I do not think that I have very much new to say, but I think that this Vote for the Department of Justice, which is responsible for the policing of the country, is a very vital matter. When people want to explain that Europe is the home of civilisation, they explain it by saying that Europe has been policed for a longer period than any other part of the world. The idea of government is based upon the idea of policing, and civilisation itself is dependent upon the existence of police. Here in this country there is a police problem which I think is peculiar to the country. It might well be that we need a greater police force and greater powers in the police, with a lesser amount of crime here, than in another country. An individual who needs money and who has grown up under peculiar circumstances goes out and robs. There should be police to get after him to encourage him not to rob. An organisation is a different matter, even a small organisation. In this country we have an organised criminal organisation. We have more than that. Deputy Lemass has defied us to show the association between his Party and the gunmen gang. It seems to me that the existence of the Fianna Fáil Party adds considerably to the police problem in this country. I said the other day that we had here a small murder gang party that neither in this country nor in any other country should get any volume of support. We have, then, a Party whose history is, roughly, this, that it occupied much the same position as is now occupied by the murder gang. At a given point they found that they were not getting anywhere.
As I said the other day, the Free State Government have done things that I never thought they would do, leading to the downing of arms. It was the first occasion possibly in our history of a demonstration that the policy of force was successful in dealing with rebellion in this country. You have those people then bringing forward what they call an economic policy, and for what purpose? Because they realised that they exist for a purpose that would never get the assent or the co-operation of the people here. As far as I remember, they then decided to draw up an economic policy to mislead the people. The position was that the people in voting for an economic purpose were actually voting for the purpose of the Party that existed before. Deputy Lemass said we suggested the Fianna Fáil Party and the people behind them were against public order. I do not think the people behind them to any large extent are against public order. As I have said, I think the Fianna Fáil vote represents the capitalisation of the Government's unpopularity, for every act which the Government does alienates a certain number. A Government has to act for the well-being of the whole country and, there are sections on one side or another whose interests do not coincide with the interests of the whole people. As I said, here you have a small murder gang, and you have as their spokesmen and defenders official whiners in this House raising points almost every evening on motions on the adjournment about actions of the police in dealing with these people. The law exists solely for the purpose of policing and protecting the people. I once pointed out, not so very long ago, that there are nine ways in which you can share in the guilt of another's sin, such as by counsel, consent, praise, flattery, silence, or being partner in the sin.
A little over a year ago I asked the Party opposite would they, if they had information which would be useful for making an arrest in connection with the murder of the late Minister for Justice, give that information, and they never yet agreed that they would. They accused us of suggesting that they stand against order in the country. I say that the man who is not prepared to do his part as an ordinary moral being in putting down murder is a party to it, and I endeavoured to give them the opportunity of dissociating themselves from it by asserting here publicly, and acting on it thereafter, that if they had any information conceivably of use to the police they would give it. The indication from two members of the Party was that they would not, and I gathered from another one that he thought they should. Now by silence I think they become parties to it, and by their public silence I think they are indicating to the people of this country that they stand against order. The Deputy said: "We desire the restoration of peaceful conditions here." What are the things that are necessary for peaceful conditions? They are primarily governed by a Government whose laws are going to be upheld in the country. It is only a few days ago since Deputy Lemass said he hoped that an Act if passed by a majority of this House would find a man who would resist to the end. Deputy de Valera said:
"I, for one, when the flag of the Republic was run up against an Executive that was bringing off a coup d'état stood by the flag of the Republic, and I will do it again."
Again he said:
"Those who continued on in that organisation which we have left can claim exactly the same continuity that we claimed up to 1925."
We know that when Deputy de Valera says two incompatible things his dignity requires that he should for the rest of his life maintain that he was right on both occasions. I think it is necessary in the interests of social order in this country that Deputy de Valera's dignity be impinged upon to the point of saying when he was right and when he was wrong. He says: "Those who continued on in that organisation which we have left can claim exactly the same continuity that we claimed up to 1925." The gunman gang claim that. Up to 1925 Deputy de Valera outside this House claimed the powers of life and death. He left that organisation, and then he says he was right when he claimed those powers, and possibly exercised those powers, or people acting on his behalf exercised those powers which he claimed, and I think we all on these benches were in 1922 condemned to death.
He says the powers of life and death remain with those people outside. There can be only one Government here. If those people outside have the powers of life and death when they decide that a juryman by virtue of his not committing perjury is guilty of treason and sentence him to death it is the duty of the police to go after them. The majority of the people of the country think that that power should not exist in the people outside. If Deputy de Valera is right, then when this Government execute a murderer we are murderers, and if Deputy de Valera ever, by some disaster, gets into power in this country he must either allow these men full scope, or if he attempts to deal with them he will be called a traitor. If he executes one of them he will be acting as a murderer. But we are told we are doing a bad thing by suggesting that the Party opposite, who represent or misrepresent a large section of the people who voted for them, stand against social order, and that we are doing something against the interests of the country. We are doing nothing of the sort.
If it is a fact, and what Deputy de Valera says is true, the country should know it. I have tried time and again, and not for Party purposes, to get the Party opposite to get up and say exactly what it is they stand for. Deputy de Valera once wrote a letter in which he said: "As you know, I am most particular even to the shade of meaning." We have not been able to get his shades of meaning. If he was right in 1925 it is not many weeks since he asserted that those people outside can claim exactly the same authority as he claimed up to 1925. Very well then, there is the position of the murder gang outside, supported by 57, or whatever the number, of the Deputies opposite. Their moral claim to murder is supported by the Party opposite. Does not a country like that require extreme police measures? It does, and I do not know of any other country faced with such a situation. We know perfectly well that the Party opposite would like to get away from their past, only that Deputy de Valera has not the moral courage to get up and admit he was wrong.
But this country may have to pay too high a price because Deputy de Valera has not the courage to say he is wrong. He said: "In the people outside rests the legitimate authority." We are elected, by the Irish people, to maintain civilisation in this country. It is obvious and clear that you cannot have civilisation when the moral authority rests with those who exist as a gang outside. We know that we are authorised by the people to put down that authority, which Deputy de Valera, and presumably his Party, say is the only legitimate authority in this country. The police know that a fair number of people are in that organisation, the members of which commit murder. Deputy de Valera will say there was only one murder committed. The business of the police is to get after the man who commits murder, to get after the man who is going to commit murder, and the man associated with murder.
You have that organisation. There are Deputies opposite who like to throw out phrases from nineteenth century liberalism. Take Deputy de Valera himself. He was associated with the movement before the Truce. Ambushes took place which the British said should be punished by death. Could the British have proved his clear association with the ambush that took place down in West Cork? Of course they could not. Was he morally responsible for the ambush that took place equally with the rest of us? Of course he was, but as far as the law was concerned it could not prove it, and if the British Government had the right to be here at all it had a perfect right to bring in such a form of laws as would enable it to handicap and to get control of those people who were associated with it. They were very much after the late Michael Collins. Could they definitely have associated him with these things? Of course they could not. Was he clearly associated and equally responsible with men who took part in them? Of course he was. Therefore if that Government had a right to be here at all they were perfectly right in endeavouring to secure a condition of affairs whereby they would be able to deal with Deputy de Valera, the late Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance, the President and myself; they had a perfect right to have their machinery so arranged that they could go out after each, equally with a man who was actually captured taking part in an ambush in West Cork.
The same applies here. There is an organisation, with its Adjutant-General, its Chief-of-Staff and other posturers that the Deputy was associated with up to a short time ago. You have a so-called Chief-of-Staff and a so-called O.C. of such and such a battalion ordering two men to murder such and such a juryman. The police, knowing the association, and knowing the hierarchy of that association, not knowing exactly who were the men who went to murder that juryman, but having a moral certainty that the Adjutant-General, the Chief-of-Staff and the O.C. were equally morally responsible and equally a danger to social order in this country, it is their business to get after those people with all the power that the law gives them. But when they do that we have the official whiners getting up every night on the Adjournment and asking why this man was arrested and why that man was arrested and not charged. The police have a moral certainty, and it is their business to use all the powers they have to secure a legal certainty. But no Deputy in the Party opposite admits that there is this organisation, though these murders have taken place. They admit these cases but say that the Government, elected by the Irish people to maintain social order, must handicap itself by taking no action whatsoever except against people whom they can arraign in a court and against whom they can bring clear evidence that they were party to a crime. They know perfectly well, and every intelligent man in the country knows perfectly well, that such a proposal is utterly ridiculous. It means that the headquarter staff, the O.C. and the rest of them can go about smoking their cigarettes, sitting in restaurants, catching their trams and all the rest of it, and the Government is to be confined to getting after the poor ignorant dupes who actually do the murders. Where is the moral responsibility? We know the names of men who have greater moral responsibility for these murders than the men who actually did them. Can we bring them to trial and prove it in court? We cannot. Was the position also the same before the Truce? Were we not equally responsible with the men who took part in ambushes? Of course we were. Could we have been definitely associated with these ambushes in an ordinary trial? Of course we could not.
It is only hypocrisy, and everybody knows it, to suggest that there is an absolute parity between organised crime of that sort and the ordinary murderer who kills a man to steal his pocket-book or something else. It is a totally different situation. Deputies say that for Party purposes they want peace preserved, because it suits the Party purposes, and say that the Minister for Justice exalts the man who is most active against the political opponents of the Government. I suggest that when you call a murder gang political opponents of the Government and when you talk about political crime you are party to this crime of murder morally by that form of praise or flattery. To suggest that these humbugs, these hysterical women, and all the rest of those in this organisation, who go about to murder jurymen who do not commit perjury should be exalted as political offenders and to suggest that we have got after them only because they are political opponents of the Government is absurd when you remember that in the election a couple of years ago these people went up and out of 152 seats they got 7—and what proportion of the people who voted for them approve of their murder tactics? They are a very small proportion, and as political opponents they do not count, but as enemies of social order they are a serious problem, backed up, as they are, by the moral sanction of the leader of a big political party in the country, who says that these men can claim the same continuity as he claimed up to 1925 and that, as he asserted, he had a perfect right to claim. He was right and therefore they are right. That is the problem we are up against. Is there not moral association between the Fianna Fáil Party and those people outside, until the leader of that Party, speaking with the assent of the whole Party, gets up and clearly says, wiping out the past altogether, that if he or any member of his Party can get any information that would enable the police to stamp out that conspiracy he will do all in his power to assist the police, and until he asserts that if the Irish people ever give him and his Party a majority he will stamp it out with a rigour not less than the rigour we have exercised? He has got to have the guts to stand up to his late allies. But to say, as he has said, that these people who wage war upon the ordinary citizens of the country have a moral right to do so is the very negation of the whole tradition of Irish nationalism; it is the very negation of social order, and it is the very negation of the moral law. It was only on the 14th of last March that the leader of that Party said these things here.
Now, the business of the Minister for Justice and of the police is to deal with all crime in the country, and before any other crime to deal with organised crime. The ordinary murderer who kills somebody or other because he wants his pocket-book is an enemy of social order, but he is only an enemy of social order in so far as he murders that man. But the people who are endeavouring to overthrow the only possible Government in this country, that is to say, a Government sitting in the Dáil, elected by a majority of the people, are the arch-enemies of social order because they are attempting to destroy all social order in the country. Deputies opposite say that they are right, and by saying that they are right and that they have a moral authority to do it they become parties to all that those people do. We know perfectly well that the greatest tribute paid to the present methods of the police against the murder gang has been shown here day after day and night after night when Deputies on the other side of the House got up to protest against arrests without warrants and about detaining people for twenty-three hours in the lock-ups, and all the rest of it. They are put up as the official whiners of these people, and I am glad to say that the policy of the Minister has got them whining.
It was thrown across the House only a few days ago that only one man was wounded and only one man was murdered. They have sent out their lists. Mr. White was only one on the list. The others are immune because there would be a certain amount of danger in attempting to murder them. We know that one of the securities of the situation is that the tradition of this murder gang only began in the 1922 period, when the fight was carried on solely on the assumption that it would be perfectly safe. But when the Government did things that I never thought they would do the down-arms order came. There was no proper surrender under the down-arms order; they could continue their organisations; they could continue all that they had done before, except the dangerous part of it, and if one of them had been arrested after the down-arms order, then there would have been an outery for arresting this man who was perfectly peaceful. We all know that Deputy de Valera gave the down-arms order on April 28th, or whenever it was. They are attempting to continue the civil war.
Until 1925 the Party opposite intended to continue the civil war if an opportunity came. They found that the tide was going against them, and later they decided that, having sworn that under no circumstance would they ever take the oath, to come in here. Having come in here and having taken the oath and having got up on points of order and having voted for or against laws that were being passed, after being in here up to the 14th of last March Deputy de Valera got up and said that this House has no authority, that the authority of government rests in this little group outside.
The Deputy says that he stands for law and order as we understand it in this House, and then he complains that the police are getting after these people outside. I think that if I had any fault to find with the police it would be for lack of activity against what Deputies opposite call political opponents of the Government. If the Deputy stood for anything that a decent man should stand for he should recognise these people not merely as political opponents of this Government but as opponents of every decent man in the country and as opponents of his Party. He recognises these people as the opponents of this Party but not as the opponents of his Party. There is not the same distinction. there is not the same antipathy between his Party and them as there is between his Party and ours. I thank the Deputy for the very high compliment he pays us, and I would, in a Party spirit, rejoice in the way in which he degrades his own Party except that it seems to me that the necessities of social order require that the Fianna Fáil Party should come out perfectly clearly on this matter. It seems to me that sometimes Deputy Lemass would like to do it, but then we have only to touch Deputy de Valera to the quick——
