I move:—
That Dáil Eireann on behalf of the Irish people places upon public record their detestation of the travesty of judicial process which culminated in the imprisonment of Monsignor Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb and Primate of Croatia; calls upon all Christian peoples and all those who do not actually hate Christendom to join in repudiating as fraudulent this pseudo-trial and in stigmatising it for what it is—a crude pantomime of justice, designed for the purpose of defaming Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular, so that the international Communist conspiracy against individual liberty everywhere may be relieved of its most formidable and uncompromising challenge, which must always come from Christianity; directs the Ceann Comhairle to communicate the terms of this resolution to the Presiding Officer of every sovereign Parliament sharing with us membership of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
I put down that resolution, Sir, because this is the Parliament of as active and as free a democracy as there is in the world, and at the same time it is the Parliament of a people 95 per cent. Catholic, and practising Catholic at that. It is the Parliament which stands in the world to-day as the enduring refutation of the materialist totalitarian suggestion that where the Catholic Church is strong and vigorous there liberty withers and totalitarianism grows. Ever since this beastly heresy of totalitarian materialism has appeared in the world it has sought to employ, as its most effective weapon, the destruction, not primarily of its opponents' persons and lives but of their reputations.
Now, the totalitarian materialists hope always, and too often with success, that with the passage of time their individual crimes will be forgotten. They know too well how short the public memory is, and that as these individual crimes pass from the memory of men, there will remain a residuum of recollection calculated to persuade the people that those who are opposed to the tyrants are disreputable and untrustworthy. I can turn to Marshal Tito, the Bolshevik dictator of Yugo-Slavia, for proof of that contention. Speaking at Zagreb on August 31st and referring to the imprisonment of Monsignor Stepinac, Tito said of Christendom throughout the world:—
"They will shout to their hearts' content and then the storm will abate, because they will weary of it and we shall not weary."
One of the purposes of this motion is to fix Marshal Tito and his kind in the world with this, that the day is past when Christian men and women will weary of remembering these individual crimes. We will not weary, and so long as Monsignor Stepinac remains in prison we will not weary of reminding the world that injustice is enthroned in Yugo-Slavia, nor need he be deceived by our refusal to resort to the same type of language which he and his kind habitually employ. Without rancour against individuals, without preaching the gospel of hatred as between men or classes, we shall continue resolutely to denounce injustice and to exhort our fellowmen in the world to combine with us in protesting against the prostitution of law.
Now it is important, Sir, at the very outset to recall that it is not our purpose to stage in Dáil Éireann a retrial of the charges brought against Monsignor Stepinac. It is not our function, much less our duty. Our purpose should, however, be to stigmatise as fraudulent the totalitarian's use of the word "trial." The minds of men througout the world are by design being confused by a new and astute manoeuvre of these latter-day tyrants. The old method was a frontal attack upon the institutions of freedom and liberty. To-day the method is to adopt the language of liberty but to attach to it a new and very different meaning. We here in a free country, when we speak of a trial, think of an independent judge sitting on his bench; we think of a person charged with a specified crime, furnished with all particulars of the allegations to be made against him, afforded a full opportunity of calling such witnesses as he wants to call so that his side of the case can be heard; we think of an atmosphere obtaining in the court where the trial proceeds with judicial calm, where the prosecution's voice and that of the defence can both be clearly heard; and then we think of a decision taken on the merits and justice done according to the law. That little word "trial" means all that to us. When we read of a trial in Yugo-Slavia subconsciously that picture rises before us and we think of the Archbishop thus arraigned.
Let me, however, remind the House what trial has come to mean under the new democracy:—
"It has been decreed on the 3rd February, 1945, in Yugo-Slavia to abolish all legal status based on law, regulations, orders which have been in force in Yugo-Slavia up to the 6th April, 1941, in so far as they are in contradiction with the achievements of a national liberation struggle, the declarations and decisions of the anti-fascist council of Yugo-Slavia, the local anti-fascist councils, as well as all the decisions taken by the anti-fascist council of Yugo-Slavia, its delegations and government and delegations of the local anti-fascist council."
Free Dalmatia, a communist paper, in its columns on December 31st, 1944, in an article entitled “The development of the people's legal system” says:—
"The trials are carried out under the auspices of the National Liberation Committee on the basis of Article 10 of the Declaration adopted at Topusko on May 9th, 1944";
and goes on to explain that instructions as to the work and organisation of the court were given by the anti-fascist council of Croatia. According to those instructions—
"judgments hitherto enforced are not to be given by trained jurists under the complicated law hitherto in force but are to be made by the best sons of the people, not by the dead-letter of the written law but upon a proper, healthy conception of the people. The judges are to be chosen from amongst the people".
Here let me give the House a short description of how a trial is conducted under the exalted tribunal before which Monsignor Stepinac was brought to trial. The newspaper Politica published on June 6th, 1944, gives a description of the first trial in Split for violation of the people's honour:—
"The accused were the brothers Bonachia but the people of fighting Split who for a full 11 hours followed the trial remember it all. The courtroom thundered with ‘forced labour for the speculators', we demand confiscation; long live the just people's court. The crowd demanded the severest penalty."
That is not a trial as we understand it in this country. People condemned before such tribunals are not condemned in accordance with our conception of what justice is. That is true not only for archbishops but also for the little insignificant individuals whose names may never be heard again. It is true of all men because our conception of the law is that all men, great and small, archbishops and crossing-sweepers, are equal before it. Just as we would demand with one voice justice for the crossing-sweeper for the same reason, and for none other, we demand it for an archbishop.
The Vatican, in referring to what the totalitarians had described as a "trial" called to mind that the trial, so-called, began on September 30th within six days of the public accusation. The defence counsel was allowed one interview with the accused. The preparation of the defence was greatly hindered by the fact that many of the defenders of the archbishop were either arrested or detained for long periods. The president of the tribunal withheld documents and witnesses from the defence. Numerous documents produced against the archbishop had nothing to do with the so-called trial. The public prosecutor spoke every day and for hours on end whereas the defence, except for the final statement, were only granted rare and short intervals for speaking.
Deputies of this House will remember the dramatic, but not as authoritative record of what passed at that so-called trial from an Irishman who was present there in his capacity as a Press photographer, and recorded in a letter to his parents, which was published in the Press of this country, that when the Archbishop sought to answer the questions that were addressed to him he was continually interrupted with the raucous outcry of a disorderly and unfriendly mob.
I want to say this with due deliberation. The unjust imprisonment of Archbishop Stepinac is shocking but no more shocking than the unjust slaughter of the thousands who, all of us know, have died in Europe because they refused to forswear their conscience. But what it is immensely important to remember and to mark here, and to announce our resolution to mark and mark again ne'er wearying —as they hope we will weary—is the steadfast and unswerving resolve of the totalitarian materialists, Nazi and Bolshevik, to defame the Catholic Church by this old expedient of staging mock trials, hoping that even if convictions do not result, some of the mud that is thrown will stick in the memories of simple men.
Do we in this House forget the Nazi trials of the Benedictines of South Germany? Do we remember the charges that were made against the members of the Benedictine Order and the Order of Saint Francis, of gross and shameful sexual aberration in their own monasteries? That was 14 years ago and I am submitting to this House that though to-day the charge is treason, it is the same conspiracy, it is the same method that inspired those to arraign the monks and friars of South Germany, not for treason, but for another loathsome crime, unnatural sex perversion, and those who make those charges think that their nature is so loathsome and the slander is so vile that we will recoil from the duty of calling them to mind again and again and again, and reiterating again and again and again that we know they were slanders, that we know the charges were false, that we know they trust, through the very foulness of their own minds, to impose silence upon us. But we know that trick of old experience and we are not to be put off, because we can remember in this country the fraudulent trials; we know the method of the packed jury and the corrupt judge.
I remember a picture hanging on the wall of my old home. It was a photograph of Smith O'Brien and he sent it to my grandmother as a parting gift from Kilmainham, when he lay under sentence of death. Beneath it he wrote the words:—
"It is treason to love her and it is death to defend."
In those days, it was Ireland who was proud of her traitors and Ireland who so confidently depended on her children, if necessary, to die. The people of Ireland did not believe the slanders that were uttered against them—the charge of being traitors. That word traitor grated sorely on the delicate honour of such a man as Smith O'Brien. The charge of traitor was thrown back at those who made it, and those who pretended, by judicial process, to prove it and fix it upon the men who dared to love this country, by our friends all over the world who, by just such action as I ask Dáil Éireann to take now, said to these men in their darkest hour:—
"Whatever the verdicts of these courts, whatever these judges call you, whatever crimes they try to fix upon you, we do not think it necessary to follow the merits of the cause, we know you are not traitors; we repudiate the judicial process as a travesty which found you traitors and remember that whatever they call you, all over the world there are men who love liberty and who will honour this new-styled traitor, this new felon, deserving of death."
Shall we, in our time, in defence of something infinitely more precious than Ireland can ever be, in defence of man's right to honour God according to his conscience, fail those who have been brought before the packed jury and the corrupt judge and deny to them the sustenance and the consolation that we, in our own experience, got when there was nothing else to sustain us in what then looked a much more hopeless cause than that in defence of which Monsignor Stepinac has gone to jail in Yugo-Slavia? It is an illusion, Sir, to seek for common ground of compromise on which to meet the totalitarian materialists of our day. Nazi and Bolshevik alike seek to establish a political philosophy in the world on the assumption that God is not in Heaven and there can be no peace, there can be no compromise, there can be no common ground between a political philosophy founded on that hypothesis and the various forms of government which men devise under the providence of a God Who has always been and shall for ever be in Heaven, superior to any law that any Parliament can make.
Those well-intentioned agnostics and well-intentioned pagans who are for ever chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of some modus vivendi with the totalitarian materialists are like moths drawn towards a flame; the nearer they approach their objective, the more certain and inevitable will be their destruction. The materialists are wise in their generation and they realise that there is only one thing left in the world which they can never hope to delude or absorb, and that is Christendom, and I like to think—and I daresay with justice—that poor, insignificant, small as we in Ireland may seem in many regards, in the van of Christendom we have the right to carry our standards as high as any nation in the world.
I direct the attention of the House to these seeming truisms which are so often forgotten. In a great part of the world, when the representatives of Bolshevik Governments, in Russia or elsewhere, elect to employ the word "demokratiski", official interpreters translate that into English as "democratic", but that is not the translation. It has been made abundantly clear that, though the word "demokratiski" in Russian may sound like "democratic", it does not mean that. It means "proletarian dictatorship"; but because many people have not marked that subtle misrepresentation, a situation is developing in many parts of the world where, unless you are prepared to accept the doctrines of proletarian dictatorship, your democracy is called in question, you are put upon the defensive to prove that you are not a Fascist beast. We know that the supreme tribunal instructed by Article 10 of the Declaration of the National Liberation Committee adopted at Topusko, which I have read for the House, is not what we mean by a court of law. Yet, when it is called a court of law, there are many simple people who imagine that the proceedings resemble such courts as we are familiar with. Have they forgotten how very like Marshal Goering's Courts of Honour in Germany these new national courts are? Have they forgotten the instructions the Nazi courts received—to judge, not according to law but according to the honour of the German people? So to-day the courts of the Bolshevik dictatorship are warned not to judge according to law but according to the conscience and the honour of the Bolshevik people.
We know that, when we speak of "elections", we think of any candidate who can find ten men to name him having the right to go before the people and the people's choice prevailing in the end, but when a Bolshevik talks about an "election" he means the submission of a list of candidates for which the people are invited to vote "yes" or "no" under the careful surveillance of a member of the OGPU, or the Cheka or the Gestapo, as the case may be. We think of "Parliament" as the one place where every man can speak his mind under the rule of absolute privilege and where one presides to ensure that the rights of the humblest member of the House, under the Standing Orders, shall be protected with the same zeal and care as those of the Prime Minister himself. When they talk of Parliaments, they talk of groups of men assembled in rooms the walls of which are lined with armed members of the Gestapo. It is because we know the difference, because we realise that Bolshevik Parliaments, Bolshevik elections, Bolshevik trials are not what we call Parliaments, elections or trials and that "demokratiski" does not mean "democracy", because we know that and because we shall never fear to proclaim it, the materialists must persecute Christianity or perish themselves.
And so, Sir, I have asked Dáil Éireann to put these things on record. We understood that the Minister for External Affairs found himself, four weeks ago, when this matter was first raised in the House by way of Question, deterred from action. It was not for the want of will, as I believe that the Prime Minister in this matter shares my views as a Catholic. I know that his Catholicity is no more in question than my own and I doubt little that, if all were known about us both, of the two he is much the better Catholic in practice—and that is no great tribute. That facet of the question is not at issue, but, understanding that diplomatic difficulties made it impossible for him to act, for diplomatic reasons, I ask Parliament to come in not as between diplomats but as between Parliaments.
Experienced Deputies of this House will remember that we had a Parliamentary Union, where the Sovereign Parliaments of the world came together and where emphasis was always laid on the fact that, in that Union, no regard is had to the side of the House to which a delegate belongs. When he comes to represent Parliament at the Inter-Parliamentary Union, he may come from the Government Benches, the Opposition Benches or the middle benches, but he is there as a representative of Parliament, and Parliament meets Parliament without reference to the internal divisions of every free legislative Assembly. With that in mind, I felt that, if the rules of diplomacy precluded action now by the Minister for External Affairs, no such rules harass the discretion of a Sovereign Parliament to speak to its sister Parliaments; and I ask this House to instruct the Ceann Comhairle to convey our message, on behalf of the Irish people, to every other free Parliament associated with it in that free association.
I do not doubt that the substance of what I have said here is acceptable to almost every Deputy of this House, though I ask none to adopt the style. However, I cannot conceal a certain measure of surprise that, while this motion was before the Government for three weeks, it was not until 11.30 on Tuesday night that the Minister for External Affairs elected to inform the Press that it was his intention to move an amendment. Perhaps there was good reason for that. All I have to say is that, so far as the motion is concerned, it stands. I find nothing in the amendment to which a reasonable man could possibly demur and, if it appeared upon the Order Paper as a separate motion, I would gladly vote for both and would cheerfully commend both to the House. Yet I am at a loss to understand—and I await the Taoiseach's intervention to learn—why he deems it expedient to move the obliteration of the motion I have set down.
I have asked this Parliament to speak to other Parliaments in the confident hope and belief that Christian people and all those who are not blinded by hatred of Christendom will join with us in demanding that the name of justice will not be invoked to wreak injustice, that the hallowed forms of law will not be travestied to outrage law and that the rights of freedom won from tyrants down through the centuries by the blood of thousands of men, who willingly shed it to secure that priceless treasure of freedom for their children, will not be used by tyrants in our time—perhaps, the bloodiest tyrant the world has ever seen in its long history—to trample down the generation into which we were born. Let nobody apprehend that, if we do what lies within our power to do in this House to-day, we shall act in vain. Remember, that when we stood alone against what most prudent people declared to be unbeatably superior odds, it was the understanding, trust and faith of friends throughout the world that sustained and bore us up. There are others in the world to-day who want that help from us and we can give it. If we give it readily, I believe there are others in the world who will take courage and gather round us. Let us make clear that, whatever the tyrants may hope, we give the assurance that we will not forget, we will not weary and that we will never desert the cause the tyrants hope to see betrayed.