Apparently I cannot bring home to the Deputy any sense of decency in this matter. All I can do, evidently, is to try to show the House the value of the criticism the Deputy makes. Now the Deputy asks what is the result. I said that the result does not matter, and it does not matter. The result is no defence for me. If I attempt to obtain convictions by fair or foul means, and do not succeed, that does not lessen my dishonour. The result in this case, however, was a conviction. I do not know whether the Deputy took a chance shot and hoped that he would be able to get away with it, thinking that I was afraid to come to the result. I did not refer to the result because, in my opinion, it does not matter to the charge levelled against me and to the charge that the Deputy must make against my predecessor in office and against Deputy Vincent Rice—against whom I make no charge and never made a charge. The prisoner got six months' imprisonment. Deputy Rice was a fair prosecutor in that case. Acting, I suppose, on the instructions of the Attorney-General, and with the approval of the Government, he offered the prisoner an alternative of entering into recognisances. The President announced that Driscoll had been found guilty on all charges—guilty of every single one of them. The President announced the verdict and asked the prisoner if he had anything to say. Here is what Driscoll said:—
"I want to say, Sir, that I would be as prepared as anybody to give any sort of undertaking, but I find that it is impossible for me to live owing to the action of the C.I.D. down in Kerry. It has been one mass of blackguardism for the past two or three years and any undertaking I would give, I could not possibly keep if they continued to adopt the attitude they have adopted towards me."
At this point, Mr. Rice intervened and said that
"never on any occasion had Driscoll made any complaint or alleged ill-treatment by the Guards. Driscoll remarked that several complaints had been made to Chief Superintendent Kelleher at Tralee when he was ill-treated, and it was due to the action of the superintendent that it was stopped."
The foregoing is from the Irish Independent report.
If that is not an exposure of dishonest criticism, I do not know what can be. There are other matters to which time might, perhaps, be more profitably devoted, and I do not wish to take up the time of the House by driving home the arguments which seem to me to spring clearly from the facts I have given to the House. This debate has been made by the Deputy an indictment of me. I am charged here with abusing my trust and behaving in the manner which I have described, and I think I am entitled to reply. I will attempt, however, to glance at the other charges which he made, and say what I have to say in answer to them as rapidly as possible. He passed on to make a charge not against me but against the Minister for Justice. He went on to refer to what he said were brutalities charged against certain members of "Colonel Broy's new recruits." One of them was so indecent that he could not in any circumstances refer to it in the House. Having made that statement alleging that those brutalities had been committed, and let that get across, he said he was not going to go into the matter because the Attorney-General was not responsible for the Guards, and, secondly, because legal proceedings had been taken. I certainly cannot understand how a Deputy can put off all decency and sense of fair dealing when he comes into those benches. He himself states that proceedings have actually been taken. I am aware that proceedings have been taken, but I do not know the nature of the charges. All that has been served on the Guards is a charge of assault. I was aware that proceedings had been taken against certain members of the Gárda Síochána, and now I gather from what the Deputy has said that they must relate to what he has stated there. I cannot reply on anything that I know about those charges. All I have been told is that they are strenuously denied. Is it fair or is it proper that when they are about to have a suit brought against them alleging appalling brutalities—the Deputy would not soil his tongue by mentioning them in this House—"Colonel Broy's new recruits" should have a further stigma added to their name by the Deputy in this indecent manner?
Then he went on to deal with charges about a fraudulent certificate. He said that a fraudulent certificate had been issued by the Minister. He made that charge two or three times in this House in connection with a case in Kerry, a case which I referred to last night, where the Deputy would not appear before the special tribunal. He appeared in the High Court and endeavoured to have the proceedings at the tribunal stayed, and when the accused were brought forward again before the tribunal he did not appear there. In the Cork case, as I already pointed out, he went down to Cork and spent six or seven days in endeavouring to obtain a verdict from the Cork jury. In this case, he went to the High Court, and having failed in his application he brings his grievance here. He has already brought this case out three or four times, and demanded an explanation. He demanded an answer from the Minister for Justice as to his having given a fraudulent certificate. He actually attacked the President about it. I do not want to take up the time of the House by going into the details of this case. Perhaps an opportunity will be given, if the matter is to be raised, to go into all the facts. The facts briefly are these, that a man named Clifford was arrested and submitted to interrogation by the Guards in connection with shots which were fired at the house of a water bailiff named John Murphy. The house of John Murphy had been fired into on Christmas morning, and this man was arrested and interrogated in connection with it. He gave evasive answers in reply to some of the questions, and did not answer others which were put to him, but after a day he called the Guards and made what he himself describes as a free and voluntary statement. In this statement he tells the story of the attack upon Murphy's house. First of all, Murphy is a water bailiff, whose appointment has been sanctioned by the Minister for Justice; he is an officer for the administration of the fishery law. This man tells how he conspired with two other men to go to Murphy's house at night, and to bring him out. Here is what he says:—
"...As a result of that conversation myself and the two men decided to give John Murphy a fright. The plan we decided on was that we would put a light on the bank of the river at Bealaw Bridge. We expected the light would draw John Murphy to the scene, and we would then fire shots over his head. We decided on meeting at Bealaw Bridge on the night of the 23rd December, 1934, and do the job. I told Martin Quirke and Jeremiah O'Sullivan that I had a shot-gun and two cartridges at my house at the time, and that I would use them on the job. The shot-gun and cartridges are the property of Daniel Keas, Glencar."
Then he tells how he met those men again after 11 o'clock Mass on the 23rd December.
"I asked then why they did not come to do the job on John Murphy last Friday night, and Martin Quirke told me he had to mind the river with the other water-bailiffs, and that he could not get away. Martin Quirke is a water-bailiff. Martin Quirke, Jeremiah O'Sullivan, and I then decided to carry out the job that night at about 12 midnight, and arranged to meet at a height on the road at the Beheshiel side of Bealaw Bridge. About 12 midnight on 23/12/34 I slipped out of my own house. I had the shot-gun and cartridges referred to with me. I walked down to the height on the road near Bealaw Bridge. I met there Jeremiah O'Sullivan, Dreenagh, and Michael Quirke of Drombreine, Lickeen. They had no firearms. I asked the two men why Martin Quirke did not come, and they told me he could not get away. Michael Quirke, Jeremiah O'Sullivan, and I then walked to the house of Michael Breen, Droumlahort, who is a water-bailiff also. We went in to his window and Michael Quirke called him and said: ‘There is a torch down on the river.' We called there just to see if John Murphy was inside with Breen. We walked from Breen's house along the road to John Murphy's house at Dreenavagh. We went to Murphy's door and rapped on it. Michael Quirke rapped and shouted: ‘There is a torch on the river.' Murphy did not answer. Michael Quirke and I then went out on the road opposite Murphy's house, and Jeremiah O'Sullivan went around to the back of the house. I then put the shot-gun to my shoulder and fired two shots at Murphy's house. I was standing about 60 yards away from the house when I fired. I aimed the shots at the wall between the kitchen door and the kitchen window. I only fired the two shots. Quirke or Sullivan did not fire any shot. We walked up above the house then and crossed a pathway together until we went about 100 yards from Murphy's house."
The gentleman who made that statement is the person in whose interest this charge is made in this House— that a fraudulent certificate was given on certain charges to bring him before the tribunal. He was brought before the tribunal and was defended. First of all, an attempt was made to prevent the tribunal from dealing with the case. That attempt failed; he was brought before the tribunal, and defended by counsel. An objection was made to that statement, but the tribunal overruled the objection. The moment the statement was allowed in this man withdrew his plea of not guilty, and entered a plea of guilty, which was accepted. He entered a plea of guilty to the charge of possession of firearms. No certificate at all is necessary in connection with a charge of possession of firearms. There was a charge against him of conspiracy on which a certificate was essential, but he pleaded guilty to the charge of possession of firearms. It was perfectly open to the tribunal to try in that case without any certificate at all. This man was a water bailiff, a man engaged in the administration of the law, and I fail to see how the Deputy can say that I am any Minister was stretching his conscience unduly in certifying that an attack upon a water bailiff at that hour was an attack upon the administration of justice. Possibly the Deputy may feel that there is something to be said in favour of that argument. But he got up here and charged the Minister and me with bringing charges based on a fraudulent certificate. There is the case which the Deputy wanted to prevent going before the Military Tribunal. This man, I should say, was a member of the Blueshirt organisation. The Deputy strained every effort to prevent the man being tried before the Military Tribunal. I make no complaint of his doing that. It was his job and he was entitled to do his best. Am I to be blamed for bringing that man before the Military Tribunal—a man who pleads guilty to that charge and who admits that every word he said in his statement to the Gárda was true and correct. But on three occasions this House has listened to excited denunciations of the Minister for Justice in the course of these debates for perpetrating the injustice of having this man tried and sent before the Military Tribunal. Was there any miscarriage of justice about that? Does the Deputy admit or deny that, or does he say that the man who admits a charge such as that, and who does not deny the statement he made was correct and pleads guilty, should not get his deserts? Is it playing the game for the Deputy to come in here and abuse the privileges of this House by levelling charges against the Government based on cases such as that?
I think I have said enough about Deputy Fitzgerald-Kenney at the moment. I will just deal with these exciting matters by endeavouring to answer some of the queries which have been put to me by other and more reasonable Deputies. Deputy Morrissey raised the question of counsel in these cases, but he did not make a violent onslaught on me. He raised the question whether in a number of cases senior counsel had been engaged by me and he inquired about the fees they had been paid. I presume the case he referred to was the only case in which senior counsel were engaged —that was the case in which the validity of the XVII Amendment to the Constitution which has given so much trouble here was challenged in the courts. This was a case which raised issues of tremendous importance. It raised issues as to the validity of certain amendments to the Constitution, which would have the effect, if the decision had been given on the main grounds on which the case was brought, of sweeping away other amendments as well as the XVII Amendment, and I felt, as I am sure anybody who happened to fill the position of Attorney-General for the time being would have felt, and must have felt, that it was my duty to exhaust every effort to have these amendments of the Constitution held valid. They were made by this House. They were not made when we were in office, though some others of them were. They were however enactments of the Oireachtas and even though they were objected to by us and though this particular XVII Amendment was not in any sense our child, I felt that it was my duty to defend it as best I could.
In the particular way in which it arose there were three cases, I think, in which the same point was raised and the three of them went on together. They were counsel in the three cases. I did not know in which the Constitutional issue was to be fought and I grouped them in one. The counsel were paid higher fees than usual. I think the fees on the brief were 75 guineas. There appears to be some suggestion made by Deputy Morrissey that this was done after we had succeeded in the Supreme Court. I am in a position to deal with that. The regulations under which my office works do not allow me to pay a fee of more than 25 guineas without a certificate from the Department of Finance. But before the case began, in view of its importance and of the issues involved, I submitted to the Minister for Finance that in view of these issues special fees should be allowed to counsel, and the Department of Finance consented to the payment of 75 guineas on their briefs. This was long before the cases started at all. Whoever gave the Deputy the information was quite wrong in this matter. It was quite wrong to say that it was because these cases went in favour of the State that these special fees were allowed to counsel. Four counsel were employed on behalf of the Government and the fees they were paid were fees that had been taxed by the taxing master who allowed these fees. Anybody who has any experience of the courts will know that these fees were eminently reasonable. Now as to the number of counsel, although there were four employed only two senior counsel were allowed by the Taxing Master and the defence were called upon to bear the fees of the two additional counsel.
