On the Adjournment, Deputy Con Lehane is raising the subject matter of Question No. 29 on to-day's Order Paper.
Adjournment Debate—Military Inspection in Northern Ireland.
To-day I asked the Minister for Defence:—
"Whether his attention has been drawn to a Press report wherein he is quoted as stating that officers of the armed forces of this State are or recently were engaged on a tour of inspection of British military posts situated in the occupied portion of our country; and, if so, whether he will state (a) what was the number and rank of the officers so engaged; (b) at whose request or invitation this tour of inspection was carried out; (c) whether he considers it in the national interest that such fraternisation with the forces occupying portion of our territory against our will should be permitted to members of the Irish Army."
In reply to that question, the Minister stated that he had read the report referred to, that two officers whose ranks were commandant and captain attended a training exercise in Northern Ireland recently, that the invitation was received from the British military authorities, and that, as he had stated on Friday last, he considered that it was in the best interests of the nation and of the world as a whole to have, as far as was humanly possible, the friendliest feelings between the officers and men of different armies.
With that reply I felt myself dissatisfied, and I felt it right to put to the Minister the following considerations: the territory of this country, the territory of Ireland, extends to the whole island of Ireland and to its territorial waters in our six north-eastern counties. There is there at the moment an alien puppet Government maintained and kept in power, contrary to the will of our people, by the protection of British armed forces—kept in power by the bayonets of a British Army of Occupation, the invading army which remained behind when the British invaders evacuated the remainder of the country. Their existence there is a continuing violation of our national territory by these armed forces, maintained by Britain in the Six County area. In my submission, these armed forces are the instruments of aggression against the historic Irish nation.
It may be possible to state the position in terms other than those in which I have stated it. It may be possible to state it in terms less blunt, less definite, less fundamental, but they would be less true. Under these circumstances, I am asking the Minister to ensure that, for the future, no act of this House, no act of the Minister's and no act of any servant or soldier of the Irish people shall be calculated in any way to permit of its being understood that we give even the most limited acquiescence to this wrong upon our country and this violation of our territory. According to the Minister's statement, the visit of these Army officers was a visit to a training course. I think the Minister described it as a training course.
Training exercise.
I understand that this training exercise is one which was described by the British authorities as "Operation Antrim." From the Minister's reply—I hope that I am wrong in this—but from his reply, and from the attitude adopted, I felt that it was possible to discern, or to suggest, a certain complacency on his part to the presence of these armed forces of Britain in six of our north-eastern counties. The British forces whom these Irish officers had to meet, and with whom they had to fraternise, are here as servants, as soldiers, of an invading army, an army which has no moral right or title to be present on our shores. For the officers of our Army to meet them under circumstances such as those outlined by the Minister does seem to suggest to me a situation similar to that which would take place if a burglar were to enter your house and you were to invite him to sit down at the table and discuss your plumbing or your electric lighting system, or if a footpad were to grip you by the arm and that your reaction were to be to discuss with him the technicalities of jujitsu.
I believe, in effect, that fraternisation by officers of our Army with the forces of Britain, occupying the Six Counties, is something like that. If we admit in any way, by the exchange of courtesies or otherwise, that Britain's forces in the North are anything other than the armed agents of a rapacious empire, then we are abandoning, to some extent at any rate, the moral basis of our claim for the control of our country. The basis of my objection to the Minister's attitude is that that attitude involves a degree of collaboration with the Army of Occupation in the North. Any anti-partitionist must be opposed, if he examines the matter thoughtfully at all, to any degree of collaboration. We in Clann na Poblachta object to this instance of collaboration just as we objected to instances of collaboration which took place when the previous Government co-operated with the police force of the Northern junta in the arrest and handing over the Border of republicans such as Michael Quille and Harry White. We objected to collaboration in that instance and we object in this instance too. We believe that our attitude towards Partition must be one of constant protest and that we must make it plain to the world that the alien institutions imposed upon our people in the partitioned portion of our country are based on force, persecution and conquest. For that reason the situation disclosed by the Minister is one which I and those with me on these benches feel we must view with some disquiet.
We feel that it is a situation in which we cannot quietly acquiesce. For that reason also any contact between the Irish Army and the British Army of Occupation in the Six Counties must, we feel, be reprobated. We make this case not out of any feeling of hatred or antipathy towards the British people. For the great social experiment that is at present being undertaken by the British workingclass we have nothing but sympathy and respect. For the ordinary people of Britain we are ready and anxious to hold out the hand of friendship. However, while Britain occupies our six north-eastern counties we feel that to British institutions assisting in maintaining the unnatural Border, assisting in the continuance of Partition, we can offer nothing but our active and implacable hostility. The training exercises to which two Irish Army officers were invited were described by the British military authorities as "Operation Antrim." For those of us who know the history of the past 30 years in the occupied portion of our country, not to talk of other operations that were carried out there—other operations that were carried out there with the connivance of those same armed forces to which two Irish Army officers recently went as guests—we cannot think of "Operation Antrim" without remembering that it is not so many years ago since there was "Operation Pogrom" in Belfast. For that reason also we feel we must reprobate and criticise the accordance of any permission to officers of the Army of this State to fraternise with the occupying forces in the Six Counties. Over these Six Counties the Union Jack still flies and while it flies there it is the badge of our subjection.
The British uniform to the ordinary nationalist of the Six Counties still represents the uniform of an alien army holding them in servitude by armed force and by armed force alone. I think, perhaps, also that in addition to these considerations we have very little to gain from contacts with any of the institutions operating in the territory controlled by what has been described as "the most reactionary junta in Western Europe." Latterly there has been much talk of the possibility of increasingly friendly relations between this country and Britain. Separatists and republicans wish for these friendly relations as much as anybody else, but the friendship can be on no sincere or lasting basis while as much as one British soldier remains on Irish soil.
Captain Cowan rose.
The Minister is entitled to ten minutes to reply.
I do not want to cut out the Deputy entirely, but this is an important matter from the point of view of the Minister for Defence, and I am entitled to ten minutes.
That is why I want to speak for less than two minutes. It is so important a matter that I consider it one of high policy, and in this matter of high policy the Clann na Poblachta Party forms part of the Government. Their Leader is a member of the Government. If what has happened is a matter of such high policy that Deputy C. Lehane is speaking, as he speaks, for the Clann na Poblachta Party then I suggest that the Government is no place for the Leader of the Clann na Poblachta Party.
It is clear from looking around this House that this is an inter-Party Government debate. We are discussing a very, very serious question, and one that impinges upon the partition of our country and yet, as far as I know, for the first time in the history of Dáil Éireann while an important debate is taking place, there is not a single representative of the Opposition Party present. It is a matter of courtesy that somebody always occupies the Opposition Front Bench. Not only is the front bench quite empty, but all the other benches are likewise empty.
With regard to the case made by Deputy Lehane, I can subscribe to and share all the sentiments held by Deputy Lehane. I do not think, however, that he was quite fair when he suggested that my attitude was one of complacency in the partition of our country. He suggested that. I think that remark was probably made in the course of his speech inadvertently and was not intended to carry the interpretation which it might possibly carry.
I said I hoped I was wrong.
With regard to abhorrence for the partition of our country and the occupation of any part of our country by foreign troops, no matter how strong may be the feelings of Deputy Lehane, my feelings are equally as strong. There is just one point on which I disagree with him. It is, again, a point of view. I do not regard the Northern Government as an alien Government. I regard it as a Government of Irishmen gone astray. I have hopes, my profession being designed to cure rather than to kill, that they will be cured of the mental aberration that instigates them to look outside their own country for leadership.
I regard the people of Belfast, whether Protestant or Catholic, as Irish. I regard them as our people. I think it is our function in life to try to instil into them a proper spirit of Irish nationality—a spirit which may be superabundant in some portions of Ireland and deficient in others. It is a case of, instead of "Operation Antrim", a little blood transfusion so that that nationalism which is so common to a great many portions of this country will incite the Northern Protestants towards the recognition that this country is as much theirs as it is ours and to come along and join with us in sharing the burden of making the best we can of this little island.
The gist of Deputy Lehane's remarks were directed towards objection to Ireland's troops, wearing the uniform of Ireland, asserting the right of Irish troops to carry that uniform in every square inch of our country. The Constitution lays it down, and Deputy Lehane opened his remarks by pointing that fact out, that the whole of Ireland is ours and the waters around our shores. I subscribe absolutely to those views. I believe that that is so and I would be proud to see, not two, but 22,000 troops in the uniform of Ireland marching through Antrim with the same ease as they would march through County Cork. We are tending towards the slave mind if we acquiesce in the partition of our country and if we shy away on every occasion from that abominable border.
I am proud of the fact that Irish officers in Ireland's uniform are marching through the Six Counties, are seen by the people there and are satisfying the extremists up there that we down here do not grow horns and that we are as good men—and perhaps better —than many of the people up there. I can see nothing but good flowing from that kind of comradeship between the different armies. I know that the influence of the contacts made between our Army and the army up there is little by little instilling into the minds of those who were most bitter the fact that we are not the outrageously, outlandish people that we have been featured as in the past.
Be that as it may, there are two ways of looking at the matter. Are we to acquiesce in the partition and mutilation of our country by not even using the soil of the Six Northern Counties as guests as long as the Union Jack flies there? That is a matter of opinion. I do not say my opinion is necessarily better than or in any way superior to the opinion and views expressed by Deputy Lehane. I can understand the motives behind the views he has expressed. I am sure that he will understand the motives behind the views that I have expressed. The motives, the aims, the intentions and the objectives of Deputy Lehane and myself are similar. It is merely a matter of who is charged pro tem with the responsibility for action in respect of invitations of the kind we have received. I believe and hope— and I have every reason to believe and hope—that it is by fraternisation that the hard feelings, which were in the past the principal obstacle up there, are gradually being moulded and softened and modified. I may be wrong in that particular view. But those were the motives underlying the particular sanction that I gave in this particular matter.
The Dáil adjourned at 10.30 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 15th December, 1948.