The next is No. 49.
DÁIL IN COMMITTEE. - THE LATE MR. CHILDERS.
With regard to the question as to whether the late Mr. Childers was denied the service of a Catholic chaplain before his execution, the position is that Mr. Childers asked to see two Catholic priests, but not as chaplains, and he was ultimately given a chaplain of his own faith. On the general question of what is called the Army policy of dealing with men caught with arms, the policy is the Government policy, and the Army is the instrument of the Government in carrying it out. I have a document here, dated the 24th November, 1922, and it is a communication from the Assistant Director of Engineering working at Field Headquarters, Northern and Eastern Command, and it is addressed to all Divisional O.C.'s and all Divisional Engineers; it reads, or portions of it at any rate read: "Arrangements must be made immediately for a systematic and continuous destruction of all communications, road, railway, canal, telephone, and telegraph."
"Roads.—These are to be made impassable at as many points as possible. Bridges are to be destroyed by explosives wherever this can be done, roads to be trenched, blocked with trees or masonry, telegraph poles, or other material available. In certain localities the roads may be flooded by breaking down the canal banks. Barricades, to be of any use, must be placed at frequent intervals at one section of the road. Four obstructions, consisting of two stone barricades and two trenches, on a mile section of road, will prove effective. The barricades to be at the extremities and trenches between them. Barricades can be erected simultaneously by five or six men at each point, and will afford protection to the trenching party," and so on.
"Railways.—To be destroyed by every possible way. Bridges to be destroyed by explosives. Small stations to be attacked and burnt. Where station buildings cover the track they should be destroyed so as to block the permanent way. Station coverings are generally supported on cast-iron columns, and one or two blows with a heavy sledge hammer will generally knock these to pieces. By blocking the railway line by means of the station buildings at two points, protection will be afforded to a demolition party working between these two points. Before the obstructions are cleared and an armoured train reaches them the demolition party will have had time to completely wreck the track."
And then it continues, along with details as to the way in which it is to be done: "Trains can be derailed by a number of ways, but care must be taken to avoid loss of life." We give credit to the writer of the circular that he means the loss of life to other people rather than his own. Then the document proceeds: "If a train is held up, it need not be run into an obstruction to wreck it. Four men with sledges can destroy the wheels of all the carriages and the locomotive in a few minutes. By destroying the wheels on the inner side only, some carriages can be thrown across the other track. The carriages should be soaked with paraffin and set on fire, and the mechanism of the locomotive battered to pieces." And then they deal with Canals and other communications—and this is marked "Important.""In each area some of the above operations must take place every week. The railways are to be given special attention. Some part of each line must he injured every night until the railways are brought to a standstill. Special efforts are to be made to destroy all railway communication to Dublin. The Great Southern & Western and the Midland systems should be attacked at once.
"Each Brigade Area is to send reports to this Department every week of all works of this nature performed. If no railway demolition work has been done the reason must be clearly stated." And then it says:—"In the meantime intense activity must be displayed with whatever means available. Every area is to act at once, and maintain this activity for the next six weeks at least. All Divisional O./C.'s and Divisional Engineers are to see that the weekly reports of those under their command reach here by Thursday of the following week."
This is from the Assistant Divisional Engineer who works in Dublin, and he covers the greater portion of the eastern parts of the country. And the Chief of Staff, who, with Mr. De Valera according to the latest instructions from the new Republican Cabinet, or the Cabinet of the new Republicanism—the Chief of Staff, who, with Mr. De Valera, must sign all papers referring to the Defence Department, says:—"These instructions are satisfactory."
We have only very slowly been coming to the realisation of what we are up against. And many of us, perhaps, feel a certain amount of responsibility for not realising it sooner. We have been in the position that men with whom we worked, and made National Leaders of, have, in a very critical time in our country's history, sooner than let us go on the road that reason dictates to us we should go in order to save our people, mangled, as it were, their minds, and are mangling some of the bodies of their unfortunate followers and throwing them in front of us on the road to stop us going that way. We put the situation before the Dáil some weeks ago, and we asked the Dáil to give us very drastic powers, and we defined to the Dáil what, in our opinion, and in the special circumstances of the case were the special offences that it would be necessary to give us powers to deal with. We made the statement of those offences as simple as we possibly could. We were going to have them tried before Courts of Officers, honest-minded men, men with heart and feeling, and men of courage who admire men of courage, but men who are not lawyers and do not suffer from the subtleties that men of legal education do. We realise the very clear situation and we realise that in that situation certain simple offences were the key, and that if we could prevent the doing of certain things and the taking of certain actions we would solve the whole difficulty, take disorder out of the life of the country, and send people back to think about things. We asked that in regard to offences such as: (1) taking part in, aiding and abetting any attack upon or using force against the National forces, (2) looting, arson, destruction, seizure, unlawful possession, or removal of or damage to any public or private property, and (3) having possession without proper authority of any bomb or article in the nature of a bomb, or any dynamite, gelignite or other explosive substance, or any revolver, rifle, gun or other firearm or lethal weapon, or any ammunition for such firearm, we should be given authority to impose the death sentence or any minor sentence upon persons found guilty of any of those offences. I think we talked about the matter for two days and it is not fair, and it is childish and unreasonable, and it is shutting your minds to things that are past, to come here and ask us are we putting men to death because they were found with a revolver and ammunition and because they were found with such things in their private homes. The circumstances in which we have power to inflict such punishment are circumstances that we explained publicly here for two days, and whoever is likely to forget these circumstances, the people responsible for dealing with them, and responsible for dealing with the Courts and for reviewing the work of the Courts, and confirming those sentences, are not, you may take it, likely to forget the circumstances which make the having or the holding of these weapons, or the committing of these acts a crime. Special cases have been mentioned here, and we have been asked have these people been killed because they held a revolver. These people have been executed because they were part of the whole scheme of destruction which would destroy the National life and which brought up-to-date to the 20th November, is expounded in that particular type of document I have read for you here as one aspect of their work. It has been said that Deputies in this Dáil and the people in the country did not realise what they were doing when they gave us these powers, and if it is thought, as a member of this Dáil has said it was thought, that only a man who took another man's life would be executed, well I would advise the Deputies who do think that to read the debate that was carried on for two days while the Resolution dealing with these Military Courts was being discussed. If it is thought by this Dáil or by the people that a man will only be executed after he has taken another man's life, then let us have a very clear statement on that point, because we are dealing with the situation, those of us on whom responsibility has been thrown, in the light of the Resolutions passed here, and the Resolutions passed here give us power, using whatever discrimination I take it, in any particular case that reason and policy dictate to us, to impose the death sentence for any of the particular offences that are mentioned in that Resolution. Another Deputy has said that he thought a proper period should be allowed to elapse from the time of trial and condemnation until the time of execution in order that a petition for mercy might be made, and petitions might be sent in by the Irish people. Well, if it is intended that our work should be conducted in that way, it had better be made clear to us that it should be so conducted, because that is not the way we are conducting it at the present moment, and that is not the way we intend conducting it, having in our minds all the circumstances of the situation and our own particular position. We are asked to believe but we cannot believe it, we cannot even hope, that a young man who leaves an Irish country town, and with five or six others goes up to the railway station of that town and destroys the buildings in such a way as to pile the whole little railway station on to the track, all the time co-operating with somebody working at the next station, and doing the same thing, and so on down along the railway line, and before assistance can be obtained from the National troops or any other people with the civic spirit in the neighbourhood, can destroy the whole railway line, is acting from patriotic motives. We are asked that if men found on work like that, and if men found carrying arms on work like that, are taken prisoners, that we should go and find out who they are, where their people live, and what private little businesses of their own they would like to transact before we deal with them. If there are any people carrying on work like that, they had better go and settle their own private business before they go on that work. If it is intended that before you deal under the Military Courts with men engaged in utterly destroying the nation in that particular way—if it is intended that we should find who their people are, bring their people to see them before they are punished for the deed itself, although our acts are intended as a deterrent rather than as any vindictive punishment for outrageous deeds like that carried out—I may say we are not making any arrangement at the present time to apprise the relatives of people taken under such circumstances before we bring them before the Military Courts, or before we execute them, if their offence is such that those responsible for confirming such a sentence consider that their crime deserves confirmation. If we were a country in a different state of organisation, it might be possible to make a trial of such people a more elaborate matter; and if we had a greater general legal education, or a greater education generally, we might allow ourselves to go deeper into the different and varying things that could be said of one kind or another on a matter such as this. But we are a nation torn asunder, without any national institutions. You have an Army torn asunder too, fresh after a very glorious struggle against an outside enemy-torn asunder by people that it had loved and revered—and we have to shelter our weakness, we have to shelter the weaknesses of the country as best we can in doing the very difficult and the very hard work that our reason points out is necessary for the saving of our country. We do not, however, as I say, under our present circumstances, propose that when we get men in ambushes, or destroying these things that are the life of the country, to find out who their people are, or who they are, before we deal with them. I hope, in the sense at any rate that is implied by some of the questions that are put here, that that deals with the question as to whether we are going to discriminate between the leaders, as we would say, and the rank and file. We cannot afford to discriminate between the leaders and the rank and file The rank and file are as much a danger to the country as the leaders, because you have leaders who are no leaders and you have rank and file who acknowledge no leaders, and although it is heartrending to have a woman write to you and say, as the President said yesterday, that she lost a son to the "Black and Tans," that she has one son in the Irregulars and that she has three sons in the National Army, and that she cannot say that she loves the son in the Irregulars less than she does those who are in the National Army—while it is heartrending to read these things, you cannot, with the rank and file you are faced with in different parts of the country, say that you are going to deal more leniently with the rank and file than you are going to deal with the leaders. Many things have been brought into the consideration of these Estimates that you might like to have discussed of themselves. We have taken and built up and have considerably more work to do in the building up of the army. We cannot prophesy, as some Deputy wanted us to do, what the nature and size and extent of the Irish army may be in the future; but out of all the stress and work and struggle that have been gone through now we will leave whatever Government is left to follow this Government with a fabric that will be a source of strength and a source of discipline, and that will supply organising minds to the country in many of its departments outside the army. In the doing of that work and in meeting the difficulties that we met in doing it, and in taking the actions that we took in doing it, some of us, as persons bearing a responsibility for the lives of the people in this country and as feeling a responsibility for the ultimate destinies of Ireland, face this situation much more calmly and much more happily, and would give our lives in seeing through the work that we are doing now much more happily and much more calmly, as men bearing responsibilities to the country, than we might have doing the work, say, we were doing two or three years ago. Two or three years ago we were doing work that was only a gamble. We were sacrificing men's lives with nothing but our great courage, our great belief in the courage of ourselves, and the courage of the people that were supporting us. We were not disappointed in that hope or in that belief. But men who did not believe that the Volunteers or Army of that time could ever be anything but a threat to England, and men who challenged some of us personally after the denial by England of the right to meet our Irish representatives in the Dáil, when after that denial we took military action against the British in Ireland—men who challenged us with bringing a terrible disaster to the country by taking such action, two years later, when it had been shown what the Volunteers could do, the men who thought that taking the first move of military action against the English was going to bring terrible disaster on the country, and who thought we could not do anything in a military way against the English, were satisfied to bring disaster a thousand-fold upon the country, in the mad belief of theirs that they could fight the whole British military and naval forces. You will understand how easy it is then to bear more happily the responsibilities of to-day, and the opprobrium of to-day, than it was to bear the flattery and applause of two years ago. Facing such, we have done our work as responsible men, no matter how irresponsible our acts may have appeared to a certain class at that time. And in doing the work of the present day, when we see ourselves as a government and when we see our people, as the people of this country, faced by the armed bully, whether he is honestly bearing arms, or simply through drink, there is only one way of dealing with the bully carrying arms.
Motion made and question put:
"That the Dáil in Committee having considered the Estimates for the Army in 1922-23, and having passed a Vote on Account of £4,000,000 for the period to the 6th December, 1922, recommend that the full Estimate of £7,245,000 for the Financial Year 1922-23 be adopted in due course by the Oireachtas."
Agreed.
There is a matter of private business which should have arisen at seven o'clock, but as I had, throughout the whole debate, allowed certain breaches of the Standing Orders I allowed the Minister for Defence to conclude. We have been, in fact, discussing on the Army Estimates a great deal of the matter which is included in the two Resolutions on the paper in Deputy Gavan Duffy's name, and I think all the matters in No. 3.