I want in the first instance to clarify the position of the Labour Party as adopted by their annual conference, and in that respect I am grateful to my colleague, Senator Ferris, for drawing attention to the precise wording of the motions that were carried by the conference in Dublin on 15 April. The position that the Labour party are in — and let there be no doubt whatsoever about it — is that they are opposed to President Reagan's foreign policy, but it is equally certain that it was agreed unanimously by the Labour Party Conference that every unit of the party should organise and initiate peaceful protests against President Reagan's visit here. Such a decision has already been communicated to every branch and every unit of the Labour Party in accordance with the democratic procedures of our party. The party, of course, defeated narrowly — I say narrowly — a suggestion that every member of the Labour Party elected in one capacity or another, should boycott the official ceremonies associated with the Presidential visit. I accept that decision, that we did not bind our public representatives in that way, but I emphasise the two other elements — that we want to protest that foreign policy, and that we were instructed to organise and initiate peacful protests on the basis of that foreign policy.
I want to develop for a few minutes the thinking that somebody like myself holds in opposing the extension of this extraordinary honour to President Ronald Reagan to address both Houses of the Oireachtas. Firstly, it is important to bear in mind and indeed as Senator McGuinness so correctly points out, that it is a unique honour, it is a signal honour and it is that for a number of reasons. It involves all the Irish people, through their elected representatives, with the visit of the individual involved. We must reflect on the significance of this. The decision to so invite President Ronald Reagan is a compliment rarely bestowed by other countries. You can reply to that by saying "We will ask any Head of State who visits this country to address both Houses." I presume those people who favour this motion are not suggesting such things. You can then reply that this is something that is being reciprocated because our Taoiseach has been invited to address the Houses in the United States. Then your argument is based on reciprocity.
While I have many differences with him in the matter of economic and overall social philosophy, which I happen to think is one I would not quite favour in many ways, I refuse to believe that Deputy Garret FitzGerald, the Taoiseach, is of the same order and represents the same attitude towards the world as President Reagan. We are left with the idea that it is something we should do, get it over with and let it pass away as quickly as possible. In the end you find the people who argue from the logic of this motion suggesting something similar to that. I want to respect their viewpoint in doing so. They argue, I think I am accurate in saying this and this is the strong point of their argument, that one is honouring the Head of State and that the State has a unique long tradition with the Irish people. I want to question that. Between 1845 and 1849 one million Irish people died, and another million people emigrated, many of them to the United States, via ports such as Liverpool. They found themselves in the United States where their position was broadly similar to those people who today live in insecurity in the countries that are attacked by President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. They were not wealthy yet; they were not tourists; they were involuntary, refugees from economic circumstances that had been forced on them and they fled this country.
In all the generations that lived in the United States, very few of them ever cast a vote for the party that put forward President Ronald Reagan as their candidate. They voted for the Democrats. They found themselves in the cities of the United States, and they did not support the Republican Party with its views, particularly if you look at the history of support for both parties within the United States. I find it a little incredible to suggest that President Ronald Reagan is coming here representing all the American people, not only now but all those people who are descended from those people who were driven by hunger and misfortune from this country. I want most emphatically to say that the facts do not support such a suggestion. It is equally important to bear in mind, in view of what other people have said, that the number — to quote the polls — who put him in the White House with the appalling consequences it has wreaked on the world, was 27 per cent. I had the opportunity of making contact during the second week in April with many of the people who represent Democratic public opinion, and some Republican people, in New York and Washington. Their view was that it would be both valuable and necessary that President Reagan be made very well aware of the strength of popular public feeling in this country about his foreign policy. They emphasised that — and I am speaking about people long in office, such as the Speaker, Tip O'Neill, and people who had direct conversations with Senator Ted Kennedy and so forth.
I emphasise a point made by Senator McGuinness, that is, that the onus is on those who want to support this motion to establish clearly and unequivocally how they are going to distance the man from the office. I am not accusing anyone of having spoken of that. I think such would be an exercise in casuistry worthy of medieval theology. The fact is that the man comes here, as Senator McGuinness points out perceptively and accurately, not as a titular Head of State but as a Head of State administering a policy that has precise effects of which we know. We cannot, unfortunately for those who believe in a view of Ireland, keep our heads down and not know what is happening around the world.
Television screens have brought into the sittingrooms of every family in this island the horror of Central America, the horror of the Philippines, the horror of the refugee camps, the horror of massacre and the horror of those who die in the streets in El Salvador. We cannot, like those people in Germany at the beginning of the Second World War, say we did not know. We do know, we more than know the consequences of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy: we know the author of those policies. This motion proposes to bring the author of all those actions of which we have full knowledge into this building and not address one of us, but address all of us, assembled in a solemn session to pay tribute to his visit. I reject that as a moral course of action, with the greatest of respect. I think the morality of our response to the foreign policy consequences — and I say this with humility — should take precedence over the formalism of how we handle the visits by Heads of State in one way or another. We are going to confer on the visit of President Ronald Reagan the formal compliment that he be invited to address both of these Houses, and through that we are going to involve all the Irish people through those of us who are elected representatives. Let me say obiter dicta on this: those constituents I represent in this House who have expressed their opinion to me have told me overwhelmingly that they do not want me, in their name, to lend myself to such a visit, and of course I will not be doing so.
There is another point that I am glad has been conceded round the House, and most recently in public discussion, and that is, the connection between the visit of President Ronald Reagan and his re-election campaign. Nobody except the most naive people are suggesting that it has nothing to do with his re-election campaign. Rather coyly, many of our own politicians suggest that if they were being re-elected they would find themselves in strange places hoping to win votes. This is an honest admission, but I must construe it in another way. We are not only bringing President Ronald Reagan running for re-election into these Houses in the full glare of his Republican television camera network, but we are assisting his re-election process, quite consciously. If we are assisting his re-election process, we are assisting his Administration and the continuation of the policies that are at the core of that Administration.
I do not have the time this evening to go in detail through President Ronald Reagan's policies at home and abroad. They have a very definite character in the United States. I have heard people in Europe, for example, look at a distance and talk of the strong American dollar recovery happening in the United States, and one innocent person writing a letter to the papers the other day said, "what better reasons for giving anybody an honorary degree?" Of course if you were in the United States and were looking at the parks that are no longer open for five days a week, if you were looking at the cuts in health services, the numbers cut back in public service employment, you would see very clearly that his policies have had a disastrous effect on poorer people, black, white, yellow and brown in the United States. That is why there is such a strength for candidate Jesse Jackson in the poorer parts of the United States, particularly among the non-white population. His attitude on how trade unions should exercise their rights is disgraceful. There are his policies abroad to which attention has been drawn.
Perhaps someone, somewhere, in the middle of all these formal visits, will say something to him about the Irish citizen who is locked in a jail in the Philippines under the Marcos régime, with the assistance of the United States. We are all aware that President Reagan's influence could have him released in a day.
Then there is the tragedy of Central America with which we are familiar. I regard it as part of the evolution of Irish thinking that in 1981 and 1982 a consensus was established across all the parties opposing military solutions in Central America, calling for support for a political process that included the Contadora countries' proposals for peace in the region. I will turn in a moment to that, but it is very clear that the present Reagan Administration is not committed to the Contadora process, and cannot between addressing us here and getting the freedom of Galway city, an honorary degree and a reception in Dublin Castle be converted to supporting the Contadora process.
Anyone who suggests that quiet diplomatic conversions can take place must have a belief that extends way beyond the miracle of the striking down of Saul. I have been influenced particularly in my attitude to the question suggested in this resolution by the structure of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy. I wish to give some instances. I hope I am not boring anyone but I am reminding people of the black news of our television screens. We have a moral weakness to switch off the facts of death as Senator Robb often points out when he is speaking about deaths in Northern Ireland but we have watched, assisted in particular by the people the previous speaker mentioned, reports of the 50,000 people who have died in El Salvador alone since 1979.
We have watched the reports of the people who have placed mines in the waters of Nicaragua. It is time to call spades spades about the position in relation to Nicaragua and the impact of the Reagan administration's policies there. At the same time as the Reagan visit will be taking place in Ireland and as he will be addressing both of these Houses, the Christian Democratic Party of Belgium, for example, are turning out material which seeks to discredit the Sandanista regime in Nicaragua. I am referring to the English version of their document circulated between 9 and 19 March 1984 which is an elaborate tissue of lies purporting to come from a standing committee for human rights in Nicaragua. This same bogus organisation are the organisation who published photographs of people killed in the last days of the Somozist regime purporting to be Miskito Indians slaughtered by the Sandanista, the same discredited organisation, the standing committee for human rights with its links with Cosa, the high council for private enterprise in Nicaragua. Again I have listened to people suggesting that the Nicaraguan hierarchy disapprove of the Government there and that maybe the Americans are right.
The Nicaraguan Hierarchy of six bishops, one of whom has always supported the present Government and one more who has recently started to support the Government, is presided over by Archbishop Obando y Bravo, who in the Somoza regime, in the last days of the last cruel dictator, ordered the churches kept open on a continuous basis so that people could pray for the recovery of Somoza, who when the Government overthrew a dictatorship, one of the cruellist in modern times, left Nicaragua for Costa Rica, later returned and now presides over the Hierarchy. It is an indication of life in Nicaragua that his speeches are printed every Monday morning in the newspaper La Princa.
I am not going to stand up here and say it is a matter of who is influencing what and who is influencing the rest of the region. I want to repeat something I said when I was a Member of the other House. The people who support foreign policy initiatives of the present Reagan administration are visiting death on the people of El Salvador. They are seeking to destabilise the country that is Nicaragua and in which the most significant achievements have been made and which are not denied. There has been a reduction from 50 per cent to 12 per cent in the illiteracy rate. There have been more houses built in the last four years than in the previous 50 years. In relation to access to education the rural people have gone back to participate in schools. That country has had 400-500 mines placed in its different ports by the direct assistance of the Reagan Administration.
There is no point in saying that, of course, we condemn all of this but that we are going to ignore who the author of it is. I am not asking the Seanad to take my word for all of this. I refer to the provisional verbatim record of the Security Council meeting of 30 March, 1984 at which Mr. Chamorro Mora and Mrs. Kirkpatrick were present. The Document is No. S/PV. 2525. On that occasion the ambassadors of the United Nations gave details of the camps that are placed in Honduras territory across the border for the purpose of attempting to destabilise Nicaragua. Fifteen camps are listed on pages 17 and 18 of the minutes of the Security Council, ranging from the "Las Tunas" camp, 11 kilometres west of El Espino in Honduran territory, and which has 200 counter revolutionaries. These 15 camps were listed in their locations and details given as to who worked within them and who was being assisted within them. Mrs. Kirkpatrick did not choose to deny a single fact in her later reply.
Equally, for the period between 4 February and 29 March 1984 the Nicaraguan Ambassador to the United Nations listed 33 separate attempts which were made in that period to attack hydro electric stations, fishing boats and so on in Nicaragua. I am giving these details because I was anxious to give a source that had nothing to do with some distorted television programme or anything of that kind. These are facts. They have not been contradicted.
People genuinely believe, by passing resolutions like this that they are for some reason or other paying tribute to the people who helped the Irish emigrants in the nineteenth century. How do facts like that fit with our own historical experience? When we were in this position ourselves, when we were under siege and had economic policies heaped against them, would we have thanked them for saying, "excuse us while we forget you for a while, while we get on with the business of entertaining, conferring degrees and freedom, and while we all stand up and applaud the author of the misery of these people?" I find it morally impossible to square that kind of thinking. I believe that if you try to make those distinctions you will provoke a crisis between political institutional debate and representation and the feelings of people on issues like this.
People who are in favour of giving the maximum amount of honours to the visit of President Ronald Reagan all argue that these matters I speak of are areas of diplomatic activity, that diplomatic initiative could be taken on them and that we could get on with the business of operating by other considerations. I am very worried about what that tells us about foreign policy. The Leader of the Seanad contributed enormously to the development of our foreign policy, to its being far more important to the Irish people now than it was before. Both young and old are debating neutrality, for example. Fine idealistic young people are campaigning for the removal of the threat of nuclear disaster. They deserve all of our respect. The argument that all the matters I speak of can be handled diplomatically is very strange when one is speaking about an administration that has removed itself from the concern of the International Court of Justice, that decided before leaving the Court of Justice at the Hague to attack UNESCO and give it a death blow. That is the administration of which we are speaking.
We should not fool ourselves on these issues. Two groups of people will thank us for protesting peacefully but effectively, for distancing ourselves, if this is what it is at the end of the day, from the re-election campaign. The many people in the United States who do not support the policies of the present administration, with its enormous build up of the threat of war, with its declaration of war effectively on its neighbour, will thank us, as will all the fine people in this country who want us to stand with dignity before the world believing in foreign policy and developing unashamedly our notions of neutrality. For that reason this is an unnecessary and inappropriate gesture.
Of course the argument will be used, made by decent people who believe in honesty, that perhaps there are economic reasons and advantages to be grafted on to our traditional relationship to the United States. The argument is made about US investment, for example, but these people forget that Mr. Reagan's administration — even by their own logic — is not something which has been of benefit to them in this regard. Under the Reagan administration US investment has dropped. President Reagan's isolationist foreign policy has delayed not only Irish recovery but economic recovery all over Europe. Equally, most recently, those countries such as Ireland who want to by-pass stages of industrial transformation, who want to get into high technology, internationally traded services in the information area, are affected by his most recent policy of an isolationist character: to place obstacles in the way of the transfer of technologies like these. I am sorry, but the argument is not supported by the facts that one would adduce to support it on its own terms.
I want to answer a criticism that has been made very unfairly, though not in this House, that those people who are opposed to the visit of President Reagan are in some way people who have not opposed the breaches of human rights in different parts of the world where they involve the Soviet Union. I was spokesman on foreign affairs for the Labour Party in the other House when I issued statements on Afghanistan and on events in Poland. They are on record. I equally recall marching in support of free trade unions on different occasions and I was not joined by many of the people who want to level accusations like this. The truth of the matter is that we have a unique opportunity to do one of three things: assist in the re-election of Mr. Ronald Reagan with the consequences that we know will follow; we equally can decide to remove ourselves from the re-electoral process; or we can do something which is enormously more valuable, that is, do everything possible to make sure that he is not re-elected. That would be my own choice.
People suggest that maybe the President, who is an elderly man and a very fit one, a model for people who are advancing in years and who wish to stay fit and so on, has not developed these policies overnight. I was very interested in tracing his career from quite early on. This is not a left-wing book I am quoting from. It is David Niven's autobiography Bring on the Empty Horses and for the purposes of those of you who want to run out and buy it, it was published by the Book Club Associates in London quite some time ago. The author is describing events after World War II. I quote from page 93:
Less than two years after the end of World War II, the first microbes of a foul disease that was to spread across the fair face of the United States, surfaced in Hollywood. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his two loathsome lieutenants, Cohn and Schine, had not yet succeeded in infecting the land with McCarthyism, but a cry of `There are Reds under Hollywood's Beds' was raised in Washington and the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened an investigation into Communist infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry. Immense publicity was generated by the ensuing circus-like proceedings under the chairmanship of a highly-biased gentleman named Parnell Thomas. Richard Nixon was a member of the Investigating Team.
Some full-blooded support for the theory that Hollywood was in grave danger of becoming a tool of the Communist Party was given by a long list of `friendly' witnesses, including L. B. Mayer, the Head of M-G-M., Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, Adolphe Menjou, George Murphy (late U.S. Senator from California), Ronald Reagan (who became Governor of the same State) and Ginger Rogers' mother——
The interesting fact of that is that back in the forties was the last occasion on which some actors who were asked questions by Mr. Reagan's committee ever worked in the United States. Members of the Screen Actors Guild were brought before an examining committee with Ronald Reagan giving evidence that they could reasonably be suspected of being Communist supporters. Many of them who, on principle refused to answer the question: "are you or are you not a Communist?" and said they should not be dragged before a tribunal like that, never worked again. One playwright had one of his screen plays never used after that even when it was submitted under a different name.
It was a long time ago that the right-wing rantings of Ronald Reagan began. They were to continue from the forties right through the fifties and the sixties, attacking minority groups, attacking trade unions, attacking countries that believe in peace and appealing in every instance to a fundamentalism that has nothing to do with, and that is sullied by being attached in any way to experience of Irish emigrants who went to the United States. It is to their great credit that his views never took hold among the Irish in America. They were to the forefront in opposing him in every step of his career. That is the record of the Irish in America. The Irish in America today do not support President Reagan's policies, the ones we have been describing.
In making up our minds about this issue, we can take it very simply: do we want to use the visit in such a way as to confer our highest honour on this visit, to remove it out of all ordinary visits in such a way that it will be uniquely valuable for the re-election of a man who will preside over an administration that has certain policies, domestic and international? Do we want to live with the consequences of his re-election? What are the implications for our own foreign policy? Do we want to say that we will attach conditions to our foreign policy? We would be thanked for saying "no".
In conclusion, I want to say that I will be voting against this resolution and not simply not supporting it. It is very important not only to oppose it but to vote against it. In doing so I have a choice facing me, and I accept that there are formulae that are part of the evolution of the democratic process. I have those formulae on one side and I think of the other occasions when I visited, with other Members of the Oireachtas, different refugee camps in the northern part of Nicaragua across the border from El Salvador. I have to say to myself "whom do I choose?" Whose visit is to me the important one — the visit to refugees who as a consequence of his policy wanted to share their food with me or would I just say that I give precedence to the formula of accepting somebody who is the head of a State and a powerful nation? I give that precedence.
I have no hesitation, and I believe many Irish people would not have any hesitation for one second in giving priority to those with whom we should be standing. Let us remember this: if, and it is not unlikely, the President who will be addressing both of these Houses is re-elected in the United States, the events that I have been describing will not evaporate or go away. They will get worse as the unfortunate disastrous speech of last week proved with its riddle-me-ree of inaccuracy, with graphs trying to suggest, for example, that the Soviet assistance to Nicaragua is greater than the United States assistance to El Salvador and so forth. This is pure unadulterated fiction.
There is of course, a massive Soviet assistance to Cuba. That is a fact but the Soviet assistance to Nicaragua is negligible. I will listen to Senator Hanafin providing the evidence that Mrs. Kirkpatrick, the US representative at the UN, has not produced. I remember asking the Secretary General of the United Nations, even privately, if the evidence had been offered to him for the supply of ammunition of the levels of which Mrs. Kirkpatrick speaks, to El Salvador and his reply was: "never even once". There are far more powerful people running the State Department of the United States. Let them put facts up, but until they put up those facts, I suggest that we would be well served by not proceeding in the manner in which this motion invites us to proceed. We would be reflecting more credit and dignity on ourselves by showing that we believed in what we say when we are expressing solidarity with the struggling people of the world if we did not proceed along those lines. It is unnecessary, it is inappropriate but in so far as it is being put forward, it is important that it be opposed and defeated.