I hope I shall not unduly startle the Dáil after the equanimity that has settled upon it to-day by speaking plainly on this matter. I am moving that the Draft Constitution taken to London by our representatives be placed in the hands of the Deputies. I am not asking that any confidential document should be disclosed. But when I first put the motion on the paper I did so simply because it is a matter of right that this Parliament, to which the Provisional Government is responsible, and to which alone it is responsible—that we, the principals of that Government, ought to know exactly what our agents have done on our behalf. Since then we have had some debate on the Constitution, with the result that I have a further reason for pressing this motion, and it is that, in dealing with the Constitution there has been exhibited a want of candour, a disingenuousness that make it more essential than ever that the Dáil should know what was the original draft of the Government. I feel that the men who are loyally supporting the Government because they realise the necessity of getting the Treaty implemented, are being imposed upon—that this Dáil is being imposed upon, and that the country is being imposed upon. Let me remind the Dáil before I give a little evidence of that of a question which I asked the President the other day. I asked him whether he would produce the Draft in question. He said no, that he had refused on Thursday last, and he added—"There has not been any change in our decision in the matter up to now." I said "Do you foreshadow that there will be?" He said "No." I said "I do." Now, the President misinterpreted my answer to him as meaning that I intended to give publicity to this document, whereas what I meant was that I believed that the pressure of opinion in this Dáil would bring the Government to see that it was necessary that they should publish this Draft. The President replied to me "If there is (that is if there is publication) it will be a breach of confidence, and no person outside these Benches has the right to publish it, as it would be a breach of confidence." I agree with that—that it is a matter of honour for people who have been in the Ministry—people who have been on the Expert Committee of the Government, not to publish, without consent of the Government, the private Draft which had been prepared. I agree, subject to one qualification, and that is, that this matter of honour is reciprocal, and that the Government must maintain on their side their standard of honour. Now I ask the Dáil to observe what has happened. When the Debate on the Constitution—I think it was on the second reading—was on (I quote from No. 11 of our Report) the Minister for Home Affairs singled me out for a curious attack, and one which he could not have made had that Draft been in the hands of the Members. It was not an attack made in the heat of the moment, because he was opening the debate and, presumably, had thought over what he was going to say, and I refer you to it, not on account of the personal matter involved, but as it will lead up to the conclusive evidence of the fact that this Draft ought to be in the hands of the Members to prevent the Dáil being misled. The Minister said "Deputy Gavan Duffy said here some time ago ‘this is a contract,' and he said it in a tone of exultation, with the suggestion that because it was a contract, you could avail of any little loophole that you saw to evade the honourable implications of this Treaty—to evade the implications which, beyond all doubt, were present in the minds of the signatories at the moment when they became signatories." And then he went on: "Now this Government will not dishonour the signature of Deputy Gavan Duffy, even at the invitation of Deputy Gavan Duffy, because when he signed the Treaty he signed it on behalf of the Irish Nation." I treated the matter with contempt at the time, because I put it down to the schoolboy insolence to which we are getting accustomed from this particular Minister, and I rather fancy that my honour stands out of the reach of the shafts of a Minister who is fast bringing his office into disrepute by his continuous habit of acrimony and want of scruple in his attacks on opponents. He returned to the charge again, being enabled to do so because the Members of this Dáil had not the document in their hands which they should have, and I find, in Vol. 12 of this Report, some further observations of the Minister which are illuminating. Let me very briefly refresh the mind of the Dáil as to what the Deputy said. I had proposed to leave the expression "the King" out of the phrase which defines our Parliament. I may have been right; I may have been wrong. At all events, that is a serious matter, and the Minister treats it in this way in opening Article 12: "There is an amendment down in the name of Deputy Gavan Daffy which, in the opinion of the Government, is practically equivalent to an invitation to this Dáil to proclaim a Republic, and I trust that this Assembly will give that amendment all the consideration it deserves. The proposal is to leave out the King. Now, unfortunately, we consider that within the terms of the Treaty it is not possible to leave out the King." And then he proceeds to quote the Canadian Act, the African Act, and the Australian Act, but he took jolly good care not to quote to this Dáil the Irish Draft that these men took over to London, and well he knows it. After that he went on to say: "We who had the duty of working out an interpretation of the Treaty could only take it that we were bound to work out a Constitution which would fit within the limits of those first two Articles of the Treaty, and we could not see, still less could we maintain across the table with the British representatives, that there was anything in these two Articles of the Treaty which would enable us to leave out the King, as Deputy Gavan Duffy desires." And then, after some sneers about Robert Emmet, he says: "We propose to accept the King because we have a mandate from the people to accept the Treaty, and we cannot maintain, and we were unable to maintain in the past, that within the four corners of the Treaty you could draft a Constitution which would leave out the King." Now that means that a man who, having been in the Ministry and knowing what were the possibilities in the draft of our Constitution and who came down to this Dáil and proposed to leave out the King, was either a fool or a rogue—probably the latter. That is what those expressions mean, and they cannot have meant anything else. I moved my amendment immediately after that, and I, thereupon, challenged the Minister to produce to this Dáil the Draft which he had taken over to London of these particular clauses. And finding himself in a very considerably embarrassed position as I went on, he decided that as he did not want to produce the Draft, he would execute a volte face, and this is what he said, interrupting my speech: “On a point of personal explanation, I would like to know through you, Mr. Chairman, whether the Deputy is trying to establish that we did not try to leave out the King.” Two minutes before he had been telling this Dáil that none but a fool or a rogue would try to leave out the King. And now when he is challenged to produce the Draft he turns completely round and tries to convey to the Dáil that he did his best to leave it out. In other words that his advisers told him he could leave it out. And I tell the Dáil, and I tell the country, that when he tried to convey that impression he was conveying the truth. The reason I moved that Amendment is because I know that this same Ministry last June maintained that we were entitled to leave out the King—and they knew it very well—maintained it after the advice they had got from the various experts—maintained it in the Draft they took to London. I shall pass from this unsavoury episode, and I hope I shall not have to return to it. I think Deputies will realize that I am exercising considerable forbearance in not qualifying the conduct I have described as one would be inclined to qualify it, in these circumstances. What I want to put to this Dáil is this: Are we going to have as our standard in the public life of this country that kind of chicanery, or are we going to have a standard of public morality of which we can be proud? It is for this Dáil to decide which it is to be.
It would have been very easy for the Government to come to this Dáil, anxious as we all are to support it, in implementing the Treaty properly, come and say: "Here is the Draft we took to London last June. There were certain things in that Draft that did not commend themselves to Downing Street in relation to Clause A, B, or C, which we specify to the Dáil. Mr. Lloyd George informed us that if we insisted on our interpretation of the Treaty and what we were advised was the legitimate interpretation of the Treaty, he would tear up the Treaty in shreds and in the face of that insistence we felt it our duty to come away and to yield to the English interpretation." The Government could have said that and have gone on to say "we recognise we were rather precipitate in our yielding, but whether we were right or wrong then, we tell the Dáil, that at the moment, when civil war is raging in this country, it is impossible for the Government to do otherwise than to accept these interpretations which are thrust upon it at the pistol point." If the Government said that, and made it clear to the country, that they are accepting what they believed three months ago to be a wrong interpretation, on a threat of tearing up the Treaty, if they had said that, "we cannot stand up to the people in London," they would have been saving the National dignity, and I, for one, would have gone nine tenths of the way with them. But what I object to is, the misrepresentation of the position, which would convey to the Dáil and to the country that the Draft, which we were told we must swallow, many parts without examination, is a just and proper and right Constitution for us to accept without question under the Treaty. Saving the face of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill! The other policy would have been just as easy, far more honourable, but it wanted just that little moral courage necessary to make it sufficiently easy for the Ministers to adopt. When I spoke of moral courage the other day the President said, "you objected to the Treaty, a man of moral courage would not have signed it." I can tell the President that it required a great deal more moral courage to sign the Treaty than to refuse to sign it. Why did they not have the moral courage or commonsense to come to this Dáil, put their cards on the table and take every man here into their confidence and say "we cannot help it, there is civil war on; and in face of that war whether we are right or wrong, England says in respect of such clauses you must take them and we are not able to make a stand by certain clauses." We have not yet been told that there was a threat of war, or a threat of tearing up the Treaty, or any other threat in respect of specified clauses. And the whole attitude from beginning to end has been wrong, and that is why I feel it my duty to insist that the facts shall come out before this Assembly, which is entitled to have them.
Let me remind the Government of what happened when Australia passed a Constitution in 1900. The Australians came over to England with a Constitution they had drafted, and the English said "you have got no Appeal to the Privy Council in this. Put in an Appeal to the Privy Council." The Australians said, "we shall have no Appeal to your Privy Council; we decline to put in anything of the kind." The English said "that Appeal must go in or you will have no Constitution for your Federation." The Australians said, "very well"—and mind you they had no Treaty which could not be altered,— the Australians said "very well, there is our draft, take it to your Parliament. If you alter a comma in it you will alter it in the light of day and everyone will know if we accept your Privy Council that we do so, because you forced us to it." That was a dignified attitude, and I think our Ministers might learn a lesson from Colonial Ministers in days when that Colony had not become a Sovereign State, and if the Ministers here showed the same dignity now, and laid their cards on the table, and told us why we must accept this or that clause, that they were doing it, that they were asking us to accept this or that clause, because we must do it; because there is civil war in the country, and we cannot resist England, that would be the dignified, straight course. They have not done so, and I ask the Dáil to say that the Ministry in the circumstances, after the conduct I have described, should produce the Draft they took to London before we proceed with the Constitution.
