In pursuance of the Ceann Comhairle's excellent suggestion, I move the following motion: "That the Dáil approves of the principle that every University in the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) shall be entitled to elect representatives to the Chamber (Dáil Eireann), and that the draft Constitution be amended accordingly, and leave over the determination of the numbers and other conditions of electoral law, if this proposition commends itself to the wisdom of the Dáil. I have an uneasy consciousness that University representation is unhappy in its present advocate. Once upon a time Colonel Saunderson in the British House of Commons, condemning the sham self-government that Mr. Gladstone had proposed for Ireland, pointed with scorn to the Irish Parliamentary group, and cried: "There they sit, 86 solid arguments against Home Rule." History has a bad habit of repeating itself. There is another difficulty against the present advocate. Some members of the Dáil are aware that he has publicly spoken against the grant of the Parliamentary franchise to university graduates, and some sub-editor, by a freakish inadvertence, allowed the cardinal point of the speech to appear in his newspaper. The point, however, against which I directed my argument does not arise here, because I was speaking against privilege, and more particularly in this case, the privilege of the plural vote. Now, we have disposed of that already in an earlier Article. No citizen is to exercise the dual vote, and consequently this whole question of University representation is so far simplified. We are not asking that the mere fact that a man is a graduate of the University should entitle him to vote first in his ordinary civil capacity and secondly in a special capacity. I, as a convinced democrat, am as much an enemy of privilege as any member of the Labour Party. I have no hesitation in declaring as an article of faith, and accepting it as a dogma of democracy, that no public privilege or advantage, arising out of the accident of birth, race, sex or social standing, or any other sectional qualification, should be allowed by the State to confer privilege. Now, it is precisely in the name of democratic doctrine that I am recommending this University representation as a specially reserved thing to the Dáil, because it is not at all inconsistent, if you reflect on it for a moment, to declare one's self the enemy of privilege and then ask for this reservation. I am not an advocate here of any sectional advantage. There was a time indeed, and that not so very long ago, in one of the co-equal members of this Union of Free States, when to ask for this vote was unnecessary, as it was granted. They had then become an advocate of privilege, as universities were really a sort of clearing house for rich young gentlemen who went there to get a certain veneer, humorously called culture, and passed away either into the Army or Legislature or some high office. But the university has a different function to-day and plays a very different part in the National life. We have not yet built the educational ladder in Ireland, but I trust this Dáil is going to set about that great work, by which we shall not only have compulsory, free, primary education, but that everyone shall be able, by his brains and ability, to climb the whole way up and reach the highest and fullest measure of the highest education he could receive in his day. Higher education, it is now admitted, is the great condition to the attainment of the fullest stature of liberty, and many social problems that exist would have been solved long ago if it were not for the fetters of ignorance that lay so heavily on those responsible for the existence of the problem, and the failure to remedy the social ills with which the problem is concerned. Now. I look forward to the time when the university graduate voter, in this University representation that I venture to claim for you, shall include every stratum of the population, when we shall have—and there is no incompatibility whatever in it—men of every walk of life, engaged in all varieties of occupation, who have received this university stamp as a result of higher studies, and of having undergone what we claim, at least—the broadening and widening influence of university study and university culture. Consequently, the voter in this case will not be, as they would be in regard to other members, simply residents in a particular area. It is very hard to find any doctrine that meets with the assent of a large number of men that would be wholly wrong, and in some of the Bolshevist pronouncements you have a claim made for vocational representation. That draws attention to one of the weaknesses of the system of getting Parliamentary representation, merely by counting heads or looking at topographical areas. If a man happens to live at one side of a street his vote becomes inoperative, he is in a hopeless minority. If he lived on the other side of the street his vote would have carried into Parliament some great reformer. I do not, at all stand here to defend or make any plea for wholesale vocational representation, but I draw your attention to it, rather for the purpose of showing this, that whereas in a mistaken notion of democracy, and what democracy requires, you are willing to pass, and I have no doubt but you will pass the arrangements in this draft Constitution for representation according to areas and numbers of representation according to population, I am anxious to draw your attention to the truth, that you have here an opportunity for giving representation irrespective of the narrow boundaries and peculiar limitations of electoral areas. It is sufficient to show you that the claim for university representation is not sectional in an opprobrious sense. There is another point. When I read over the draft Constitution and thought of it in connection with the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, who had figured so prominently for so long in the public press, so that I became familiar from photography with every aspect of him, from every possible point of view, and thought of him as the author of a very interesting work called "The Gaelic State," I looked carefully through the draft Constitution to see the elements— the germ, the nucleus—of the Gaelic State that was to evolve out of this Constitution. I saw a great deal it derives from Teutonic Constitutions, many novelties from Switzerland, the new Constitution of Germany, the Constitution of the United States and the old Constitution of Great Britain, but I looked in vain—I hope I am wrong —for the traces of Gaelic civilization or the influence of Gaelic ideas. Now you have in this, the University representation, an opportunity to go back to an earlier conception of the social fabric, in alignment of its elements. In the old Gaelic days an t-ollamh—the professor— was next to the King. I think without asking for social privileges such as were attached to that office, that we might at any rate do something here in our institutions that would mark a public sense of the Gaelic spirit's desire to honour education—the great spiritual, the great vitalizing influence. It is an unfortunate thing for which our country is not to blame—yet the fact is there—that education is not respected in this country. It is only a sort of technical education that has a money value, that has a bread and butter value, that is regarded with any degree of esteem and the pursuing of knowledge for its own sake is commonly regarded as a species of folly, and culture is sneered at; even agriculture as a University study has been sneered at already in this Dáil. I think it is not contrary to public policy, but very much in the line of public policy to use every device devisable to imprint on the public mind, in Ireland, the fact that we do hold the pursuit of knowledge and the dissemination of education in high esteem, and that we do attach spiritual values to elements of life, in modern Ireland, as pronouncedly as they did ages ago. I feel that this is one of the disabilities of education in Ireland, that the popular view of the professor—the professor usually, though not always the University representative, is that he is an incompetent person, a strange and subtle blend of imbecility and scholarship. There may be some truth in that, at times, but I think if you have an agency for putting the professors as representatives of the University into close and continuous contact with the representatives of other activities of the Nation it will improve the Universities through their representatives. That is a decided practical advantage, and I think that would appeal to the utilitarian spirit. You may say, why not adopt the expedient of sending the professor out to the hustings and let him stand for a Constituency, like any other citizen. That may not always be desirable for the University. I need not labour that point. Even if the professor were likely to be regarded with favour by the Constituency, I am afraid he should have to become a partisan and espouse some political programme or stand upon some plank, and forget for the moment his desire to represent the attitude of attempting to take broad views and to relate things dispassionately.
