The nation mourns the passing of one of the most outstanding men of our times in the person of Seán Lemass, soldier, statesman and master planner, who got the wheels of industry turning in a peaceful revolution that provided jobs for tens of thousands of our people and produced a nation which could export its manufactured goods in competition with those of any of the other exporting nations in the world.
Seán Lemass, as boy of 15, began his service to Ireland in the GPO during Easter week, when his rifle spoke of the freedom for which he worked so hard and so effectively during all the remaining years of his life. During the War of Independence he was at his post with his unit and during the final defence of the Republic he was there too. I had the good fortune of knowing him for almost half a century. I first met him at Republican Army Headquarters in the Four Courts, Dublin, a few hours before the building was shelled by Free State Forces in June, 1922. If any man knew what the horrors of civil war meant to the people of this country, and what tragedies it could bring to a family, Seán Lemass knew it.
All his life he followed the dictum of Wolfe Tone to the letter and in the spirit and his motto, which was the motto he provided so effectively for the party which he helped to build and whose fortunes he directed at election after election—the motto of Tone, to unite the whole people of Ireland and to abolish the memory of all past dissensions. If any man worked towards this end, to heal the embers of civil war, to cure the bitterness and the hatred engendered by it, that man was Seán Lemass. If any man had the courage and the ability to take the steps which were necessary to break the barrier and extend that abolition of the memory of past hatreds and dissensions to our separated counties in the North, it was Seán Lemass,
Seán Lemass does not need any monuments in stone or mortar to perpetuate his memory in the hearts of the Irish people. The great airplanes which fly our skies, the great airports which were built through his energies and enterprise, the great development of the peat resources of our country, the rural electrification poles which stretch from one end of the country to the other, the magnificant fleet of modern ships which bring the Irish flag over the seven seas, are some of the monuments which he has built for himself and which will last longer than stone or mortar.
There is another one, however, to which we are too near to do justice to, another one which history will record as perhaps one of his greatest achievements. During the period of World War Two from 1939 to 1945 he was given the post of Minister for Supplies and asked to make certain that we could maintain our neutrality by making it possible for our people to obtain adequate food supplies so that we could not be forced into surrender by starvation. Seán Lemass was able to do this. Wherever he got the supplies, however he got the ships and transport to bring them here, he was able to do it and to see that the food was divided evenly among the people and that a reasonable ration was given to all. That enabled us to survive during that period when pressure was being exerted by outside powers to make us change the course of history. As Monsignor Patrick Browne said on one occasion of Seán Lemass: "He kept the drop to our lips and the bite to our mouths." For that the Irish people will never forget the service which he rendered to this nation in time of stress.
The workers of Ireland, too, will never forget him. As I said at the outset, his foresight energies and initiative in making Arthur Griffith's dream of a two-arm nation a reality, made it possible for a great industrial fabric to be built here; made it possible for trade unions to quadruple their membership in 15 years and made it possible for us to have in Ireland a corps of workers as expert in their jobs as those in any country in the world. Side by side with that, he instituted, through legislation in the Oireachtas, a workers' charter which provided for such things as holidays with pay, conditions of employment, shop hours, wet time insurance and all the other benefits which workers have enjoyed as a result of the thought and concern for their interests which pervaded his mind during his whole life.
I had the great privilege and honour of being associated with him and of enjoying his friendship and working with him, and I found him to be a most unassuming, gentle and considerate man, a man of great heart and of great human sympathy, a man— I know this from my own personal experience because I witnessed it— who would never turn away a charitable appeal and who could not resist a hard luck story. He was a man whose whole life was devoted to the interests of his fellow men and women and a man who, in his lifetime, had the great pleasure of seeing most of his dreams realised. This country was fortunate that, when it had a great national leader like de Valera who inspired the nation, it had a great architect of genius like Seán Lemass to translate into active practical reality the things which must be done in order to put this country on the map as a modern state. That he did and for that we should always remember him.
He also had something which is very seldom referred to and is very little known, I am afraid. He had an abiding interest in the survival of the Irish language. He did not know much of it himself but every encouragement that he could give he gave it. In many of his recent addresses you will find running through them a theme which has been the theme of nationalists down through the years, that without a language this nation cannot survive except as a halfway house between two great English-speaking countries.
The nation is the poorer for his loss and I would ask you on behalf of the Members here present to extend to his wife and family the deepest sympathy of the Members of Seanad Éireann in their great bereavement.
