It is not to-day or yesterday I had to remind the House of Il Principe. This is a matter about which the House must be told the truth. Is there any precedent in Europe, America, Asia, Africa or Australia for setting up an arts council and planting a discarded member of the Cabinet in the chair thereof, for no obvious reason except that the Government wanted to squeeze him out of the Executive? Is there a prime minister in any of the five continents which I have named who, having done that, would ramble into the House and move a Vote for £1,100, informing the House in Irish, hoping that nobody would understand him, that he had nothing to say and then to say in English: “If there are any questions asked, I shall be glad to answer them”?
Is there any Deputy in this House, with the exception of the faithful disciple of Il Principe, who occupies the Front Bench who will have the hardihood to get up and say that it is a becoming thing, when you set up an arts council, to choose as its first chairman, a man active in public life but disappointed of political preferment? I remember very well the story being told with great drama of how, when Lord Salisbury informed Sir Stafford Northcote that he could no longer include him in his Cabinet, Sir Stafford Northcote fell dead at his feet. Lord Salisbury, reciting this afterwards in the House of Lords, said that it was on occasions like this that a man who had spent his lifetime in the public service cursed the day on which he had entered it, when public duty required that he should cause the death of an old and faithful friend, by an announcement which was to prove fatal to him. Lord Salisbury was very unfortunate in that he had not an opportunity to study the tactics of our Prime Minister. If he had had that opportunity, instead of breaking the news to Sir Stafford Northcote in the way he did, he would have made him chairman of the Tate Gallery and if so, Sir Stafford Northcote would have survived in prosperity and peace, just as Deputy Little survives among us at present—the Lord spare him for many years—showing by his present equanimity, his bland enjoyment of this office of distinction.
The office of chairman of this body is purely honorary but here is a question I should like to put to the Taoiseach for a specific answer. Is it the intention of the Government that this position should remain honorary? Do they propose to state now that they will not introduce a proposal to change the status of that position? I ask the Taoiseach to tell us why he chose the ex-Minister for Posts and Telegraphs for this post, not because I believe for a single moment that he will be at the slightest loss to explain that he burned midnight oil wondering if he could ask his colleagues in the Cabinet to suffer the cruel loss of this invaluable colleague, having all the time at the back of his mind the knowledge that the Government had reluctantly consented to make way for Deputy Childers, and that Deputy Little had been appointed chairman of the Arts Council. I commend his explanation, whatever it will be, to the attention of the Dáil. It will be a beautiful performance. He will have all the appearances of indignant amazement at being asked such a question and will tell the House that it never crossed his mind that so monstrous a question would be asked and that he had not time to prepare an answer to it.
Those who are not familiar with the Taoiseach's exquisite technique will feel their hearts bleed at the righteous indignation of this blameless man at the mean, ungenerous and disingenuous attack made upon this noble patriot who was planted where he is sitting now, right in front of me, in order to impose the virtual obligation of silence on every Deputy who is capable of saying anything which would embarrass a colleague who is sitting beside him in the same House in which Deputy Little and I have sat for the past 20 years.
I had hopes that this body would function in detachment from the turmoil of politics and that it would become one of the few institutions about which the Oireachtas would find itself in substantial agreement, granting it what annual grant our resources permitted and leaving a very wide discretion to the body to do the work assigned to it as best it thought fit. If Deputy Costello's original scheme had been followed, I think that would have been the result. As the Taoiseach doubtless knows, it was not his purpose to install in the chairmanship of this body a discredited Cabinet colleague. Somehow, it makes one feel rather hopeless when gestures of the kind to which I have referred are so audaciously made.
I had hoped that the Taoiseach, who is so notoriously wrong-headed a man about most things, would, in respect of a matter relating to educational art, show the quite exceptional capacity which he ordinarily shows in dealing with matters of that kind. Usually, when he dealt in this House with matters concerning education or art, one seemed to be listening to the voice of reason and though I personally found it difficult to conceal my astonishment at the voice of reason proceeding from such a source, it did. This is the first occasion on which I found the Taoiseach rambling into Dáil Éireann and sheltering himself behind a cloak of incomprehensible Irish to excuse himself for his failure to deal with something which he must have known it was his duty to deal with on this occasion. The evidence of that knowledge sits behind him. But he brought in Deputy Little in his train. I wonder does he intend to continue this body the way it has begun. If he does, then it was a very unfortunate thing that this Fine Arts Bill was ever brought in at all.
Let me, in conclusion, make a slight comparison between the standards set by the Taoiseach and those set by his colleague who secured the advantage accruing from the political demise of Deputy Little. The Deputy's successor in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, for the great enlightenment of mankind, ordained that there should be free and easy discussions broadcast from Radio Éireann.
