I submit that the transaction which necessitated the expenditure in this Vote was about the most treacherous transaction that has ever been perpetrated on the people of this country. The Public Accounts Committee admit that these war materials were purchased for use against the Six County Government. It has been definitely established here by Deputy Carney that at least one flying column was equipped at Beggars' Bush for military operations in that area, and it can be proved, and I have here documentary evidence to prove it, that officers from the Training Department of the Headquarters Staff at Beggars' Bush Barracks were actually arrested in the Six County area during 1922 for carrying out military manoeuvres in that area. The Divisional Commandant of the Fifth Northern Division in 1922 made his position quite clear in a statement he made to the British representative on the Liaison Commission, when he declared that in certain eventualities, if certain aggressive action were taken against our people in the North, and if certain prisoners continued to be detained, he would lead flying columns into that area and take military action, even to the extent of disarming Specials in that area.
There is no room for doubting that in 1922, 95 per cent. of the officers and men who were acting under the Beggars' Bush Headquarters were bluffed into the belief that joint military action by the two sections of the Irish Republican Army would be taken to secure the freedom of Ireland and to emancipate our fellow-citizens in the Six-County area. It is a well-known fact that there was difficulty in restraining in 1922 the present Chief-of-Staff of the Free State Army, General Hogan, from taking that military action, until the deal that is under discussion now in this House was completed, and until the joint Army authorities were in a position to carry out the military policy that had been agreed upon. There is ample evidence, and I have abundance of it here if anybody requires it, to prove that it was found almost impossible to restrain the military activities of some of the men who were then acting under the Headquarters Staff at Beggars' Bush. I have no doubt in my mind now, and I had no doubt in my mind then, that Dan Hogan and Sean MacKeon and other officers and men acting under them intended to use those guns against the forces of the Six-County Government, but I am equally certain in the light of after events, that it was intended by the Executive, to whom these men were responsible, that they would never be allowed to use these guns for this purpose. These officers and men were deceived by the Beggars' Bush Headquarters and by the Executive to which that Headquarters was responsible. They were deceived and betrayed as well as the men in the Four Courts.
A time was reached when something drastic had to be done in order to divert the minds of these officers, especially the men from the North, from the position in which the Nationalists and Catholics of the Six-County area found themselves. The reign of terror that was created there by the Specials had aroused public indignation. Every loyalist that was called a man was armed to the teeth. Every Nationalist and every Catholic of the male population were outlaws in their own land. They were reduced to a condition of abject slavery in that area, and the mentality of the men of the Irish Republican Army, of the Beggars' Bush section of it in the North as well as the Four Courts section of it, was that this thing would not be tolerated. The jails were filled. Our people were being flogged and interned, and many of them were being murdered cold-bloodedly in their own homes during that period. The men of the Army could no longer be restrained. The Beggars' Bush section of the Army accepted the Articles of Agreement for the express purpose of putting their house in order and preparing for a final military effort to free the whole of Ireland. They were more aggressive at that particular time towards the Six-County authorities than the men who took their orders from the Four Courts. It was then that it was decided by the Executive, to whom the Beggars' Bush men were responsible, that the bluff had been overdone.
The only way to prevent effectively the joint military action for which these warlike materials were purchased was to unloose the civil war that was unloosed the day the Four Courts were attacked. And these guns that were purchased—the transaction that was entered into for the purchase of these war materials for the defence of our citizens in the north—were turned over to the Beggars' Bush men for use against their fellow-countrymen in the south. That section of the Army that had been prepared to co-operate—and definite arrangements for co-operation had been made with responsible men on the other side of this House—in action against Ulster was rushed into civil war at twenty-five minutes' notice, and passions were aroused in that civil war, and bitternesses and hatreds were engendered that successfully blinded these men to ordinary reason, and the way was prepared for a complete betrayal of the north. The country was shocked and horrified, and the position of our people in the north was for a time lost sight of, and the way was clear for a final betrayal without protest.
At the time that this transaction was being negotiated, at the time that these war materials were being purchased, would any member of the party opposite, would any member of the present Cumann na nGaedheal Party, have dared to go before the public, to go before any section of Irishmen, and to have declared that this country was free, that the sovereign independence of this country had been attained? They would not have dared to do it then.
