"Keep them guessing" was the motto. Here is a Bill bad in itself because it deliberately refuses to acknowledge the principles for which the President said he stood, and which has steadily deteriorated in the course of the numerous stages through which it has gone. Every chance the President got of dealing with his original measure has ended by making it worse—except the opportunity offered this morning. We have had two marvellous concessions this morning and they, let us hope, will improve the measure almost beyond recognition.
That has been the fate of the Bill. The President came into this Dáil with a definite scheme, after full consideration for 12 months and as a result of the constitutional mumblings that took place inside him, and then the Minister for Industry and Commerce comes along and, in a week, imposes on him an entirely different scheme, but a worse scheme, if possible. I am sorry he gave way to that pressure. You are going to get an entirely political Seanad, and you deliberately set out to do that, although you profess the opposite. As far as possible, he said, at the moment we could not do more. You can do more. If these bodies are good enough to choose 40 men, out of whom 21 must be elected, they are good enough to select the 43. There were many opportunities of confuting that during the Committee Stage. I do not really know what to call the different stages of this Bill. Yet we are to advance towards better organisation, but I gather that the more of these organisations we have, the worse we shall be, because it will throw more work on the returning officer, because his business will be, no matter how many of these we have, to keep the number nominating as small as possible. Therefore, if this is an inducement, it is an inducement in the opposite direction.
The President's gesture has explained it accurately—here now and there to-morrow. The President has done it splendidly—you think you are here and then you think you are there, and eventually you find yourself back here. That is the President's idea of negotiating—two parties starting, as he eloquently expresses it in the gesture he has just made, here; they come to this point and say "At least we have agreement now," and then they find that the President is back there. Some schemes, he said, appeared to go further. They did, but they were not practicable, he said. They are quite as practicable as this scheme, and as far as there is any acknowledgment of the vocational principle in this, it is a proof of the practicability of the schemes which the President did not even consider. I admit that he could have considered them, because he had considered the matter for 12 months and had come to the conclusion that it was impossible, but he has given no reasons for that conclusion.
We have compromise. I wish the President was not so fond of half-way houses. They are bad places as a rule. He suggests that there is an inducement to move in a certain direction, but there is no such thing. There is the contrary. I have said already that there were three things which the President professed he wanted to accomplish. The first was a vocational Seanad, and he has done the opposite so far as he could. The second was a Seanad not elected on purely Party lines and not under purely Party machinery. He has got the most perfect scheme for doing the opposite; he has given us a scheme for election completely under the Party machine, and the more effective that machine is, the more successful it will be in elections of this kind. The third was his desire that there should not be a hang-over and that when a new Government came into power it should not find a Seanad in existence which would be hostile to it. We had great expressions as to the necessity for that and great stress laid on it, and for that reason we are presented with the great inconvenience—as it very often is—of having the Seanad going out with the Dáil and the necessity, therefore, of compressing the Seanad election into a small period. Why was that? The President explained it fully. He said that the Seanad had a certain function. That function should be to bring a different mind to bear upon legislation going up to it from this House and not to obstruct this House. That is the view the President had. Therefore, he said to himself, if the Seanad goes over from one period to the other, a Seanad which is of a different complexion from the new Government coming into power, that Seanad may act as an obstructive body and, therefore, let the Seanad go out with the Dáil.
In that case, you will have a new Seanad which, so far as its election is concerned, in the original Bill, at all events, would more or less represent the complexion of the Dáil in its general views, and which would not be inclined on the whole to obstruct, but for fear it should be so inclined, there will be 11 nominations by the Taoiseach. Even that principle has been abandoned. The majority of the electorate does not necessarily change with the dissolution of the Dáil. Two hundred and ten out of the 350 remain on. They, having been elected at a different time, possibly two years previously, may be entirely out of sympathy with the majority, with the result that you are here again doing something contrary to your expressed wish. But is not that the fate of the Bill all along—professions of principle on one hand and violation of them in practice on the other? We have honoured the principle of a vocational Seanad merely in expression and not in action. The non-political principle, in the sense of the Seanad not being under Party control, is gone in as effective a way as we could make it go, and the principle of safety for a new in-coming Government is gone. These are the three things on which the President laid stress, and if he had deliberately set out to violate these principles, he could not have done it better. We may express the one hope that other people will take the President's principles more seriously than he takes them himself. We are implementing the Constitution. We have done it several times and on every possible occasion, we have, in practice, violated the whole spirit of it. There are many things in that Constitution to which I object, but it is quite characteristic that the people who set out to violate it first, and to trample on all that that Constitution was held to enshrine, are the President and his Party.
We are presented with a Seanad and it is either take it or leave it. There is no possibility that I see of getting the Seanad which the President could have got. He has spoken all along of vocational Seanads. He has managed to deceive a number of people into believing that that is his aim. His aim is nothing of the kind, so far as we can judge him, not by his professions, but by his acts. We have been in favour of a Second House, and we thought it possible to get a Second House. We were not particularly interested in the First House, but we did hope that the foundation of a vocational Seanad might be laid. We made any amount of concessions, and we put forward schemes. They were not considered, but we would not mind that if there was the slightest pledge for the future that this Bill is an advance in the direction in which the President says it is an advance.
