We know the President's method well. He picks up some irrelevant little point, gets up, and is humorously impertinent, and irrelevant. He gets away with it and has been getting away with it because he always talks last. Just as he has attempted in this case to do, he has been able to prevent people from examining his little irregularities and his impudent irrelevancies. You have had a case of that now. He did exactly what I tell you and, though an ordinary and unassuming private member in Opposition, meek and shy, was attempting to exercise the rights which he has under the rules, the President attempted to bluff that innocent and shy member and this House into the idea that that member had no right to do what that innocent and shy member, in his ignorance of the rules, thought he had a right to do.
The President says that it is a question of saving £40,000. It is not a question of saving £40,000. You must be expected or you are always supposed to intend the reasonable consequences that follow from any act. You are always expected to intend to avoid the reasonable consequence of not doing any act which you might avoid. Now the reasonable consequence, the inevitable consequence, of passing this resolution is that £7,000 of salaries in the Seanad, which will not be paid if this is not passed, will be paid. Will the impudent irrelevancies meet that? Will they say it is not true? Will they say that if we do not pass this resolution, they will be able to spend that £40,000 on an election without introducing special legislation to upset the legislation which they have introduced in this Bill? They will have legislation in relation to the election of the Seanad, and they will have no means of carrying out and financing it unless they play some hoofling trick with the finances and come to the House for a Bill of Indemnity afterward for their financial misconduct.
That is the direct issue and it is not the slightest use for the President to try to side-track the issue. He is asking you to do an act which would involve you in an expenditure of £7,000 a year, which, if you do not do that act, you will not be involved in. Of course, that is trying to misrepresent the action of Fianna Fáil on the Committee, that impartial Committee, that utterly unpacked and judicial Committee which dealt with the Constitution of the Seanad and those other Bills. He did not tell you that what Fianna Fáil were out to see was that not merely £7,000, but £76,000 would be saved. He did not tell you that by loading that Committee with an equal representation from the Seanad and his own nominees from this House he had made it impossible for us to save this £76,000, that he had made it impossible for us to say that that Seanad should not be elected at all. He did not say that. He knows it, and he chooses to misrepresent it, and the closed valve of his Press will keep from the people the fact that he is deliberately misrepresenting to this House in relation to a matter which he did know.
When you cannot do a thing which you want to do, you may have to choose between different alternatives and you may have to choose between lesser evils. Every vote that was given by Fianna Fáil members on that Commission was a choice between lesser evils, and I think we are faced by the fact that the interested representation of the Seanad and the representation of Cumman na nGaedheal on that Commission were sufficient to prevent any useful or proper decision being taken by it.
Now come back to the issue again. You are asked to do an act, the direct and inevitable consequence of which will be that £7,000 a year, which would not be otherwise expended, will have to be expended on salaries alone, in the Seanad. I am asking you to refuse to pass a motion which, if you refuse to pass it, will mean that unless they hoofle with the finances of the House, unless they do something behind the backs of the House and come back afterwards with their machined majority to get through an Act of Indemnity to cover their financial hoofles, will make it impossible for them to put on you that charge of £7,000 a year. £400 is the maximum! One capital sum, £7,000, is an annual sum. That is the amount of the gross and the deliberate misrepresentation of the financial facts which was offered by the President in his very impudent speech.