The Minister to conclude.
Committee on Finance. - Vote 46—External Affairs (Resumed).
Debate resumed on the following motion:
"That the Vote be referred back for reconsideration"—Deputy Dillon.
Is the Minister concluding?
I am calling on the Minister to conclude.
I want to make a contribution.
The Deputy did not offer.
He did not get a chance.
I thought a Labour Deputy was in possession.
Deputy Sherwin was in possession.
He is not in the Labour Party.
I will allow the Deputy to make a statement.
My only interest in this Estimate is in the booklet, and the omission of the name of Michael Collins from it. I took part in the Civil War, and in the past 40 years I have avoided, so far as I possibly could, all discussion on that unfortunate and dreadful period in the history of this country. Some of my closest friends in those 40 years were men who were opposed to Michael Collins in the Civil War, but there is common agreement on the stature and quality of that dead leader. One aspect more than any other of Collins which aroused my youthful admiration was his extraordinary and surprising reserve of moral courage. We all knew the other kind of courage he had. We knew of his personal bravery. I consider his real greatness lay in his great reserves of moral courage, and the manner in which he faced slander and misrepresentation. That is a characteristic which is not usual in our people, and it was a sign of his greatness.
Those of us who saw in recent weeks the British television film, Rebellion, which was shown on Telefís Éireann, saw many pictures of Collins. One Collins we saw was the extroverted, gay soldier whom most people remember when they think of Collins, but we saw another Collins whose forehead was overshadowed by a great sadness. It was quite obvious to those of us who interested ourselves in the conditions of our country in that grave time, 40 years ago, that Collins bore a great burden, that he knew the part malice would play, but he did not think malice would follow him to the grave.
However, that has been done in the production of this booklet by the Minister, or by someone. They could not injure Collins because he is quite secure, but they could and did injure Ireland and the Irish people. Those abroad, and particularly those in Britain, will say: "How petty and how mean", and then they will say: "How Irish". That is the injury that has been done by this booklet. The people of Britain know of Michael Collins, if they do not know of the Minister for External Affairs. That is the injury that has been done, this most un-Irish lack of generosity which has been shown in this matter.
I stood where Collins was shot some three weeks ago in the midst of some thousands of silent people and I wondered whether our 700 years of slavery had not left a deep mark on us, a mark that could result in the production of so regrettable a document as this. The book is an excellent production technically and I congratulate the Minister and his Department on that aspect of it but the aspect which led to the name of Collins being wiped from its pages is a regrettable imputation on the honour of this country.
During the first stage of the debate on this Estimate, a few points were raised with which I think I should deal. After the discussion we had here on Tuesday, I do not think I need deal with the questions raised about Cyprus but I should like to deal with the question of our emigrants in England and what we can do for them, if they get into trouble. The fact is that there are fewer emigrants going to Britain in the last couple of years than used to go and we are all very proud of that. One of the reasons we have emigration —it is not the only reason—is that our cash incomes per head are less than in some parts of England and in some trades in England.
The greater the burden we put on our people here, the harder it will be for us to reach the standard of cash incomes they have in Britain but anybody who is in reasonable employment here is much better off with less cash per week than he is in Britain. That is well recognised, and all over Ireland we find people who have been in Britain and who are back working here at less than they would have if they went to work in Britain and worked overtime and earned bigger wages. It is not true to say that we have no interest in the Irish who emigrated. I wish the Deputies over there would stop talking; it is very difficult to deal with this matter and make oneself heard.
If the Minister did not cover the microphone, perhaps we could hear him.
I have not covered the microphone. One of the things we must avoid in trying to help the emigrants in Britain is a lowering of their will to help themselves. We are doing our best with the resources at our disposal in the Department of External Affairs to foster their will to help themselves. For the past couple of years, we have an officer in our Embassy in London whose sole duty it is is to keep in touch with Irish organisations and Irish emigrants, to encourage them to organise self-help and also to organise cultural activities of an Irish character that would keep up their morale.
We have had a growth in recent years in the number of organisations in London and elsewhere which are based on the Irish counties. These centres of meeting help to keep former neighbours in Ireland together so that they know when one of their fellow workers gets into difficulty and are able to help him along. I believe that is the proper way to deal with the matter, not only from the point of view of the Irish Exchequer but from the point of view of the emigrants themselves. That must be our aim, to do everything we can to increase the happiness of the emigrant who feels that he must stay in England rather than in Ireland.
The one place where we can help the Irish people is here in Ireland. When a Government passes an Act to help any group of individuals, any type of individual in the country, they have to arrange that all persons with an equal claim, all persons of equal status shall have a right to draw equal amounts from the Exchequer. It would be impossible for us to create such machinery in Britain without huge cost, to create machinery which would distribute sums of money to Irish emigrants living in that country. They are scattered all over it. Some of them are short of cash only for a week or two and at other times they have very big incomes. How are we going to create another civil service in Britain that would follow the Irish wherever they went, to every corner of Britain and Scotland and ensure that whenever they made a claim, that claim would be investigated, the circumstances investigated and the claimant treated equally with other Irish applicants in other parts of Britain?
The fact that this has not been done up to the present, the fact that it was not done by the Fianna Fáil Government over the years or by the Coalition Governments is in itself a prima facie case that there is no means of doing this effectively, of doing it economically from the point of view of the Exchequer and doing it effectively from the point of view of the morale of the emigrants. All Governments have been ready to help anybody in need. The journey is so short between here and Britain that I feel it is better for the Exchequer and for the individuals concerned, if an Irishman or an Irishwoman finds himself or herself in want in Britain or in danger of being in want, to return home where they will be treated as well as anybody else.
I am glad the efforts of the officer in charge of organising Irish people in Britain have been very successful. He has now been at that work for the past three or four years and very good results have come from it.
Deputy Costello made a small point to which it is hardly worth replying. He said that President Sukarno came here to get the Irish Government to go neutralist. That is just nonsense.
Deputy Costello is also anxious that we should make good use of Strasbourg. Deputies' meetings and Ministers' meetings in Strasbourg are as well attended by Irish representatives as they are by representatives of the other countries. All the Parliamentary delegates who go from here are as active as other delegations. I do not think I have ever missed a Minister's meeting. Occasionally, I have spoken in the Assembly.
I do not think it would be a good practice for the representative of a small country always to insist on his right to address the Assembly. It is difficult enough for the President of the Assembly to fit in the list of speakers that are on offer without stretching out the time of the meetings. I think that, by and large, it is reasonable that an Irish Minister should be expected to speak only in cases of real necessity.
Deputy Cosgrave spoke about putting some control on the age at which boys and girls go to Britain. There is an age limit—16 years—under which children are not expected to go without the consent of their parents. I do not think we can go any farther than that.
How do you check?
The emigration officials——
What do they require? They do not require any documents.
That is the law. It would be very difficult to carry out any law designed to keep young Irish people at home when we have such a free and wide Border between ourselves and the part of Ireland that Britain holds on to and when it is so easy to go to Britain. We cannot do it in that way.
It is much better, I think, to encourage these young people, through the schools, through the various Churches and by the speeches of public men to ask parents to encourage their children to stay at home. We know that it is not necessity that drives all of them. It is not want of food, of clothes or of some pocket-money that drives some of these young people away. It is the fact that they are not encouraged to stay at home.
I feel they would be much better off at home until they come to a mature age and then let them make the decision for themselves as to whether they want to go abroad or stay at home. There are a number of factors at work on them and one of the most important, I think, is that people denigrate the standard of life that is available here. They demand that every person here should have the same number of pounds per week as anybody can earn in other countries. In that way, they excite the cupidity of these young people and many of them want to go off to make their fortune in a very short time. When they go there, they find that fortunes are not to be made quite so easily. A number of them who were enticed to go abroad by this type of propaganda seize an opportunity of returning to Ireland or at least a good number of them do from time to time.
I find I have answered the various points that were raised with the exception of one, that is, the question of the publication "Facts About Ireland". I can understand what the Deputies are at in raising a fuss about "Facts About Ireland". They remind me of a pup who burns his nose on the coal and then seizes and shakes an old brogue around the floor. The "Facts About Ireland" is a very handy way for the Deputies to let off their anger and disappointment at the cracks they got on the nose from the people of Kildare and Cork. The truth of the matter is that "Facts About Ireland" had been in circulation for at least six months before the Cork and Kildare by-elections and there was not a word about it.
When the late President Kennedy came here last year, we found we could not get a handy dossier of facts for visiting journalists. We printed large sections of this book “Facts About Ireland” and circulated it widely. There were something like 3,500 copies and it was word for word the same “Facts About Ireland”—and there was not a word about what was in it or out of it until the Opposition lost the two by-elections, not a word. Then they come along here and make a fuss about “Facts About Ireland”, though they had an opportunity of raising the matter earlier.
The Minister is aware that that document was not published generally.
It was widely circulated.
I never saw a copy of it.
The Opposition newspapers all had it.
I did not have it.
If there had been any objection then to the way in which the history section was treated, it could have been looked at. I have no prejudice against Michael Collins— far from it. It was not because of any personal antagonism, or hatred, or any motive of that kind, that his name was left out; it was the same motive as drove the people who produced this Saorstát Éireann Handbook to leave out all these names in the historical section.
Including their own.
Including their own.
That is what we are grumbling about.
In "Facts About Ireland", until you come to the year 1926, de Valera's name is not mentioned. Surely, if we were going to write any sort of detailed history about 1916, the establishment of the Dáil, the Black-and-Tan War, de Valera's name should be put in.
Yes.
Of course, it should, and so should Michael Collins's and Griffith's names be in, if we are writing in detail. But we did not pretend to write any detailed history. We followed the practice that was started in the Handbook of Saorstát Éireann. There is a chapter of 23 pages in this on Irish history and there is not one word about Collins or about Griffith. Of course, we could alter the pattern. I should be very glad, indeed, to think that the time has arrived when we can, without going into detail, acknowledge the work that was done during the Black and Tan War by all the people who later differed. The difficulty, of course, about treatment of the Civil War period is well known, very well known, and we are lucky here, I think, in that we seem to have recovered more quickly from the effects of the Civil War, which was very bitter, than most countries which have suffered in the same way. In many respects there is, I think, a keener memory of the civil war that occurred in the United States of America than there is of the civil war that occurred here.
For my part, I am quite prepared to admit that the men who accepted the Treaty did so in good faith. They thought they were doing the best they could for Ireland. I did not agree with them. I thought that Michael Collins, an excellent soldier and Minister for Finance, an excellent Director of Intelligence, had not evolved to the point of being an excellent statesman. His great error was, in my opinion, that he thought the whole nation could be brought to change its mind as quickly as a small group. He did not realise that, once you get a vast number of people moving in one direction, if you start making changes then, you throw everything into confusion.
Deputy MacEoin said I owe a lot to Collins. I was appointed as the Commandant General of the 4th Northern Division in February, 1921. I am sure Michael Collins, and all the other members of the headquarters staff, had a hand in that. I am sure, if Collins had disagreed, my name would not have gone to Cathal Brugha for appointment. I appreciated the honour that was done to me in entrusting me with that Division. It was no sinecure to be put in charge of that area of the country in February, 1921—no mere ribbon to stick in my coat—and I appreciated the honour.
Deputy MacEoin referred, too, to another point in history at which I was again suggested by Michael Collins for an appointment in charge of a number of Northern Divisions. That was late in 1922. My name was agreed to by both sides. I had been doing my utmost from the time the Treaty was signed to prevent a civil war. I could never see the sense in having a civil war to decide whether or not we would go on fighting Britain. I did not think that was the proper method of deciding.
I thought we should face the situation as we found it. The Treaty having been signed, what were we going to do? My idea was that the Army should keep together. There was a demand in January, 1922, for an Army convention. I opposed it. I opposed it after every member of the Executive had accepted it, and they were all there. Collins was there, and Mulcahy, and MacEoin, and many others. They agreed to having that convention in January. I objected to it. I said at the time that, if we had the convention, we would have an artificial division. There were those who would say that they believed Collins, given time, would ensure that the Constitution would not contain the Oath of Allegiance to the British King, a Governor General, and all the rest of it. There were those who would disagree. My proposal was that we should wait and that we should keep together until we saw the Constitution. By keeping together we could apply moral pressure on those who were framing the Constitution to produce the kind of Constitution Collins said he would produce.
There is no use now trying to throw the Collins cloak over the Fine Gael Party. They are very remote from each other. I was desperately sorry Collins was killed. General Mulcahy has a letter from me which I wrote when Collins was killed. I was then on the other side, having been attacked. General Mulcahy got a letter from me expressing my regret that Collins had died. I felt that Collins was about the only one who was strong enough to change the course upon which the Cumann na nGaedheal people had embarked at the time. I felt he would not continue the Civil War once it became bogged down. I believed he would call the Dáil together and let the members of the Dáil discuss how best to make peace between Irishmen. It was not without some justification that I felt that way.
I was very deeply involved in the Collins-de Valera pact. It had broken down. Harry Boland and the others were negotiating with a view to getting a pact but the negotiations had broken down. I went to Collins. I went to Griffith, to de Valera and to Brugha. I went to Liam Lynch and Rory O'Connor. I went to General Mulcahy and Eoin O'Duffy. To each one of them I appealed that the pact should be accepted. We brought them together. I invited them to a meeting we held in the Oak Room of the Mansion House. Peadar Murney, Pat Lavery and I addressed the meeting, urging the acceptance of this pact election and that we try to work out our differences in a peaceful manner. We did succeed in getting Michael Collins to change his mind and to accept the principle that the number of candidates should be the same proportion as in the case of those who voted on the Treaty issue and that the Republican side and the pro-Treaty side should support the whole list.
That is a long way back into history but what I want to prove is that this allegation that the booklet "Facts About Ireland" was influenced in any way by some hatred or bias I had against Michael Collins is completely and utterly unfounded. I should be very glad indeed that the time had come when we could deal with this question objectively. In recent years we tried —I think Deputy Dillon is aware of this; maybe he is not—to get a combined statement of historical fact agreed upon by the various Parties and we could not get it. I should be very glad if we could get a history of the period from 1916 to 1926 which is the gap in this handbook and if we could have agreement on a factual statement of what happened. It is not possible in a Government publication to have any evaluation of the persons involved, even to have the evaluation of Michael Collins that I have given here today. It must be a factual statement.
One of the omissions I regret in the booklet is the omission of a photograph of the First Dáil Cabinet. The preparation of this publication was going on for three or four years; I had seen it in its proof form and I confess I did not miss the First Dáil at the time. I should like to see in this booklet a photograph of the first Cabinet when the State was established in 1919. The way things are going, we shall probably need to have a new edition printed before long.
Corrections can be made then.
Yes, of course. That correction will be made. That photograph can be inserted, as long as there is agreement, as we got with Deputy MacEoin, that this State was not established just by a few words written in a British Act of Parliament but that it was established here in 1919 by the combined efforts of Irishmen.
One of the excellent things in this booklet is the bibliography. One of the things badly missed both in the Saorstát Éireann handbook and in the other booklet "Ireland—an Introduction" published in 1950 was a bibliography. In the bibliography in "Facts About Ireland", there must be about 15 books which deal in full detail with Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and all the other people of that period. That is our effort at a bibliography but I shall be very glad to get from those interested throughout the country suggestions for a bibliography. We have been trying to evolve a very good one in the Department of External Affairs because when visitors come here, we like to have a list of books to which we can refer them and from which they may pick out what interests them. It was a great want in the Department and one which we filled as best we could with a roneo sheet but it is much better that it should be——
What about Donal O'Sullivan's book on the Irish Free State?
I am talking about these two books.
That has not been included in the bibliography.
As I say, I am quite open to give references to all the books that have been written in this regard. It would be useful to strangers, indeed to Irishmen as well, if they wished to study a little bit of Irish history.
Having heard his remarks, which I was very pleased to hear, may I ask the Minister to use his good offices with his colleague, the Minister for Defence, to see that this year, 1964, Michael Collins will be commemorated with full military honours?
That is a matter about which we should be careful. We have one day of commemoration for all who fought for Ireland, that is, Easter Sunday. If we were to have State functions in commemoration of one side or the other in the Civil War, I do not think it would add anything or add to our harmony. Michael Collins had the status in the Black and Tan War of Director of Intelligence on the Headquarters Staff. There was also Cathal Brugha, who was Minister for Defence and you have a lot of other names of men on the Staff and if we are to have a military ceremony for one, then we should have a number of them. The easiest thing to do is to have the general commemoration of all who died for Ireland, fighting according to their lights, on Easter Sunday.
I should like to raise a specific question with regard to the general Vote. It has been stated in today's newspapers that the Government have received a request for further troops for Cyprus. Have the Government taken any decision on this?
We received the request yesterday morning and the Government have not yet considered it. I would foresee great difficulty in fulfilling it.
May I ask a further question? I do not remember whether the motion on Tuesday specified the number of troops that would go abroad. Is it necessary for the Government to come back to get sanction for an extra number?
No.
On that basis the whole Army could be sent?
Yes.
Yes, it could, nationally.
Question: "That the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration", put, and a division being demanded, it was postponed in accordance with the Order of the Dáil of 14th November, 1963 until 10.15 p.m. on Tuesday next.