The Minister for Justice has challenged an argument on this subject, and, before entering into it, I would like to draw the attention of the House to the Bill which is actually before it. It is to delete Articles 47 and 48 of the Constitution. I submit that you cannot consider that proposal in any adequate or thoughtful way unless you take into consideration the conditions and the circumstances under which the Constitution itself was framed, and the purpose for which those Articles were included in it. In considering such a proposal, I would like to emphasise to the House, to ask them to consider that this is no mere commonplace, ordinary legislative measure that is now before it. We have often been taunted with obstructing and holding up the business. I want to leave that phase of the matter altogether on one side, and to those who would try to restrict or limit debate upon this matter, I would quote the dictum of a great parliamentarian, Charles James Fox, who said that deliberation, and not despatch, was the duty of legislative assemblies. We are considering a fundamental law of this State. We are proposing to alter and to change that law, whether for the better or for the worse is the point which we have to argue. At any rate it is always a delicate and a dangerous thing to tamper with the fundamentals of anything, whether it be a creed or a building or a constitution. I would like that we should leave behind us, if we can, the atmosphere that has been engendered here during the past few days, and consider this matter in a calmer but not less earnest spirit, to consider it not as partisans fighting to retain or to obtain some temporary political advantage, but as men charged with a great public duty who will be judged by the people upon the results of their efforts to-day. We, on this side of the House, admittedly, and it may be a weakness in our position, necessarily approach this problem from two aspects and in two frames of mind. Primarily we view the Constitution which we are now discussing as an instrument which, if not actually imposed in toto from without, at least, in certain essential forms was determined by an exterior power. We feel that the provisions of this enactment which have been so determined are unfortunately considered by the majority of this House to be the essential provisions, and, therefore, we feel that any change which we must make in that Constitution must be a revolutionary change, that we must change it not in its accidentals, but in its essence. On the other hand, by force of circumstances, we have come here. We have been compelled to accept in the letter, if not in the spirit, the forms that have been imposed upon us, and we can look upon other provisions in this Constitution in the light of a contract regulating the relations between the effective Executive power in this State and the people whom we represent. In respect of those particular provisions and in respect of them only, we can place ourselves in the position of representatives of the people who believe in and wish to preserve and to secure not only the national, but the popular liberties. I would like if we could make that a common ground between ourselves upon these benches and the Deputies in every other section of the House. I would wish that that principle could be accepted, and that we could, without reservation of any sort, take it that every single Deputy here, even if he does not believe in the wider, the fuller, the wholly unqualified national freedom which we seek, at least believes that every single citizen in this State should be secured in his rights as a man.
In answer to an interruption the other day, the Ceann Comhairle emphatically declared that this House derives its authority from the people and from no other source whatever. We welcome that pronouncement from the head of this Assembly. We endorse it, and we will uphold it to the fullest extent of our power. It is because we believe that all authority is derived from the people that the exercise of authority by this House or by any component of this House, or by any organ in this State, should be always controlled, checked and guided by the effective power of the people, by the will of the people, expressed through the organ of the Constitution, that we are opposing the deletion of Articles 47 and 48 from this Bill. This House, in the words of the Ceann Comhairle, and I think that we ought to remember them always when we are discussing these fundamental Statutes, derives its authority from the people. The acknowledgment of that principle took a long time to secure, longer here in Ireland, possibly, than in any other land on the globe. It was secured as a result of suffering through centuries, suffering by generations of the common people, and when the common people secured the almost universal acceptance of that principle, I would ask you to remember how jealous they were of it, how metaculously they set themselves to devise safeguards for it, and how jealous they were, when the need arose, always to assert it. Many constitutional forms were devised to this end. The operative and essential principle of every one of them was found in the division of authority among the organs of government.
The Minister for Justice said that he was a believer in representative government. He asked us did we, on these benches, declare that representative government had broken down. Let the Minister for Justice read any single modern analysis of modern constitutions, particularly the constitution from which the Constitution of this State derives, the Constitution of Great Britain, and let him answer himself whether or not representative government has broken down. Every impartial observer who has examined the British Constitution from which, as I said before, this Constitution derives, and which in many respects it resembles, is certain, at any rate, that if representative government has not broken down it is, so far as Great Britain is concerned, in the last stage of degeneration. When the people secured the acknowledgment of that principle to which I have referred they devised certain machinery whereby it would be made effective, and, as I have said before, they realised, with Hobbes, that freedom is political power divided into small fragments. Therefore they made certain that no power and no authority should be concentrated in any one organ in the State. In some cases they allotted to the head of the State certain functions; to other sections and classes within the State they allotted certain other functions.
In some cases these functions were divided between two, three and four assemblies. In the case of our State, in the case of Great Britain and in the case of the United States the power was divided between the head of the State, an Upper Chamber if you like to call it so, and a Lower Chamber. For years that division of authority was effective, but by the passage of time it has been nullified and the safeguards which were based upon it have, for the most part, disappeared to-day. For years it was effective in Great Britain, and for a long time men looked upon the Government of that country as a model to be imitated and as the finest expression of the principle in practice, but in no other country in the world has the decay of that principle been more rapid and more complete. Gradually the three separate functions of the head of the State, of the upper or revisory Chamber and of the Parliament, have been usurped by one component. One hundred years ago England enjoyed what was known as representative or Parliamentary government—government by a monarch and two Houses of Parliament. Forty or fifty years later that Parliamentary Government had become Cabinet Government, with the Cabinet and the Parliament alternately the important and determining factor in it. The Throne in itself was important, but in relation to the other two factors was comparatively insignificant and ineffective. To-day the process of evolution or degeneration has gone a step further, and all power and all authority is centred ostensibly in the Cabinet or, more accurately speaking, in a cabal within the Cabinet.
I remarked that our Constitution, deriving as it did from the British Constitution, had certain resemblances to it, and I am emphasising the degeneration and decay which befell the British Constitution, because the fact that our Constitution had to a certain extent to be modelled upon the British Constitution furnished the central problem which the Committee which drafted and considered this Constitution of ours had to solve. Our Constitution resembles the British Constitution, but there are very striking, very essential and very important differences. The most important of them are Articles 47 and 48. Why were those Articles inserted? The President has stated that they were introduced because they happened at the time to be fashionable Constitutional devices meant to impose upon the people, but never meant to be effective—meant to attract popular support, but never meant to be effectively used. Surely the President, when he makes that statement, is not just to two great men who are gone and who cannot rise in this House to vindicate their memory. The President knew Arthur Griffith longer than I did, possibly longer than most of us in this House, and he knew him better than I did, I daresay, because I only knew him from 1916 until his death. Can anyone who ever knew that man and who can look back on the years that are gone and feel the prouder for having been associated, however distantly and humbly, with the great work which he did for this people—can anyone stand up here in this House and sincerely and truthfully declare that he did anything for show, solely with intention to deceive, and that, above all things, in the moulding of this Constitution that he did what he himself, on the very last day on which he recommended the Treaty to the Dáil, declared he never did, whatever else he may have done—deceive this people? Can anyone say that Arthur Griffith, whom we all knew and whom we all— no matter how we may have differed from him years ago—revere and cherish in our hearts, inserted in that Constitution one single provision which he did not feel to be essential, necessary and vital, giving to the people some power which he did not think was in their interest and to their continual welfare to use? What I have said of Griffith I will say of Michael Collins. His ways were not mine, but I do believe that, deriving from the people, believing in the people and sincerely desirous of emancipating the people, he, so far as he could within the four corners of the Treaty, forged for the people an instrument which, as he said himself, though it was not freedom, at least gave them the means to achieve freedom. And these two men, to whose memory so much lip-service has been paid within the last four years, had associated with them in the drafting of this Constitution the keenest intellects in Ireland which they could command.
If we examine the position in which Collins and Griffith and the members of the Constitution Committee found themselves in the year 1922, we will understand why Articles 47 and 48 were inserted in the Constitution and why, no matter who else may do it in this House, the President and those associated with him who pretend to stand here as the inheritors of the things that Griffith and Collins gave— at least they, whoever else may do it, should not delete Articles 47 and 48 from the Constitution If they do, they take the very key-stone from that Constitution and assuredly this State which was meant to be a democracy will become an autocracy and the Constitution itself will tumble down in ruin.
When the Constitution Committee came to examine the position in which they were under the Treaty, they found that, by the Treaty, they were compelled to draft a Constitution modelled more or less upon the British model, a Constitution in which the representative of the King of Great Britain should form at least one component part. They found that so far as Great Britain is concerned, as I have emphasised, the system of Constitutional checks and balances, which had grown up through the centuries, had broken down completely within the last hundred years and that, so far from that Constitution fulfilling the essential requisite for freedom which Hobbes who examined the position minutely laid down—that freedom was political power divided into small fragments— now all political power in Great Britain had become centred in one organ in the State. It might have been possible to remedy that position if we could take and make again as an actual functioning component in the Government a head of the State who would enjoy the affection and the loyalty of the subjects. The old system might have been made effective here in Ireland if we could have had, as head of the State, the descendant of a royal line stretching back through the centuries, whose power and importance had waxed with the prosperity and progress of the people. It might indeed have been possible to remedy that position if we had been able to choose, by public election, as head of the State that citizen whose private merit and public character had secured for him the trust and confidence of the people. But these essential things were denied to the men who had to draft this Constitution. Our native thrones were overthrown; our princes were banished, and, as the key-stone of the whole Constitution and the whole Government, we were compelled to instal the representative of a foreign throne who, so far from commanding the respect and affection of the mass of this people, had, at the very best, only secured their passive hatred.
That was one of the great fundamental difficulties which Griffith, Collins and the Constitution-makers had to overcome. Sharing that feeling to the fullest, those who made that Constitution determined that the representative of the Crown in Ireland should only be a symbol. They did not believe, and they did not indeed seek to secure, that such a power as was represented by that symbol would ever be effective in securing the liberty of the people. At the same time they saw the danger of a non-controlled Executive. They were familiar with, and they feared, the methods which had overcome Parliamentary Government elsewhere, and they wished, therefore, to place in the hands of the people some weapon which would make the Executive at once the instrument of the people's will, and at the same time protect and secure the rights of minorities in this State. Only that State is free and only that State is democratic, in the true sense of the word, in which the rights, even of the weakest member of the community, are secured against unlawful aggression. Remove Article 47 from the Constitution, and what protection is there for any minority, or any individual, in the country who dares to oppose the power of the Executive?
That is the argument; that is the reason—to protect minorities and to secure the rights of the weakest among us—why Griffith and Collins inserted Article 47 in the Constitution. I submit that it was a nobler and loftier reason and one more in accord with the true character of these men than the one which President Cosgrave, to his shame, adduced here in this House. I hope that those who are here as Independent representatives, who proclaim that they do not belong to any Party, who stand within the polity of this State as single individuals and alone, will listen to what I am going to say and will ask themselves with me what protection is there, if Article 47 is removed, for any minority, whether cultural, religious, social or industrial, in this State? Formerly, as I have said, there was a certain protection for every individual in this State, because the Executive power was divided among a number of organs or instruments who had to co-operate in order that the executive power could fully function. To-day all that has disappeared. All authority is concentrated in the Executive, and, as we here have witnessed from time to time, the Executive is no longer controlled by Parliament. The Executive is controlled elsewhere. I do not believe that it is even controlled by the Party.
The Executive of the present day—I speak without any particular or special reference to the Executive of this House—the Executives of most Party machines are controlled by big businesses, by proprietors of one or two companies, by newspapers, the syndicated Press, as Deputy Flinn called it, by Deputies who are not members of the Party proper, but whose votes are essential in order to give the Party a majority which keeps the Executive in office. We have had instances of the power of that majority in this House. We have seen a leading article, dictating a certain policy, appearing in the newspapers, and we have seen the Executive Council, pretending to speak in the name of the people and to act in the name of the people, meticulously follow the programme laid down in that newspaper, which, whatever else it was, never was a friend of the Irish people. The Executive, as we see it to-day, reminds me of one of these automatons, a mechanical chess-player which used to amuse the crowd, a doll which used to take little pieces and move them from square to square, appearing as if of its own initiative to pursue a well-defined plan, while all the time, concealed in the bowels of that effigy, was a hidden hand which moved the pieces and made the effigy posture to its will.
The parallel I have drawn is not complete, because the effigy only moved to amuse, and therefore, to that extent, possibly, was of benefit to the people, but the automaton Government, controlled by an interested section within the nation, may often operate, not to the amusement, but to the grave detriment and disadvantage of the people as a whole. Under the present system of degenerate Parliamentary Government there is, I repeat, no security for any individual who dares to oppose the interests, often the selfish and mercenary interests, of the section which, in reality, controls the Government of the day. At present, so far as we in this State are concerned, so far has Parliamentary Government degenerated that there is no single right of a citizen, whether of liberty honour, property or civic right, secured from the aggression of the Executive, if he dares to oppose it. I repeat, and I would ask Deputies to dwell upon it, that there is no single right of citizens, whether of liberty, property, or honour, that is secure against infringement or violation on the part of the Executive in pursuance of its personal or even mercenary advantage. That is a truth which I wish to urge on you.
That is an argument which I wish to adduce, in answer to the Minister for Justice, for the rejection of this Bill and for the retention of Article 47. That is the reason why Arthur Griffith placed it there, in order that a position which has come about in this State to-day by the failure to recognise the encroachment by the Executive Council on the liberty of the people, might not remain for ever unremedied—that the people, having awakened to their danger, might have at hand an instrument by which they could secure and work their salvation. I would like to try and put before you the consideration which I am about to capitulate in order to show you how difficult it often is for minorities to secure their rights, even with a majority thinking that they are acting fairly and not tyrannically. We, as a minority, operating in this House, when our forces are joined with the Labour Party, present a combination which is possibly the strongest which any Government could face and survive. Two or three votes more or less on some divisions which have taken place in this House, and the effect would be such that the Executive Council could hardly function. As I said before, we, the coalition of Fianna Fáil and Labour, present. I believe, the strongest effective minority that could be contemplated, but, as the experience of the last nine months has shown, not even a minority so strong and so constituted as that minority has been, has been able under the present Constitution——
