I have the honour to move:—
That in the opinion of the Dáil the Government has not given adequate attention to the problem of Partition.
In putting forward this motion for the approval of the House, I have no desire to strain unduly the case against the Government. I realise the immense difficulties of the question. I realise that those difficulties would have actually been increased and not diminished by the adoption of some of the suggestions that have been pressed upon the Government by certain Northern Nationalists and by certain supporters of their own. I realise, moreover, that a Government cannot be expected to go far in advance of public opinion, and that if it attempts to do so it can only fail and probably do more harm than good. I realise that the task of abolishing Partition is by no means a task that can be accomplished by a Government alone. Individuals, organisations all through the country, have to take a part in it if it is to be successfully achieved. Therefore, I am not proposing, as I have said, to strain unduly the case against the Government. But, on the 1st March, 1933, almost immediately after the last general election, we unanimously agreed in this House to the proposition that a reunion of the Irish nation, founded on goodwill, should be the primary object of Government policy and that every other constitutional issue should be subordinated thereto. That was nearly four years ago. Some time in the course of the next year we shall have another general election, and I think it is not unfair or unreasonable to inquire whether the Government have lived up either to the letter or to the spirit of that resolution which they accepted.
Now, I hope that it is not necessary for me in this House to stress the evil of Partition. Partition is, in my view, an evil, not only form our point of view, but from the point of view of all concerned, something that does harm to everybody that is affected by it. The President has told us that when he wants guidance on some issue of national importance he finds the best plan is to look into his heart. I presume that that procedure is open to all the rest of us and, even though he may regard my heart as a some what denationalised and cosmopolitanised organ, I venture to look into it in connection with this matter, and, looking into it, I find this—that while I can and do forgive spoliation, oppression, religious persecution in the past, I can hardly reflect on Partition without a kind of rage, a rage that I have some difficulty in preventing from mastering my reason and my judgment. If I did not think that I had so prevented it, naturally. I should not be taking the liberty of addressing the House, on this problem to-night. But I think anyone is living in a fool's paradise who imagines that the people of this country will ever reconcile themselves to Partition or that good relations between the Irish Free State and Great Britain will ever be possible on the basis of Partition. And some of these admirers of the President across the water who are talking as if we could all kiss and be friends provided that a Republic for 26 Counties were set up in external association with the British Empire, are simply ignorant of the fundamentals of the situation. Partition is vital to the whole question of our relations with Great Britain. Not only is it an evil from our point of view; it is an evil from Great Britain's point of view, because it is obviously of the greatest value and importance to her to secure the friendship of the Free State if she possibly can. Such friendship would be valuable in peace and perhaps even more valuable in case of war. And it is not only an evil from the British point of view, but it is an evil from the Northern Ireland point of view, and not from the point of view of Northern Nationalists alone. The spirit of bigotry and ascendancy is an accursed thing. It degrades and demoralises not only the people who are the victims of it, but those who are actually exercising the ascendancy. I am not sure that in the long run and in the last analysis the case of those who are exercising the ascendancy is not the more pitiable of the two. I hope, then, that I need say no more to emphasise the vital importance of this issue to all concerned.
I may as well put my cards upon the table at once in case anyone should suppose I have some magic formula up my sleeve for resolving this question, and I may say immediately that in my view there is only one way of getting rid of Partition and that is to gain the goodwill of the Northern Unionists. If that sounds like a truism, all I can say is that it is a truism which is neglected in 99 per cent. of the utterances made upon this subject. And if it sounds like telling a man the way to catch a bird is to put salt on its tail, I can only say that later on in my speech I hope to develop the point and to show that the gaining of the goodwill of the Northern Unionists is not necessarily an impossibility.
Before I come to that, I want to deal with certain heresies which seem to me to be blocking the way and confusing the public mind. One of these heresies is that it is impossible for anybody to do anything effective, that we must just let matters drift, that we must trust to justice being done in the long run automatically. I find that theory expounded in a book otherwise brilliant and a book that I would like to see every member of this House reading and still more to see every member of the British Parliament reading, and that is Professor George O'Brien's new book called "The Four Green Fields," which concerns itself with this very problem. There is much that is true and wise and eloquent in that book, but I personally think that his conclusions are altogether too pessimistic, and that the notion that we should adopt a fatalistic attitude to this problem is a wrong notion, because if we leave the question alone I have the greatest fear that the general drift will not be towards the abolition of Partition but, on the contrary, away from it.
The second heresy to which I am referring is that this is not primarily an Irish problem at all, that it is a problem of which the solution lies in the hands of Great Britain, and only of Great Britain, that the British Government could abolish Partition to-morrow if they wanted to and that nobody else can do anything about it. That I regard as a most mischievous fallacy. My view is that, supposing the British Government were to-morrow to withdraw British forces from Northern Ireland, to leave the Northern Unionists to depend upon their own resources, the Northern Unionists would defend themselves and defend the territory they occupy with the same embittered resistance we see being exhibited at the present moment in Madrid. But that is a contingency which it is hardly necessary to consider because no British Government could afford to do anything of the kind. Any British Government that proposed to do such a thing would, in my view, lose the support of almost everybody in Great Britain. It is one thing to say that the British created this problem. They did. If the British had never sent these people over here hundreds of years ago, the problem of partition would not exist. It is another thing to think of these people now merely as invaders and intruders, and it is to shut one's eyes to the fundamental facts of human nature to suppose that, with us professing a desire for separation and the Northern Unionists professing devotion to the Crown and the Commonwealth, a British Government could take the course of handing the Northern Unionists over to us against their will.
I think, however, it is important to consider to what extent, if any, the British people and the British Government could assist us in this matter. It is sometimes said that a great deal would be accomplished if they would even stop subsidising the North. The answer to that is, in the first place, that the Northerners would deny that they were being subsidised. The financial arrangements between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are not simple, and it is not easy to say whether in fact the North is being subsidised or not; but let us suppose that, by British action, the Northern Government was reduced to a state of financial collapse, what would be the consequence? Is there any reason to suppose that the result of that would be the entry of the North into a united Ireland? I suggest that quite the contrary would happen, that if for some reason of that nature the Northern Ireland Government were to break down, the result would be that the Northerners would go back, lock, stock and barrel to Westminster and Northern Ireland would simply become a part of England. I think we should, therefore, put out of our minds that anything useful to us can be expected from the British on these lines.
It has been urged by Professor O'Brien that the impotence of the British in this matter is so complete that at no time during the whole of the Home Rule controversy were they really in a position to deliver the goods as regards Northern Ireland. I believe that to be a misconception, and I speak not without some first-hand experience. From 1909 to 1914—in fact, from 1905 to 1914—I took a fairly active part in Home Rule propaganda in Great Britain. I spoke in many debates on the subject, and I spoke on many platforms on the subject, and I was by no means under the impression then, and am by no means under the impression now, that, provided the fear of complete separation could have been got over, there would have been any reluctance on the part of the British electorate as a whole to compel Northern Ireland to accept a Dominion of Ireland, and to play their part in the Dominion of Ireland. The cause of the difficulties that arose during that period was the House of Lords. But for the ability of the House of Lords, under the Parliament Act, to hold up the Home Rule Bill for two years and but for, as it seems to me, the quite unwarranted timidity both of the Liberal Government and, to be frank, of the Irish Nationalist Party on the subject of applying any sort of coercion to the Northern Unionists, I believe that no such physical force movement could have been gathered together as was gathered together during those years and as proved so fatal to the interests of the Home Rule Bill.
It has been said, and with a great deal of truth, that the loyalty of which the Northern Unionists so often boast is a conditional loyalty and that on various occasions they have threatened, if something was done of which they disapproved, to discard that loyalty altogether, but I think that argument is to be received with certain reservations. In point of fact, Catholic Emancipation was passed in spite of such threats, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was accomplished in spite of such threats, and Ulster "loyalty," if that is the proper word for it, still continued. I think we may draw the inference from those facts that the Ulstermen are not always prepared for quite such desperate deeds as they profess to be prepared for, and that if the passing of the Home Rule Bill into law could have been accomplished in the ordinary way, and within the ordinary time in which the passing of a measure of capital importance into law used to be accomplished under the British Parliament, the Bill could have been put into force without very much difficulty. The reason I lay stress upon the proposition that the Northern Irish Unionists cannot be guaranteed always to have matters their own way is this—that I do think, given the necessary conditions, the British Government and the British people could exercise a great deal of what I might call moral compulsion on Northern Ireland.
At present they are treated by most of the British politicians and by the British popular Press as heroes. They are constantly being patted on the back and praised for their loyalty, and we can hardly blame them for being willing to accept these assurances at their face value. At the very moment when they were compiling what the late Lord Asquith called "a grammar of anarchy," when they were threatening every sort of treason and rebellion in connection with the Home Rule Bill, they were being assured by men of light and leading in England, by the most prominent front-rank politicians, that they were noble patriots showing a spirit of devotion and attachment to the Crown and Empire. Who can be surprised if, under these circumstances, their die-hard attitude was persisted in? But it is not at all so clear that if the gilt came off the gingerbread and if they ceased to be regarded as heroes in Great Britain, if they began even to be regarded as unreasonable in Great Britain, if they found themselves meeting with a chilly reception in exalted circles—it is, I say, far from clear that in these circumstances their resistance to any sort of accommodation would be as embittered as it has been in other circumstances.
I suggest then, Sir, that while Great Britain has not got the power to solve this problem for us, it has the power to give us some assistance in the matter if we make that assistance possible by establishing the preliminary conditions necessary for it to take effect. But, substantially, this question of curing the evil of Partition is our own job and nobody else's job. If we are to undertake it, the first essential is that we shall be in earnest about it, that we shall really want the reunion of Ireland on a voluntary basis, and not want it in the sense of somebody who has bought a sweep ticket and, having bought that ticket, thinks that his part is done and that he need only sit back and wait for Fortune to smile upon him. We have got to do something more than merely express a wish to see Partition ended. Our desire has got to be an efficient desire. He who wills the end must also will the means. What I want to ask the House to consider is whether we have really faced the facts in that respect, whether we have realised what is involved in the reunion of Ireland, whether we want the reunion of Ireland on that basis, taking with it all that is logically involved in it, and whether we are prepared to do what is necessary in order to work towards that unity. If we are not, it is idle to say that we are in favour of abolishing Partition; we are simply Partitionists ourselves although we are concealing the fact from ourselves.
We often complain, Sir, and with justice, that British statesmen have shown a lack of vision in their dealings with this country. Are we quite sure that that reproach does not apply to us in relation to our dealings with the Northern Unionists? Does not the reproach of lack of vision mean that the statesman you are reproaching has failed to put himself in the place of those whom he desires to conciliate, has failed to try and see difficulties as they see them, has failed to make allowances for the sentiments that he must know them to possess? There has been an occasion in history when real progress was made in establishing co-operation between Northern Protestants and the rest of the population of this island, and that was during the period when Wolfe Tone was founding the society of United Irishmen. It is worth considering for a minute just what Tone did. Tone made friends with, and gained the confidence of, the most enlightened, the most broadminded, the most tolerant men he could find in Northern Ireland. He engaged them in a fight against a corrupt ascendancy, a fight for the liberties of Parliament and the realities of democracy, and he met with unexampled success in eliminating the prejudices that had hitherto prevented the two stocks that inhabited this island from co-operating with each other and that success was interrupted by what? It was interrupted by the outbreak of war between France and England. The first result of that outbreak of war was that those who wished to change the established régime in any way came to be suspected of treason and disloyalty, and in their fear of France and in their eagerness to support their own country in time of war, many men slipped back into acquiesence, at any rate, with the status quo, whereas others, Wolfe Tone among them, slipped forward into open rebellion. Those occurrences broke up, for good and all, the co-operation that had been established.
If we are to win the Northern Unionists to-day, it will not be by fussing after them, with the futility and lack of dignity that a certain number of British politicians and publicists are fussing after us. We have really got to win their confidence. We have got to turn their thoughts away from the worse things that now occupy them towards the better things that might occupy them. We have got to enlist them, just as Tone did, in a fight against something that is worth fighting. We have got to enlist them in a fight against poverty, in a fight against class hatred, in a fight against racial hatred, in a fight against war, in a fight against all the evil things that afflict humanity. In other words, Sir, the way to gain the goodwill of the Northern Unionists is, first of all, to gain the goodwill of the best among them, the broadest-minded among them, all those who are most free from race hatred, and those who realise the evil, as many in the North do realise the evil, of the ascendancy spirit, who realise that it is a deplorable state of things that a third of their own population should be despised and hated by the other two-thirds, and constantly in an attitude of revolt against the State.
I do not believe it is at all impossible, if we take the right measures, if we cultivate the right frame of mind, to gain the confidence of the best among the Northern Unionists, and, having gained their confidence, to give them a chance to extend their influence in the North and to win over others, until in the end we have the confidence of the bulk of the Northern Unionists.
But, Sir, if we are going to embark upon that task, there are certain obstacles that have first to be removed. Now on this matter I ask Deputies to reason things out for themselves. I ask them to believe that I am not trying to force upon them ready-made notions; that I do not approach this matter as one eager to shove, for example, Imperialism down their throats on the excuse of getting rid of Partition. I ask them to judge what I am saying on its merits; to try to exercise the vision that I have suggested is necessary if this problem is to be solved; to try and look at things through the eyes of a reasonable Northern Unionist, of a man who does dislike race hatred, but who wishes to be reassured about our outlook and about our intention. I imagine that if the President was having an interview with such a reasonable Northern Unionist, and if he asked this Northern Unionist why he objected to coming into a union with us, our friend from the North might say: "Well now, Mr. President, first of all we Northerners are generally credited with being materialists, so I suppose you will permit me to deal with economic questions at the start. We are concerned for the future of our shipbuilding industry, and for the future of our linen industry. Just what do you propose with regard to them? In the event of your separating from the British Commonwealth, have you any market to offer us for either one or the other? If not, how are you proposing to find employment for the many thousands of people who depend upon those industries? Again, as regards our agriculture, have you any alternative to the British market to offer us in regard to our agriculture?" I hope, when the President comes to reply to this Motion, he will indicate what reassurance he is in a position to offer to Northern Unionists about such matters as these.
There are, no doubt, some other economic difficulties. We have created certain small industries and certain not so small industries—here in Southern Ireland, which might perhaps be imperilled by competition from the North if the boundary were to be suddenly removed. I personally do not believe that any such obstacle as that could be a fatal obstacle. A way could always be found to do equity as between any industries in our own present area and industries in the Northern area that might conceivably compete with them, but I do think that if we are in earnest about this question of Partition we should bear matters like these in mind; that when we are setting up new enterprises in the Irish Free State we ought to consider whether similar enterprises exist in the North; and we ought on the whole, to prefer setting up industries that would not suffer by competition from the North if Partition were to be abolished.
Turning from economic matters, about which it is not necessary to say very much because their importance is so obvious, let us think of other substantial obstacles that stand in the way. The first that immediately suggests itself is republicanism. I cannot help feeling all the sadder about republicanism being an obstacle because I honestly think that republicanism is a sham. I do not say that with any desire to be offensive; I cannot see how you can make it out to be anything except a sham. A republic for 32 counties is obviously impossible. A republic for 26 counties is possible, but the Government have not the smallest intention of declaring it and of facing its economic consequences, and so far as I know practically nobody wants it. The two people in Ireland, I think, who come nearest to wanting it are Professor Tierney and myself, because we think that the moral effect might be so good as to make up for the immediate economic effects. The only other sort of possible republic is a 26 counties republic within the Empire if such a thing is conceivable, and so far as I can see, that kind of republic would satisfy no republican feeling in this country. So far as there is any republican feeling in this country it is based on the idea that the British Empire is immoral, and that we ought not to be tangled up with it in any way, and especially not in its foreign policy or in its wars, and I cannot conceive of any meaning for a republic within the British Empire unless it is a republic that is going to be tangled up in British foreign policy and in British wars. Therefore, as I say, republicanism seems to me to be a sham, and I feel all the sadder that the profession of republicanism—for it seems to me to be nothing more—should be there to constitute an obstacle, as it does, to union with Northern Ireland.
I have often said before in this House, and I think it worth repeating again, that the mere presence in office in the Irish Free State of a non-republican Government is not enough; that as long as there is any substantial Party professing republicanism in this country, whether in power or out of power, we cannot make any real headway towards gaining the goodwill of the North. Therefore, I am not interested in this as a question of turning anybody out of office or anybody else into office. I am interested in it as a matter of what public opinion in the country is, and our task is to lead public opinion in the right direction.
The next obstacle is the obstacle of Gaelicisation. I have always had the greatest reluctance to talk about the Irish language, and for this reason—that I think no part of the national movement during the last quarter of a century has evoked more unselfish idealism than has the revival of the Irish language, and I have the greatest respect for the men who have made it a labour of love to learn the Irish language, and to seek to revive whatever may be revived of Gaelic culture. Therefore, although I believe Gaelicisation to be a profound mistake, I speak about it with the same reluctance as I would speak if I were attacking a man's religion, but I am obliged to speak about it in connection with Partition because there is no shutting our eyes to the fact that the Northern Unionists will not have the Irish language rammed down their throats and they will not come into a union with us if compulsory Irish is to be forced upon them or if they are to be barred from every sort of advancement by reason of their lack of the Irish language. Now, I am in favour of gaining every scrap of culture that we can gain from the Irish language. I am in favour of gathering everything that can be gathered in the way of Irish folklore. I am in favour of enriching our civilisation on that side of it, but I am not in favour of making the Gaelic side monopolise our civilisation. I believe that that plan is founded on a complete misconception. I believe that the man who argues for a Gaelic Ireland is arguing against an Irish Ireland. I know that the notion of Gaelicising the whole of Ireland would have been detestable—was detestable— to Daniel O'Connell; would have been detestable to Wolfe Tone.
