put this Article 18 into the Constitution, providing panels of a particular kind and, in order to change these panels, a referendum would be necessary after June of this year. Surely that is contrary to all commonsense.
I do not wish to discuss at the moment the constitution of this House, but rather what actually happened. The Constitution contemplates that the Seanad and the Dáil must change at the same time and in the same way. In effect, that means that, if a Party with a majority in the Dáil goes to the country and loses that majority, the Seanad also will be dissolved and a new one will come in, identical with that of the Dáil. In other words, Dáil and Seanad will have the same political views at the same time. That is another part of the make-believe.
There is another point which would be a great joke were it not such a tragedy—that this is not a political body. Everybody here knows that this body did come into being on a political basis, and even the hardiest propagandists have abandoned the whole contention that this is not a political body.
