I should like to intervene at this stage on a point of personal explanation. Senator MacDermot, in the course of his speech last night, said that on 4th December the feelings of the Cork Examiner were expressed by Senator Crosbie. Senator MacDermot is misinformed. I do not represent the Cork Examiner in this House and I have no authority whatever to express their feelings or views. In this House I represent a body known as the Irish Branch of the Institute of Journalists, from which I was nominated. On the date in question I spoke in that capacity. I consider it is regrettable that the Senator should have made such a statement, even though I feel sure that he made it inadvertently.
Censorship and Constitutional Rights—Motion (Resumed).
Debate resumed on motion in the names of Senators MacDermot and Alton, and amendment in the name of Seanadóir Mac Fhionnlaoich.
I am extremely sorry if I misrepresented the Senator.
I shall endeavour not to tax the patience of the House too much, although I was just thinking that I have a right to make three speeches. I was prepared to speak on Wednesday of last week; I was prepared to speak last night, and I was prepared to speak half an hour ago, but all the arrangements broke down. Being, like Senator Madden, a Limerick man, I take broken treaties very lightly. I will take one remark made by the Minister as my text, and I shall proceed from that. Last night the Minister said that Senator MacDermot wants to go to war, and that is the reason he wants to avoid censorship. I will let Senator MacDermot explain and justify the motives that made him move this motion, but I can assure the House and the Minister that no such motives lay behind my action in seconding the motion.
What I want—and I am speaking for myself and many people who think with me—is knowledge, light on the present situation. That is a simple motive, and I shall now endeavour to give some reasons for it. I will put before you with all sincerity the reason for my action, although I may not be able to put it before you with the amount of conviction I fain would attain. In the debate last December I remarked that I was fully conscious of the heavy responsibilities, the terrible responsibilities, that lay on the Minister. I pointed out that I realised clearly that the censor's task is a difficult one, and I admitted that, in times like the present, censorship is necessary, and that we have to forego to some extent the freedom of speech that the Constitution guarantees to us. While I made these admissions, I gave it as my impression, my sincere impression, that the censorship in this country was being exercised too rigorously, and that it would be useful for both the Minister and the Department that controls the censorship, to have some precise limits, and to consider very carefully if they should not define these limits.
The motion before the House is an attempt, possibly not phrased as wisely and as cleverly as some cleverer and wiser heads could phrase it, to define and to find such limits, to beat the bounds, as it were, of the regions of censorship. Censorship, I admit, is necessary, and Ministers may perhaps rightly, under certain conditions and restrictions, hold it to be a good thing but we can have too much of a good thing. There are poisons that, in moderation, are excellent tonics and extremely useful, but they are things of which "a little more than a little is by much too much." They have to be circumscribed and cut down. Particularly in the case of censorship, it is hard to find the happy mean between too much and too little publicity. It is just one of those things in which virtue lies rather in erring towards the too much than towards the too little. Undoubtedly there is need for censorship. Nobody will deny that; but there are many, far more perhaps than the Minister realises, who think that the censorship is too rigorous, too penetrating, and that it is unwisely, because unnecessarily, exercised in some departments.
I do not intend to go into all the examples that Senator MacDermot brought before the House. They were attested and fully documented. I shall just touch in outline the department that he mentioned—the censorship of newspapers. It is obvious to my inexpert eye that there has been serious censorship at times of editorials. The editor at times is cut off abruptly after an introductory sentence. There is possibly a quotation, even in German, and down comes the hatchet and off goes his head. Again you read on and you find arguments that are inconsecutive, often ending in bathos or some fatuous platitude. However, I shall leave editors to look after themselves.
Again I have been struck by the extraordinary manner in which censorship in regard to pictures is exercised. I am not a great visitor to the pictures but occasionally I go round the picture houses. I have seen the news films— I think that is what they are called— here and in other places, and what struck me here was the paucity of depicted events—the absolute stupidity of some of the pictures and then the very ordinary pictures, of football matches, race meetings and gatherings of that kind which are shown. The Minister for Supplies said, I think, on Saturday night, that there are some amongst us yet who speak and act as if the war were being fought on another planet instead of in the immediate vicinity of our shores. Surely it is pictures like these, and the suppression of news such as I have indicated that give rise to such a view of the present circumstances. People think that the world is absolutely at peace, trotting on in its old jog-trot way, that there is nothing to trouble about other than who won such a football match or whose was the champion dog at a particular show. The censorship I think is responsible to some considerable degree for this false impression which I admit is current and to which the Minister for Supplies drew our attention.
There is one aspect of censorship to which I think Senator MacDermot did not animadvert. That is the censorship of private correspondence. I have heard a number of protests in regard to that matter and I have been asked to bring the Minister's attention to it. It has aroused more indignation and more resentment than any other feature of censorship—indignation and resentment that in my opinion are justified because of this intrusion into what, very often, is merely a family colloquy. I could give instances. You have letters between father and son, between mother and daughter or between brother and brother in which the news that is being censored is, as far as I can see, of no military importance. It is certainly not inciting sedition or aimed at upsetting our Government. I think there has been too much of that type of censorship. It is certainly resented and bitterly resented. It reminds me of what I have read of the early days of history, of the spies and informers that used to go round after the people in the street, in the bad old days in Greece when the people were governed by tyrants. Senator Tierney could tell us all about that. These spies and informers were the tyrants' eyes and ears—trying to catch whispers at the corners, trying to discover the enemies of the autocrat in every place. It is like what happens in savage countries where the king of some Zulu tribe employs his witch doctors to go and smell out treason. That is going too far.
A person has a right to express his private opinion provided it does not lead to lawlessness, the upsetting of the Government or the betrayal of the nation. He has a right to express his opinion in a letter to a relative or to an intimate friend. A man has a right to his conscience. That form of censorship really is—and is regarded as— intolerable. The consequence of this indiscriminate censorship—in so much as it is unnecessary—is unpleasant. Politically and socially it is bad. It is certainly undemocratic. Again, perhaps the Minister for Supplies could have made a better speech here on this subject than I.
It would not be published if he did.
I will quote the first paragraph—or more if the House desires—of the speech of the Minister for Supplies in Dublin on Saturday last: "A good Press and a free Press is essential to the conduct of a democracy. Other forms of government might be possible without it, but a democracy is not. For the functioning of a democratic State it is essential that there should exist some medium for the dissemination of information— reliable information—concerning public affairs and for the ventilation of opinions." He made the restriction, of course, that in war time you must not betray your country by the betrayal of military secrets whether they be your own or another's. He says that "in times of peace it has to be restricted, too, by the law relating to treason, libel and the like, but, normally speaking, it is the function of the Press to give the people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".
I think he has stated that democratic principle clearly and concisely and better, perhaps, than I could state it; but he is not the only person who has discovered it. Since the beginning of democracy, since the democratic state was first on the earth, that opinion has been known and recognised. "No greater disaster can happen to free men than to be deprived of free speech." That was Demosthenes and, therefore, supported by Demosthenes and by the Minister for Supplies, I do protest and state that this excessive censorship is really undemocratic. It is undermining the democratic state. Socially, psychologically, it is bad. As I have said before, it creates an atmosphere of suspense and suspicion. A nervous fear is created that things are really worse because we do not see them as they are enveloped in the darkness. One thinks that what is hidden from us is certainly more alarming than the little glimpses we get at the truth. For those half truths that are current there are many more lies and wild rumours that could be killed and should be killed.
When the truth is revealed suddenly—as sometimes it is—it gives a terrific shock. The Minister for Supplies revealed it in that way when he told us that nine Irish ships had been sunk when conveying necessary stores to this country. People were wondering whether many other things of that sort had taken place. There is a grave psychological effect in the suppression of news. It is even worse than the actual economic loss of our larder and other stores. These driblets of fact, these glimmers of light, make the darkness in which we are living more evident. It would have been wiser, I suggest, for the Government to take the people more into their confidence. Confidence begets confidence. We have got a people behind us who are utterly and fundamentally Irish and they are not going to betray one another and it will pay to put the facts before them. We are suffering from this war of nerves— this nervenkrieg—in this unhealthy atmosphere of rumour and half truths. Half truths are the worst kind of lies.
I realise that there is a great temptation to indulge in wholesale censorship. I will admit that if I were Minister I probably would yield to it. Of course, one assumes that one would be a beneficent tyrant if one occupied the position oneself. I cannot look at it in that personal way, however. There is the temptation: there is no doubt it saves the Department and the Government from trouble, from interference within the State and from remonstrance from without, and it produces a nice quietude in which they can work. They need quietude during these days when the strain of this world war affects even this neutral State of ours, but I think that quietude is unhealthy and unreal. The silence that is produced by force is undesirable. It is not synonymous with acquiescence when a lot of people are afraid to speak and are forbidden to speak and there is always the undercurrent of resentment, a ferment of disapprobation and suspicion. Resentment and hostility show the folly and the failure of such methods of suppression of public opinion and private opinion.
It has been tried again and again. Look at the history of Greece, of France or of this country. It leads to trouble. I do not think we are on the way to such trouble here. I do not want to exaggerate in any way, but I say that it is an unhealthy policy. We are not going to blaze out into revolution as happened in other countries. But the path of repression is an undesirable one and when you start walking along it you are inclined to go further and further. I would call for a slowing down in that journey. Perhaps I am speaking too much in metaphor. I am trying to put general truths as strongly and as vigorously as I can before you. It seems to me that this excessive censorship is a form of propaganda. Is it not the distortion of truth? It is. We get a mental blackout; we cannot see where we are or whither we are going. Naturally, it is against moral judgement when you are not allowed to say or to think what is right or what is wrong. We are not allowed to condemn, certainly not openly, certain actions which we know are sins against the spirit.
Senator MacDermot talked of the people being led in blinkers, but at times it seems to me that that metaphor is too mild; we are blindfold. Restriction of the freedom of speech is recognised by the Constitution when it is in the interest of morality, but the present restrictions, I maintain, are sometimes rather in the direction of undermining morality and sapping moral judgment by preventing its exercise. Most of all. I should like to say again, this interference with private correspondence is very bad—it is really a conversation between two people, written in black and white.
It is necessary, I think, for us here to diminish this censorship. It is necessary for us to know a little more than we are let know, for the sake of soothing our nerves, in order that we may have confidence in ourselves and have even more confidence in our Government. I have confidence, personally, but I want to be able to give reasons for the faith that is in me. Most of all, I think it is necessary for our young people—and I have something to do with them—to have knowledge, to know what is happening, and to have a right to think about and discuss what is being done and what should be done. They, even more than we older people, require free speech and plain speech, "plain speech with plain folk and plain words for false things." The old order is gone. There is no doubt about that. Perhaps I may quote from another address of Cardinal Hinsley, to which I think no word of reference was made in any of our papers. It is a splendid address, magnificent in language, and, apart from propaganda dealing with the English side, it is a fine, elevating, moral address. He remarks:
"There is a general agreement that the Europe of to-morrow will be, and ought to be, different from the Europe of yesterday. Something new, better, more advanced organically, more sound, freer and stronger, must take the place of what existed in the past. There must be a new order. The old order has not brought happiness and peace, and men are right in demanding order."
And so he leads up to his point, and his hope and prayer, that a bond of peace may be discovered by the coming generation, a bond of peace that will mean a re-founding—if I may express it thus; I am not a theologian— of Christianity. This world is going to be, and is, a broken-down and shattered world and it will have to be rebuilt, and it has to be rebuilt by the generation that is rising now. Let us hope that they will succeed in doing it and that they will be able to face the problems that we have been unable to solve, that they will be able to get rid of the evils that we have been content to palliate—these evils, social and political—so that we may get a real society of free men.
We have tried all sorts of alternatives in looking for light. We have seen doctrines—of enlightened self-interest, the League of Nations, collective security, and all the rest of it—put before the heterogeneous mass of humanity, and found by them unsatisfactory, inacceptable. We have to have almost a re-creation of civilisation and, just as in the original creation the first act was light—we want light. The younger people want to know what is happening, and to know what they have to do—they want light, and that is where I think the censorship is sinning. It is darkening our knowledge. Let us give the coming generation this light that they need.
I do not wish to seem pedantic, but at the risk of seeming so I would point out that the problems we have to face to-day existed also in days of old, and that the man who was reputed the wisest man in ancient Greece made a plea for freedom of speech and knowledge for younger people. He said that to take freedom of speech from the young was, as it were, to take the sun out of the sky. Well, the young people of to-day do want, even more than the old people, knowledge and unfettered speech. They will, I hope, be able to correct the mistakes we made—our many mistakes, blunders and failures. So, let them have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even with the limitations that, as I say, we have tried, perhaps ineffectively, to specify in the motion.
As for ourselves and our position in this war, I really do not want to speak now, because I do not know enough. I know that we are, perhaps, too weak, and that at present we are trying to assert certain rights, such as the right of neutrality, and so on. Again, I suggest that the Minister for Supplies should have made this speech, and I am falling back upon him again. In the course of the speech from which I quoted, he said:
"We in this country have a right to be neutral in this conflict if we so decide. We have a right to expect that the belligerents will take care to ensure that, of the thousands of bombs falling from the skies around us, none will fall upon our territory. We have a right to expect that neutral ships, carrying cargoes to our ports, will not be interfered with on the high seas. We have thousands of rights, but rights alone are poor protection for small States when great Empires go to war."
If the Senator agrees with that, he should not have seconded the principle of Senator MacDermot's speech.
Senator McEllin can develop that later on. I assure him that I will not be long.
Let me alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while my lips are dumb.
At any rate, neutrality is forced upon us but, if I may say it again, I think neutrality is a poor ship to be embarked upon. I think that if any of those people want to attack us, our neutrality would keep the bombs off us just about as effectively as an umbrella. We have to take that attitude. One cannot assert that it is a heroic attitude. To some, it may seem an ignominious one, but the present time is not the time to pass judgement upon it. History will do so. Years ago, at a time when there was a lot of political trouble and the world was darkening for the great world war —I think it was in 1912—I remember reading a very striking article entitled: "What will posterity say of us?" The writer was throwing himself mentally into the future and taking a long view, trying to look at things through a historical perspective, if I might quote his words, sub specie æternitatis. He was passing judgement on his contemporaries for their failure to see what were the most exigent and urgent social problems of the day and their failure to find solutions. I thought of that article the other night. The title question stands: “What will posterity say of us?” I wonder what will posterity say of us, and of what we have done? Will they understand, will they sympathise, will they approve? Will they say we have done well? God grant that they will not say that we have sacrificed the right for the expedient. That certainly would not be in keeping with the history of this country.
It is difficult to know precisely what to say about this motion, or whether to say anything at all about it. It has given rise to considerable discussion on history and on our neutrality. I do not propose to discuss our neutrality at all. The motion itself is one about which if there was a division it would be difficult to make up one's mind. It offers in paragraphs (1) and (2) statements about fundamental constitutional rights, and certain other rights, with which I think we would be all, including the Minister, in fair agreement. It goes on to state that the Press Censorship ought not to exclude matter from publication except upon four named grounds. On the last occasion this matter was debated here I asked if the Minister could give us an indication of the principles upon which the censorship was administered, to tell us what were the relations between the various functionaries who dealt with the matter and the Minister, to his credit, did endeavour to answer that question.
Speaking from the practical point of view I fail to see how we could avoid a censorship in our present situation, and without going into general principles as to what is good for the young or the old, that seems to me to be something which is inescapable. In our present circumstances a form of censorship is necessary. What form should it take? The Minister seemed to imply yesterday evening that because the Dáil and the Seanad had given powers of censorship there was no option but to approve of the Minister's administration of the censorship. That, I think, is a view which, on reflection, he would abandon.
I did not say that. I said that censorship should be subject to review by the Dáil.
Mr. Hayes
I suggest that the Minister has abandoned that position. Should we express ourselves this evening as being in favour of censorship, agreeing on certain grounds that expression of opinion would be really of no value unless we could insert these conditions into an Act of Parliament? If I were Minister I would not accept that particular scheme. That being so, I do not see how I can support it now. If the grounds for censorship be set forth under four heads then these would become the only grounds upon which the censor could proceed. They would be exclusive. That is a well-known principle which governs legislation and the interpretation of it. The censor and the Minister would be precluded from censoring under any heads other than those mentioned in the statute. That would result, particularly in a country of alert intelligent people like ourselves, in the censorship being unworkable, and you might possibly have much litigation. The present Government has passed a great deal of legislation for the removal of doubts, and I am afraid if they gave reasons why they censored things in an Act they would put in so many reasons that it would not be possible to say or to write anything at all. Therefore, as a practical person, accepting that we must have censorship, this particular motion is not one which I could support.
What, therefore, should one require in censorship? There must be vigilance on the part of both Houses of Parliament, and courage on the part of the people who feel they are aggrieved with the censorship itself. That censorship should be enlightened and be run by persons of calm and equable temperament, with deep knowledge, with many contacts, with common sense and above all, with a sense of humour. I would not demand that a Minister in charge of censorship should be impartial. I do not think he could be. That is simply to demand a quality which you are not likely to find in a Minister particularly a Minister in a Party Government. I do not use the word "Party" in any but a descriptive sense as applied to the present Government. That is the kind of censorship we ought to have if it is to be satisfactory and if people are to put up with the manifest inconveniences of the censorship. I feel that that is precisely what we have not got. The Minister yesterday evening showed that he is everything but a person with a calm and equable temper. I think he is narrow. I think he is biassed and I think among colleagues who are not mealy-mouthed he is a person who uses the strongest language and the most thoughtless words on occasions. I think it is very unsuitable that a Minister with these particular qualities should be in charge of censorship. For example, it is quite obvious that when the Minister sees Senator MacDermot— I do not find the Senator very soothing myself at all times—he sees him in British uniform and immediately finds himself back in 1921. When he sees Senator Sir John Keane he sees generations of landlords.
If he was in a uniform he would not look half so bad no matter what uniform it was.
Mr. Hayes
Thanks be to God the Fianna Fáil Party has not appointed Senator McEllin as censor. We are bad enough as we are. At any rate I think the Minister is entirely biassed and is entirely foolish in his outlook about certain people. For example, I do not know that I would speak at all but for a particular incident. Senator MacDermot quoted a leading article in the Irish Independent, dealing with the censorship, which was suppressed. It was, as I heard it, rather mild, but was entirely suppressed by the Minister.
When the Minister was making a reply to that, almost the first thing he said was that the Irish Independent had published another leading article in 1916. Therefore, as I pointed out to him at once, it would appear that he is punishing the Irish Independent in 1941 for something which the Irish Independent did in 1916, of which he did not approve, and of which, being closer to the facts myself, I did not approve either. Surely that is an outlook on a matter such as the censorship which shows that he is entirely unfitted for the post, and that his attitude is entirely wrong.
Having said that yesterday evening, we look at this morning's newspapers and we find that that particular statement of the Minister's is not reported at all. Was it censored? I am perfectly certain it was. In other words, the Minister can make an obvious blunder, showing himself in his real colours in this House, and the reports of this House, as published in the newspapers, can then be censored so as to cover up the Minister's blunder. That is a pretty shameless abuse of the power of censorship in a matter which does not concern our neutrality, our national prestige, or any of the matters which we all ought to have at heart, and about which we ought all to be concerned at this very difficult moment.
Similarly, his first reaction to Senator MacDermot's motion was that Senator MacDermot once told the Dáil —I forget the incident myself—that the Dáil ought not to allow themselves to behave as gutter-snipes. I heard the Minister over and over again in the Dáil, and I think a great many gutter-snipes, the great majority of them, would be ashamed of the language which I heard the Minister using. Yet, he is the person who is to judge what language is to be used. That is an absurd situation. Surely, when he says that the Dáil passed a law giving power of censorship to the Government, they did not approve in advance of everything that would be done, and there certainly is necessity for review. Perhaps I am right in interpreting the Minister as being rather in favour of some kind of Parliamentary committee. I forget the exact words he used yesterday evening, but I think he said he was prepared to show to one Senator, or five or six Senators if they wished, exactly what happened in particular cases.
On the last occasion when I raised a particular case with him, he told us that his policy was to keep down the temperature. What happened in that particular instance was that at a meeting the speakers gave utterance to a very common and peculiarly false piece of Fianna Fáil propaganda, namely, that Partition was the result of the Treaty in 1921. A letter was written refuting that lie by the statement that the Treaty was made in December, 1921, after Partition had become an Act and a fact. That was not allowed to be published. So that, apparently, a particular thing can be said, but the answer will not be allowed.
That is not the way in which the Minister treats papers which support himself. Reference was made by Senator Fitzgerald yesterday to a paper called The Nationalist and Leinster Times, published, I think, in Carlow. Senator Fitzgerald quoted from a particular issue of that paper, the issue of December 28th, in which, subsequent to a broadcast by the Taoiseach, in which he stated very clearly that no demand had been made upon him for the Ports, was printed a letter stating that such a demand had been made. Now, the Minister told Senator Fitzgerald by way of intervention yesterday that that matter was being got after. I should like to point out that, from the 7th December up to the 4th January, matter which by no means could be considered calm, neutral comment on the war was allowed week after week in this newspaper, which is a frantic supporter of the Government. For example, in the issue of 7th December we have the statement:
"And we, here in Ireland, have heard of the harrowing cries of the unfortunate people of Coventry, Bristol, Liverpool, London, Southampton, and the many other important British cities which, if they are not completely destroyed, have suffered havoc a thousandfold more serious than the Press of Great Britain or its news agencies would have us know."
That kind of thing is allowed. But comments from a member of the Irish Hierarchy upon the "accursed bombers" who came and bombed us at Terenure and the South Circular Road are not allowed. So that you keep the temperature down when dealing with a member of the Hierarchy, but when dealing with a Fianna Fáil scribe in Carlow you do not keep the temperature down. I have here issues of that paper from the 7th December to 4th January, and each of them is worse than the other; each one is certainly tending to give a particular view and a very biased view of situations to our people.
As I am on this point of unsuitability, the Minister admitted on the last occasion that he had compelled the Irish Times to take the lion and the unicorn out of a photograph. Did anybody ever hear such an extraordinary example of what I can call nothing else but an inferiority complex? The lion and the unicorn on the Bank of Ireland are a symbol of a victory that the Irish people won when they made the Treaty—the first political victory the native Irish ever won, it might be said, and which some people had not got the sense to see. If the Taoiseach, the Minister for the Co-Ordination of Defensive Measures, the Minister for Defence, the leader of the Fine Gael Party, and the leader of the Labour Party sit on a platform in College Green with Irish soldiers behind them, Irish police and an Irish crowd before them, and the Irish flag over them, in the presence of the lion and the unicorn, that is not anything to which we ought to object, but is something about which we ought to be proud. If the Minister is so buried in obscurantism and futility of that kind that he feels we ought to have the lion and the unicorn taken out, all I can say is that he must make a very hopeless censor indeed, because nothing but an inferiority complex would make him object.
As I am on this matter of leading articles, might I give a further example? The Minister for Supplies spoke on Saturday night at great length. I am subject to correction on this, but I have the feeling that if the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures had got his own way he would have censored the Minister for Supplies very considerably, but apparently he did not. The Minister stated that we ought to have a free Press. The Irish Independent, having got that report, on Monday wrote a leading article headed “A Minister on Censorship.” It is very brief and I will take the opportunity to read the whole of it. It is mainly a quotation from the Minister. The leading article said:
"Everybody engaged in the production of newspapers will read with extraordinary interest the following observations by Mr. Lemass, Minister for Supplies, at the dinner of the Institute of Journalists on Saturday night."
Then follows a quotation from the speech of the Minister for Supplies:
"That function (the function of the Press) had to be restricted ... in times of war by restrictions upon the publication of information of military importance without authority, or, by confining the brick-throwing activities of journalists to their own Government because other Governments might not like it.
"A free Press and a good Press was essential to the conduct of a democracy."
That is said without comment and that was not allowed to be published. It is a matter of great importance, I think.
I quoted these words.
The Senator is not the Irish Independent. The Senator did not write a leading article in 1916.
The speech of the Minister for Supplies was published in extenso.
Why should not the newspaper be allowed to say: "This is an extract"?
Why did not the Senator ask that before I spoke? If I am allowed to speak again I will answer it.
We cannot conduct debates on the principle of allowing the Minister the last word. I do not mind if the Minister speaks again.
I do not mind who has the last word. The Senator is asking me a question.
That was a rhetorical question.
Whether it was or not, I do not know what the reason is, except that the Minister, I think, indicated yesterday that no comment of any kind on the censorship will be allowed. I shall let the Minister answer that now. Is that the position —that no comment of any kind, even of this oblique kind by quotation, will be allowed?
I will deal with that later on if I am allowed.
I do not think there is any objection to the Minister being put in the position that he must argue his case in the Press. It is the essence of the kind of Government that we have, or the essence of the kind of Government that we hope to have. The Minister should have answered the questions and should have argued his case. I think it is a very foolish and narrow-minded attitude for him to prevent anything of this kind appearing in the newspapers. There is no comment at all, but simply the Minister exercising power and getting the best of everything.
Now, may I make one other point with regard to the Irish language? It is to the Minister's credit that he has learned quite a good deal of it. When Bardia fell—I referred to this before— the heading the Irish Press gave was “Bardia i seilbh na nGall”. “Gall” is a word which, in Irish, means “foreigner”, once applied to the Norsemen, and, generally, applied to what my friend Senator MacFhionnlaoich would call “clann na bplanndóirí”—“the planters' breed”. It might be freely translated, perhaps, “Bardia now in the hands of the base, brutal and bloody Saxon”. Similarly, an Irish Press placard appeared in the following terms in the Gaeltacht—so I have been told by a friend of mine who lives in the Gaeltacht—“Long eile le Gallaibh ag tón puill”—“Another British ship lost, thanks be to God”. I do not know whether that arises from ignorance or from what Senator Fitzgerald would call tendentiousness, but in any event there it is.
Lack of space, I would say.
I do not think so. I do not think the Minister is simple. I have said that he was narrow-minded and had an inferiority complex, but I do not think he is simple. In fact, I am perfectly sure he is not simple, although he did fall rather badly, and showed his hand about the Irish Independent. Of course he has the whip hand of the whole matter, and can keep it from being published. I do not think that our neutrality comes into this debate at all, except that Ministers, when they choose to speak or use the radio, are allowed to say what they please, and it is not possible, very often, to put the other side.
They have the habit of talking always about two belligerents, and one wonders whether they are always putting the case quite fairly. I very much doubt it. But, whatever our military preparedness for war may be, and whatever our economic position may be, there can be very little doubt that if you pursue a particular line of censorship and prevent certain types of intelligent and rational discussion, then you are going to make our mental equipment for meeting invasion, if it does come, very bad indeed. I put that quite seriously to the Minister. I am not putting that as a theory, nor as a matter of abstract justice, that the people ought to be allowed to hear these views. I disagree entirely with Senator Alton that we must have the whole truth, because I do not think the whole truth is ascertainable, except a certain amount, and from sources about which Senator Alton and I would probably not be in agreement. What I do think is that this motion is not workable. We must have censorship. I do not think it is practicable to put into an Act of Parliament all the grounds upon which censorship should be exercised, and only these grounds. Therefore, the only remedy that I see is to have an enlightened censorship, and that, it would appear to me from the declarations of the Minister and from the conduct of the Minister so far in the matter, we have not got. The remedy for that is obvious, but perhaps, like the motion, it is not practicable at the moment.
In rising to speak on this motion I want it to be understood that what I have to say represents my own point of view only, and, consequently, I suppose I will sally forth into my usual indiscretions.
What you say will not appear in the morning. The Minister will make that right.
This matter of censorship is not an easy one. It is a modern innovation. From what I can see, not only in this country but in other countries, censorship has been spewed upon by the Press, using all the powers they possess in their own interests.
I am not referring to Ireland only, but to what has happened in England and in other countries. The Press, in those countries, have talked about the audacity of anybody setting up any authority to question what they ought to do. The thing got into such a hopeless mess in the neighbouring country that the censorship administration led to all sorts of changes. The whole paraphernalia of censorship was changed from top to bottom. Even Ministers were changed. I think that happened at least half a dozen times. A lot of hubbub has been created here about the abuse of the censorship. I wonder who is interested in this censorship? What percentage of our people are interested in what is, or what is not, published at the present time, and especially since the emergency arose? It is not so long since many people in the country only saw a daily newspaper once a month. Even to-day, in many of our country villages, the people only get the weekly newspaper on a Sunday. I suppose it is true to say of the daily papers published in this country that their biggest sales would be in the cities of Dublin and Cork. That being so, why all this talk and anxiety about censorship? It does not affect the general body of the people in the country.
I have a fair idea as to why we are having a repetition of debates on the question of censorship here. We had a debate on censorship a couple of weeks ago. We have a repetition of it these days as if it were something that vitally affected the people. I think I have a fair idea as to why we are having all this discussion: that it is due to a savage greed for sensationalism in the public Press on the part of Senator MacDermot: that he had the ingenious idea that this was something the Press would jump at and would use him in their own personal interest. In the newspapers this morning we had big black headlines as to what was said here yesterday about the censorship of the Press. Was it the censorship of the Press that the Senator was interested in, or was he simply using this censorship business to put across some of the vilest points of view to insult the most intimate national sentiments of the people?
He talked about rifles and neutrality, and about everything under the sun except the real genuine difficulties that affect correspondents and editors under existing conditions. We all know perfectly well that editors have a deuce of a time to contend with in trying to get out papers. We are perfectly well aware of that. I should say that they are carrying on particularly well in the circumstances, but they know themselves, they are human beings and they have their families to consider, that what is being done is in the best national interests, and for the security of the people of the country. If the Irish censorship is compared with that of other countries, I am not too sure but that the hard work, sense of fair play and honesty and the co-operation to which effect is sought to be given there would show a far higher standard than would be found amongst any of these so-called efficiency experts in the censorship offices of other countries. These people must get a little fair play, too. This continual attacking to satisfy the desire for sensationalism of one particular individual and a few of his colleagues is not fair.
I happen to be a constant reader of the Irish Times, and I remember reading, shortly after the outbreak of the war, an article in it which impressed me very much. It spoke of the fine spirit in which we were facing our position generally, and, in that article, after the censorship system had been put into operation, the writer pointed out that, in a small country like this, it was only right and proper that we should be more careful and cautious in respect of our press censorship than bigger countries. That is perfectly true and it is a perfectly human viewpoint. It showed the right spirit at the right time, but I hope that we Irish people are not again showing that typical characteristic, for which we have been noted in the past, of being full of enthusiasm for the time being, but, as things jog along, of beginning to forget our good resolutions made earlier. That must not be, because we have a duty and a responsibility. We have taken certain decisions in full realisation of all the circumstances affecting this little country of ours, and, although the censorship may not be everything that newspaper editors would like it to be, it is too bad that a minority should make use of them and of Parliament in addition, in order to bolster up their own views with regard to our relationships with other countries. Senator Hayes talked a lot and showed a certain amount of temper.
Was I not very nice, Sir? I did not show any temper. The Senator must have thought I had gone away.
He showed some temper with regard to something relating to an article published by the Irish Independent in 1916. He said he agreed with it and, if he did, I do not know what he is talking about.
Agreed with what?
He agreed that what was published in 1916 was to be condemned, but, still, he disagreed with the Minister because he happened to bring it in by accident.
A bad accident.
The fact remains that a great part of the Senator's argument was, with all due respect, much ado about nothing. There was nothing in anything the Senator, or any of the other Senators, raised that fundamentally affected the people in their workaday lives. There is not at present any aspect of life, either in public or by the firesides of the people, which is not affected in some way or other. We are all thrown out of our stride in the carrying out of our duties to-day. That position will be worse, but we will try to meet it and get over the difficulties as best we can. There is no reason why the newspaper editors or Press proprietors should represent the be-all and end-all of everything, or why they should have the power to voice grievances while we all have grievances which we cannot voice. That is an injustice to the public and it represents the other side of the picture. There has to be give and take in this matter in the unfortunate world in which we find ourselves to-day, and if we get hard knocks or jolts from time to time we shall have to take them in the spirit that they might be a lot worse. If we are not prepared to do that, there is no future for this country, and the sooner we make up our minds as to how we will take these jolts and how to season and harden ourselves to receive them, the better it will be for us, because if we do not do so, we will not be able to take the hard knocks when they come.
With regard to Senator MacDermot's speech yesterday, I do not think that any Parliament in any country of our size in Europe had to face such a mentality as that which was behind that speech. The speech flouted the wishes of 99 per cent. of the people, and it consisted of nagging and irritating points of view, brought up deliberately to irritate the public mind, if he succeeded in getting them published.
That shows that we are still a democracy, does it not? It is all to our credit.
This democracy business can be overdone, too. Democracy, overdone, can be a great menace, and it is the abuse of democracy that has the world in its present position.
Then the Senator is a totalitarian?
I am not, and I shall never be, while I have brawn left in me to resist. I believe in free speech, but I do not believe in people flouting the wishes of 99 per cent. of the people. It is an abuse of democracy for Senator MacDermot to go out deliberately to say the most irritating things that his warped brain could devise. He spoke about our not being able to have this or that unless we got facilities from somebody else, and so on. I appreciate any assistance we get from anybody, but I cannot understand a man saying deliberately, in the cause of democracy, the irritating things he said, knowing perfectly well that the more irritating his remarks, the more publicity and sensationalism they would evoke.
He only said it to annoy you because he knows it teases you.
That is what I am trying to say. I may not have a sufficient vocabulary to make it clear, but I am doing the best I can.
Professors have their uses as well as their abuses.
I will give an example of what we are up against. Senator MacDermot is a sort of correspondent. He will not leave it to the man who wants the job of correspondent for a livelihood. He has it as a pastime, and he would like to get a lot of jobs to get the other fellow out. In December, 1940, the Senator wrote a nice, short little squib and sent it over there. Whether the censorship was in operation or not, he was free enough to write this sort of story: "A few individual members of the Seanad have urged participation in the war, but such faint prospect as they might have had of influencing public opinion has long since been extinguished by the Press censorship." Just imagine the audacity of that! The fellow thinks he has such persuasive powers he would be able to influence the people, if it were not for these horrible fellows with horns in the Censorship Office, so that they would participate in the war. The merits of the man's case have been made on the basis——
Leas-Chathaoirleach
The Senator should refer to the member of the House in question as "Senator", for once in a way.
Certainly. The Senator's principal object in life, for some time past, has been to see this country participate in the war. It is an extraordinary thing that he should be so interested in that particular aspect of life because all his own actions run contrary to that point of view. I do not want to be nasty. It affects me more to abuse people than it does the person interested.
Be easy on yourself.
We have all the evidence that everything that is dear to the Senator, materially and otherwise, has been placed 3,000 miles from the war zone. It is all very well sneering at a point of view of that sort. The Senator showed good foresight——
Leas-Chathaoirleach
That has nothing to do with the subject of this debate.
We have to get at the motive.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
The motive stated by the Senator is personal and should not be brought into the debate. The Senator should return to discussion of the motion.
I accept the ruling of the Chair, although it is hard to accept it because we have to get at the underlying principle of all the irritating things said here. Out of respect for the Chair, however, I desist. There should be a certain amount of pathos for the unfortunate position, if you like, in which this little island finds itself. We are a small island, rather sparsely populated, and our participation in such a conflagration as is now proceeding could not possibly affect matters one way or the other. We have not enjoyed self-government for long in this old country. Our institutions are new and any machinery of that sort is always brittle in spots, because of its newness, and can be very vulnerable. People may be inclined to abuse these institutions and this machinery, but we must be careful to do our best to preserve them. We want nothing from anybody except the right to determine our own way of life. Above all, we want inside the country to try to get some fundamental principle on which to work for the betterment and preservation of this old country. Irritating speeches such as we had to listen to yesterday are not going to improve the situation. They may create a lot of misunderstanding.
We are ready for any emergency with which we may be faced. These institutions mean everything to us. With the unanimity we have to-day, we are going to be in a stronger position to work in the future. The people have made up their minds, no matter what outsiders may think about us, that, on this question, fight they will and surrender they will not. We have known in the past what a foreign Power can do to a race. That knowledge is intimate to the present generation. It is recent history and, with personal experience on the part of the people, resistance would be far greater here than it would in any country of equal size. These motions merely afford an opportunity for surface talk by a lot of people who want to keep in the news. They are far removed from the fundamental principles on which the people are working and thinking to-day. We are bound to survive because the mentality behind the speech made by Senator MacDermot is not representative of 1 per cent. of the Irish people.
When I finish, I hope I shall not be accused of any intention to annoy, because the last speaker, who is rather sensitive, thinks that, when people speak contrary to his rather extreme point of view, their intention is only to annoy. I can assure him that some of us feel conscientiously about this matter and do not speak for notoriety. There is one rather limited and definite aspect of this matter with which I should like the Minister to deal. I understand that individuals are not allowed, in correspondence, freely to express their opinions to one another, however discreet they may be. I refer, of course, to overseas correspondence and not to internal correspondence, on which there is no censorship. Presumably, I can say what I like to my correspondent at home but, where the correspondence comes within the purview of the censor, expressions of individual opinion are forbidden. I know of a certain individual whose letters were caught in the censorship and who was brought before the censor and warned that he was liable to very severe penalties for writing as he did. I take it the Minister is exercising the power with good reason but I should like to know the reason why individual expressions of opinion are forbidden. As far as I know, they are not written to people of any influence. They are just written to personal friends.
Then I would like to know on what principle correspondence is held because my friend who was hailed before the censor was shown three or four letters that had been held up in correspondence. I would like to ask the Minister on what principle that is worked. If letters are held up is there any period for which they are held or is any intimation given to the writers that they are being held up? There may be an indiscreet sentence in a letter which would cause it to be held up but that letter might be of personal or family importance and it might be very serious for the letter not to arrive. I do think in all reason that when letters are stopped the writer should be informed as soon as possible that the letter has been stopped so that he may not be upset by the non-delivery of a letter that might be of great family importance.
The object of this motion is to get guidance, and I would like to ask the Minister for guidance on a wider point of principle. I take it we have still got the rights of free men, that Parliamentary institutions are still functioning, and that anybody in Parliament has the right to advocate any change of policy. We know at present this policy of neutrality is accepted by all Parties. To what extent does the censorship interfere with citizens advocating a change in that policy? I take it that in this House I can get up, or any other Senator can get up, to ask for that policy to be changed. I take it the leading Parties in the State can get up and ask for that policy to be changed. To what extent is that demand denied publicity? That is what I would like the Minister definitely to say, because as long as we are functioning as free men, we have the right, I suggest, to get our point of view laid before our fellow-citizens, and that can only be done to any practical measure through the Press. I quite agree that obscure individuals cannot be allowed perpetually to question the accepted policy of neutrality, but I take it that responsible people and Parliamentary Parties are allowed to do so, and are entitled to publicity in their attempts to do so. I hope the Minister will deal with that, which, I submit, is a quite clear and specific point.
Then, in order that the citizens of the country may make up their minds as to the desirability of any change of policy, which they are quite entitled to advocate, surely it is necessary that they should be allowed news. I give the case, say, of pictures of the damage done in London and England by bombing. I may be wrong in suggesting that they are prohibited, but I understand that the censor does not allow such pictures to be published. Surely that is acting in excess of commonsense, for how can any one of us form our conclusions and form logical opinions about a change of policy unless we know facts? All I am asking for is that facts may be published. I am quite clear that there are reasons for preventing publication of expressions of opinion. I am speaking merely from the point of view of news, and I suggest it is exceeding the powers of censorship to suppress it.
Those are the only two points I wish to make. First of all, in regard to limitations of private correspondence, and secondly, have we, who are free men, a right to publicity in advocating a change of a policy which is for the moment accepted?
When this motion was first circulated, Senators will remember, it came to us in a rather different form from that in which it now appears on the Clár. It is interesting to consider the reasons that influenced the framers of the motion in making this change. I think it is quite plain that they wanted to give the motion a spurious—no, that is an ugly word; I will not use the word "spurious"—a specious, syllogistic appearance, but if you come to examine it —it is a long time since I learned any logic except the hard logic of facts— anyone with the slightest knowledge of logic will see that it is full of fallacies. The proposers of the motion wanted to try to get us to accept the major and minor premises and what they alleged to be the consequences, but if you submit them to careful examination I do not think any democratic assembly could accept the major premise that we have here before us. Let us read it: "Fundamental constitutional rights ought not to be abrogated more than is necessary for national safety even during war or the threat of war." My objection is to the use of the word "abrogated". I hold that fundamental national rights can never be abrogated, and I am confirmed in the view by looking up the word "abrogate" in the Oxford Dictionary, 1933 edition, in the Library. I find that "abrogate" means to repeal (a law or established usage), to annul, abolish authoritatively, or formally, to cancel; (2) to do away with, put an end to. I hold—and I am sure this House, when it considers it, will hold—that fundamental national rights can never be abrogated and that we should not, even by implication, seem to hold otherwise. But even though fundamental rights can never be abrogated, the exercise of them may by the choice of a free people be suspended. I hold that on the 2nd and 3rd September we, the people of three-quarters of Ireland, that portion of the Irish people that is able to exercise the rights of a free people, deliberately endowed the Government with emergency powers, including the power to establish censorship. We were not deprived of free speech. We deprived ourselves of the exercise of it for a time, because the emergency powers are only for a stated period. We deprived ourselves of its exercise deliberately, in what we thought the best interests of the country. We deliberately suspended our rights.
And did we deprive ourselves of the right to criticise the Government in the exercise of those powers?
I am talking about fundamental national rights.
I am talking about the right of criticism and freedom of opinion.
We established the censorship.
So did we.
And when we established the censorship it was as a bulwark of fundamental national rights. On that same night we declared our neutrality, and the censorship was a very important instrument in defending that neutrality. That is why the two questions are related. Neutrality has received universal approval of the Irish people, and it has so far kept us safe from the worst horrors of war. But it has done more than that; it has been regarded by everyone, by all other nations, as the greatest proof we can give of our independence. Those are two great things that neutrality has meant, and the censorship that protects neutrality also protects those two great things. But there is another thing, and I do not think Senator MacDermot should forget this; we gave our word that we would be neutral. We, a free people, exercising the rights of freedom, gave our word that we would be neutral. That pledge was reciprocated by one of the belligerents, as far as I remember, and tacitly acknowledged by the other. Are we going to allow ourselves, by any indiscretions, to jeopardise that neutrality? I think it would be not only a disastrous policy but a dishonourable policy, and I protest in the strongest way against any consideration of it.
I confess that I cannot follow the somewhat tortuous reasoning of the last speaker, and I will make no attempt to do so. But this motion does raise certain important questions. It raises questions of what is the fundamental nature of a free democracy like ours. It raises the question as to whether the censorship in our free democracy is being exercised in such a way as to preserve the essentials of that free democracy, and in the exercise of the freedom of criticism which we still preserve, I propose in the course of those remarks to draw attention to certain general principles that should govern our actions in this present national emergency.
In doing so I accept the fact that we have adopted a policy of legal neutrality, and I accept most of all the fact that we still are a constitutional sovereign democracy which claims to have derived all its powers from God in a part of the Constitution that has not yet been censored, although it would be censored if Cardinal Hinsley or any other such person attempted to express such sentiments in a broadcast speech. I am quite aware that any Senator speaking on the present subject at the present time should be careful not only as to what he says but as to the form of words which he uses in saying it, so in order to avoid dangerous language or the danger of saying anything which might be nationally harmful I have taken the somewhat unusual precaution of committing to writing most of what I propose to say. Although I observe that I am now addressing mainly empty benches, nevertheless, I think what I have to say is sufficiently important to be worth placing on the records of the House.
Notice taken that 12 Senators were not present; House counted, and, 12 Senators being present—
I think this is the first time I have had the distinction of emptying the House.
The Senator did not; it was empty before he started.
I must say I am grateful to those Senators who have returned to the House and have made up the necessary quorum. One of the problems which the censorship has to face is what should be the attitude of the censorship to the very vigorous propaganda that is maintained by all sorts of people in connection with the present European emergency. For my part, I am in favour of the utmost possible freedom of propaganda, propaganda in favour of the ideas of the totalitarian States as well as propaganda in favour of the ideas and principles of democracy. It is part of the philosophy of totalitarian States that an ascendancy class should claim the right to exploit and confiscate the wealth of subject races in virtue of moral and racial superiority. We had an ascendancy regime of that kind in Ireland for more than two hundred years, and I personally would welcome a serious effort of propaganda to show that such an ascendancy regime would be beneficial to Ireland in future whatever we may have thought about it in the past.
In my view, it is legitimate in a democracy to recommend ascendancy principles of government, or any other method or philosophy of government, as an abstract conception to be freely accepted or rejected by one's fellow citizens. For example, if I should make myself the leader of the so-called ex-Unionist minority in the twenty-six counties, and, by sheer persuasiveness, successfully persuade the majority of my fellow citizens to disfranchise themselves and entrust me and my party with a monopoly of political power, and absolute control of their lives, property, thoughts and actions, the result, of course, would not be democracy, but the method of achieving that result would be perfectly democratic, so long as the surrender of democratic rights was freely made as a result of my persuasion. On the other hand, if I organised a gang of toughs, or rough necks as they call them in other countries, armed with any suitable weapons, and terrorized my fellow citizens into voting my programme, and terrorized the Government to such an extent that they failed to put the forces of law in motion against me, that would be a violation of democratic procedure by me and a betraval of democratic principles by the Government which failed to suppress me. It is, I think, quite clear that propaganda of this kind ought to be sternly suppressed by any democratic government.
As a matter of fact, my first essay in public life was a pamphlet denouncing the idea of an appeal to force by my fellow-countrymen 27 years ago in resistance to the constitutional processes of democracy which sought to confer self-government on Ireland. I feared then that the appeal to lawless violence would breed more violence, and it did, in Ireland and in Europe. On the other hand, while democracy must restrain propaganda inciting to lawless violence, it cannot, without treason to its own cause, restrain propaganda which is explanatory of the nature of democracy itself, it cannot restrain propaganda which seeks to create in the minds of citizens a lively sense of the conditions and the convictions which must exist if democracy is to be preserved. To do so would be the same as if a Christian church were to forbid propaganda on the principles of Christianity. Democrats, least of all, can afford to live in an unreal world. They must know the dangers that threaten democracy within and without. A censorship which refuses to allow our public Press to underline the one reference to Ireland contained in President Roosevelt's fireside talk, is depriving our people of expert guidance and conspiring to make us live in a fool's paradise.
Many of the people for whom I may claim to speak are by no means anxious for us to abandon neutrality. But at any moment our neutrality may disappear through no action of ours. Whatever action we take in such an event should be the action of a united and disciplined nation, having full confidence in its Government. But will our morale be better or worse in such a dreadful contingency if we have been kept in ignorance of the moral issues which are at stake and of the ideologies which are in conflict in the present strife and if intelligent discussion of these issues is forbidden by our censorship? Our neutrality as such is nothing to be ashamed of. It must not be taboo for discussion. It is, in fact, an honourable condition forced on us by circumstances for which we may disclaim all responsibility.
When the League of Nations was established the States which joined in it undertook, by Article 10 of the Covenant, to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the members of the League. An attack on any one member was to be deemed to be an act of war against all members, and all States members of the League were bound in honour to go, with all their forces and resources, to the help of the victim of aggression. This was the famous principle of collective security, and it abolished neutrality for all States members of the League. In such a world order, if such a world order still existed, a State could not be neutral in the face of aggression on a fellow-member without dishonouring its signature. Unfortunately, Britain and France—or, I should say, certain disreputable statesmen who happened to be in power in Britain and France in these years—spent much misplaced ingenuity in wriggling out of their obligations under Article 10. China was betrayed in 1931; Abyssinia in 1935; Spain in 1936, and Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938.
In accordance with Standing Order 17, I desire to draw attention to the fact that there is not a quorum present.
The bells were rung.
Perhaps it would be better to adjourn this debate until the next meeting? So far as I know, most of the Senators who usually sit opposite prefer to have their tea at this hour, and it might be a good thing to adjourn, even for half an hour, rather than to be continually ringing the bell.
I suggest we should not adopt a counsel of despair. Probably in another two minutes there will be a quorum.
It seems to me rather undignified if we continue in this way. This is the second time that the bell has been rung. We should adjourn for a short time, or perhaps adjourn the whole debate.
The same thing has happened in the Dáil. It is not at all certain that if we did adjourn for a short period it would make any difference.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
In any case we shall give Senators not present five minutes.
There are 12 Senators here.
I move that we adjourn for half an hour.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
There is a quorum present. Is there any objection to an adjournment?
I would rather continue.
The dignity of the House ought to be considered. The attendance in this House is, I may say, disgraceful. There are persons elected to the Seanad and they never put a foot in the House.
It is just as well that they should be shown up if that is so.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
If Senators do not want to adjourn, Senator Johnston may proceed.
The point I am trying to make here is that if democracy has been destroyed in many countries in Europe it is in a very real sense far more the result of the betrayal of democratic principles by democratic governments in the years of uneasy peace, far more that result in a strictly moral sense than it is in a material sense the result of the actions and ambitions of neighbouring undemocratic States. Professor Keith, who is a very distinguished English publicist, in a book on the causes of the war, pillories the numerous occasions on which democratic States violated democratic principles and departed from international good faith. In fact, he says that the number of treaties deliberately broken by the democratic States makes quite as respectable a total as the number of those broken by the totalitarian States.
Quoting a statement of the late Mr. Chamberlain, made on 6th October, 1938, with reference to Czechoslovakia, where Mr. Chamberlain said we had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia, Professor Keith, on page 359 of the book, writes:—
"This deliberate denial of all binding force of the League Covenant, Articles 10, 16, and 20, is a classical repudiation by Britain of the binding nature of the most solemn treaty ever concluded by her."
He goes on to add: "It is idle to pile up lists of Treaty violations by other Powers on the assumption that Britain has not been guilty of equal violence of law and morality." Now, I might attempt to defend what I might call the respectability of our neutrality against the kind of propaganda we read of in British and pro-British newspapers.
Are we discussing neutrality or the censorship?
The Senator may proceed.
This raises a general question. I do not want to be taken as expressing any anti-British sentiments of my own in doing so, because I think the House knows quite well where my sympathies lie in the present crisis. I do not want to emphasise that aspect of the matter too much. I am dealing with it merely from an academic point of view. It is, I think, a matter of historic truth that Britain and France could have made the new world order established in 1920 a reality if they had set an example of international good faith in their dealings under the terms of the covenant of the League of Nations. They elected to follow a course which made the emergence of international anarchy inevitable. The smaller nations, including our own, would have gladly followed a strong moral lead if it had been given in these after-war years, and they would have taken the risks incidental to their obligations as members of the League of Nations; but once it had been made clear that collective security was regarded as midsummer madness by a British Premier, then once more neutrality became an honourable condition which a small nation would be wise to maintain in certain events. Thus the honour of our neutrality stands rooted in the dishonour of the nations which founded the League of Nations and then betrayed it. It is sometimes said that it is dishonourable to be neutral when one of the belligerents is defending causes which are vital to us. To that we can only reply: "We are doing exactly the same as you did in 1931 when China began to fight your cause as well as in her own, and as you did in 1935 when Abyssinia fought in your cause as well as in her own and when you remained neutral all along." In a state of world anarchy, considerations of expediency must be paramount, but if a new world order based on law and international good faith is ever created, we, I hope, will do our best to sustain such a world order.
Now a nation like ourselves, which I hope is truly Christian, must also be truly catholic, not in the technical but in the etymological sense of that term, in the sense in which every Christian is a Catholic and, as such, we must recognise that the claims of moral and religious obligations are universal and that they transcend all loyalties to nation or State. If a new world order is to be created, national individualities and national loyalties must be fitted into the general scheme of things and there must be a voluntary abandonment, by great nations as well as small, of so much of national sovereignty and national egoism as is incompatible with that world order. Will the censor allow us to think on those things and to discuss the conditions which must exist if national freedom and democracy in the various States of Europe are to be preserved and harmonised in a new world order of that kind, in which law and justice are prevalent, and in which Christian ethics are the dominating principle? It is, I think, essential, even under present conditions, that we should have an adequate appreciation of the various moral issues which are in conflict, that we should have an adequate knowledge of the facts of the world situation and of the national situation without which we cannot form a true moral judgment. I think it was entirely regrettable that Cardinal Hinsley's address was suppressed the other day by the censor, because I, personally, listened to that address with the greatest interest, and I thought what an admirable expression it was of the views which any Christian should hold about the relations between Church and State. I think the censor's office in suppressing that address acted more in the spirit of the Peter who thrice denied his Lord than in the spirit of the St. Peter who founded the Church at Rome. To be logical and complete, he ought to censor the preamble to the Constitution which expresses sentiments exactly similar to those which Cardinal Hinsley expressed on that occasion.
Has the Senator any proof that the particular reference about which he is talking was censored?
I know for a fact that the address was not printed in the Irish papers.
I have no information that it was censored. It may have been but, normally speaking, the whole of an address is not censored.
My information is that the address by Cardinal Hinsley was censored and I think the Minister admitted the fact in yesterday's debate.
Portions of addresses on occasions are censored but not all of the addresses all the time. If the Senator is basing his case on the censoring of a particular speech or broadcast or of portions of it, surely he should have fully informed himself before coming into the House and basing a case on it?
My information is that the censor will not allow that address to be printed in the Irish Press. Finally I would summarise the three kinds of behaviour by the Governments of democratic countries which can destroy and undermine democracy without any foreign intervention. In the first place, there is the kind of conduct of which the Government of the United Kingdom was guilty in 1912 and 1913 when they allowed their policy to be altered in consequence of an appeal to violence or a threat of violence in the part of this country known as Ulster. That, I think, was a disastrous concession to lawless force and a serious invasion of one of the first principles of democratic government. In the second place I think the various statesmen—the Hoares, the Lavals, the Chamberlains and others—in charge of French and British political Parties during these critical years and who failed to give effect to international obligations under the League of Nations, did a serious disservice to democracy. If democracy has failed in these later days, I think we may thank the British Governments and the French Governments of former days.
Our own Government can be completely exonerated from all blame on the first or second count but I think we are in danger of doing a serious disservice to democracy if we do not allow the public mind to be enlightened on the very important moral issues which are now at stake in Europe and in the world. Apparently the leaders of Britain and France failed to give their own people the facts about what was happening, for example, in Spain in 1936 and 1937. They failed to educate their own public opinion in the facts in regard to the world situation generally in the critical years from 1935 to 1939.
One result of that was that war became inevitable, and another result was that democracy in one of the principal countries was not adequately prepared morally for the encounter with the other side and consequently, collapsed after a remarkably weak resistance. I hope that we ourselves never will have to defend our democracy and freedom by force of arms but, if that misfortune should come to us, it is absolutely essential that public morale should be sound. It cannot be sound unless we have been thoroughly enlightened upon all the principles and issues that are at stake. We are for the moment—and I hope will be for a long time—a free people and citizens in a democracy, and while that situation exists we should behave as citizens of a free country. I am aware, of course, that there are powerful nations locked in a deadly struggle not far from our shores, and I am aware that one of those belligerents has acted the part of a bully in Irish history during some centuries past and that it is not impossible that one or other of those belligerents may act the part of a bully in future in relation to our Irish freedom. Bullies are not nice people: in fact some people regard them as rather objectionable, but there is one kind of person more objectionable still, that is, a today. I hope we never shall descend to todaying to either of the belligerents but that we will continue to behave as free people so long as our freedom lasts.
In this very interesting debate one of the most remarkable things has been that, if we except Senator Mrs. Concannon's speech, no one has thought it necessary to draw attention to the terms of the resolution. Even the proposer of the resolution did not draw attention to its set terms. It seems to me that the order of the resolution is important and, while it might be difficult for the House to accept the whole resolution as it stands, some of the clauses in it appear to demand, or even to command, universal support. It is quite true that Senator Mrs. Concannon drew attention to what I take to be a verbal slip—using "abrogated" where, I think, "suspended" would be more accurate, in the first line. Apart from that, it would seem to me that No. 1 clause of the resolution is the one that we could not only assent to but join in very cordially and that we should be glad to emphasise it. It is necessary to emphasise it, on account of the great danger that occurs, with any emergency legislation, of its being carried on long when the emergency has ended.
We have had instances of that in a neighbouring country, of emergency legislation dealing with such small matters as the time at which one could purchase cigarettes or a drink, being carried on for some 20 years after the emergency had passed. We have an example on the Paper we have before us to-night, in the amendment to this resolution, where a clause is suggested for the approval of the Seanad which has nothing whatever to do with the emergency and has to do with a condition which might be permanent in Irish life or might go on for many years after this present national emergency has passed. I think we have to keep our minds open to the danger of emergency legislation, in that it is so easy to carry it on in time far beyond what was intended at first. We have had many instances shown to us to-night which are evidence of the danger of emergency legislation being carried out in a way which was never intended when the legislation was passed. That is a claim which I think was made frankly by the Minister in the debate yesterday evening, but I will come to that later.
In this first resolution we find suggested a principle with which we can all agree, having made the amendment that Senator Mrs. Concannon has suggested. In the second clause, the resolution goes on further to bring that down to more particular questions as to the right of expressing opinions by citizens. Whether that clause is happily worded or not—I do not care altogether for the wording—the principle of it is quite sound. Then we come to clause 3, which deals with particular matters which should be open to prohibition by the censor. I doubt if either the proposer or the seconder of this resolution was so innocent or so simple—although they are innocent and simple men—as to expect that the Minister would accept these definitions as limiting his duties in regard to censorship. No doubt they are good, but I scarcely think they are exhaustive. I doubt if it is possible to express in words any set terms which would be binding and be a limitation which could properly bind the Minister in the discharge of this kind of duty.
Someone with more experience suggested last night—I think it was Senator Fitzgerald—that there must be consideration of all the conditions at a particular moment, that censors must bring to their duty a considerable amount of common sense, and that there must be a judgment which can scarcely be merely an interpretation of the set terms set down in a resolution or a regulation. I am quite sure that neither the mover nor the seconder expected the Minister to accept the suggestion in Clause 3 as binding. To my mind, those who brought this resolution forward had in mind to induce the Minister to tell us a little more than he has told us up to the begining of the debate, or even up to the present moment, of the principles that guide him in the application of censorship.
We had a previous debate dealing with censorship, and an innocent Senator, logically-minded, might have thought that the Minister would have taken the opportunity to take the House—and through the House, the public—into his confidence as to the guiding principles which govern the actions of his censoring officials. No such statement of principles has been made by the Minister up to the present, but I hope it is not too late to induce him in this debate to make such a statement of principles. It is true that, in the debate on this matter last December, he gave a very attractive statement of the sentiment in which he approached this duty. "By and large," he said, "we operate this censorship, as I think somebody said here to-night, to keep temperature down internally, and prevent it from rising between ourselves and other countries." Everybody will agree that that is excellent as a general guiding sentiment, as to the atmosphere in which the censors should work.
While accepting that, we are bound to inquire whether it has always governed the actions of the Minister and of his officials. He remarked with a degree of self-satisfaction: "Of course, I have better judgment than most people in this regard." The public and the members of the Seanad must exercise their judgment on that matter, but they are not to be allowed to express it in the Press.
We must have no criticism of censorship in the Press. That was stated bluntly last night, and, I think, to the amazement of the House, it was stated that that was with the will of the Oireachtas. We are told that the Oireachtas has established a censorship and that, since the Minister in charge has decided that there should be no newspaper articles criticising the censorship, therefore that is the will of the Dáil. Could anything, in three or four sentences, be a greater breach of every rule of logic than that? The Dáil passes a law, a Minister is appointed to administer it, and when the Minister comes to a decision that is the will of the Dáil! Under the Constitution certain departments are set up here, and if the Minister concerned makes a decision, that decision cannot be questioned. That is exactly the same argument as was advanced here last night. That sort of argument, thrown out in what was intended to be a serious debate and what, with few exceptions, was a serious debate, certainly does not keep the temperature down. I speak with subjective knowledge in that respect, and while I am very willing to give every possible weight to the Minister's argument— and to a great deal of what he said last night I gave great weight—I cannot think that he was carrying out his own policy of trying to keep the temperature down when he said that.
Certain other rather provocative statements have been made, but I do not want to go back upon them now. One Senator to-day rather criticised the Minister in that he had censored himself. That was Senator Hayes. Well, I differ entirely from Senator Hayes. I wish the Minister would censor himself oftener. In view of the sedative remarks about keeping down the temperature, I wish that some of the statements made by the Minister in the Dáil during the last 13 months had been censored before they reached a wider public than that of the Dáil. I think it would have been much better for the temperature. I regret that it has not been thought fit, within the last 24 hours, to censor the statement of even a higher authority. I think that the temperature would be a good deal cooler if the address made by the Taoiseach last night had not contained some of the remarks he made. That is my own opinion, of course, but I certainly was struck by one highly misleading and tendentious statement made by the Taoiseach last night.
As I say, however, we have not yet had from the Minister in this House any indication as to what principles guide him or what principles guide his active officials in the carrying out of these duties. We had the general sentiment, which I valued highly and which, I believe, generally does control the action of those who are working under the Minister, but we had, both last night and in the previous debate in December, certain sidelights on the Minister's attitude towards these questions. They are not principles, but they were informative and illuminative. Before coming to them, however, I should like again to draw attention to some of the remarks made by the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Supplies, in the speech he made last Saturday. No doubt, the speech was given in a more congenial atmosphere than that of the Dáil, but it certainly was an admirable speech, and there is one part of it which, although it does not precisely lay down principles, with regard to censorship, comes very near to doing so. I think the remarks have been read out already by other Senators, but even if they have I shall read them again, because I think they cannot be read too often. Having drawn attention to the duties of the Press to ventilate opinions and the privilege of the Press to express its opinions through its columns, Mr. Lemass went on to say:
"That function had to be restricted in times of peace by laws relating to treason and libel and the like, and in times of war by restrictions on the publication of information of military importance without authority, or by confining the brick-throwing activities of journalists to their own Government, because other Governments might not like it. Subject to these restrictions, it was the function of the Press to give the people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
I should like to ask the Minister, does he accept his colleague's definition of the function of the Press, or does he not? His speeches here have not respected the axioms quoted, and I am quite willing to accept the view that many of the statements made in regard to censorship have been made by oversight or through misunderstanding. The Minister made a very good answer to some of these statements from that point of view, but if he is willing to say that the working of the censorship is governed by that clause of his colleague's, then I think there will be very little need for further criticism.
According to that speech of Mr. Lemass it was the function of the Press to give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but now it would seem that the Minister will not accept Mr. Lemass's statement. Mr. Lemass says that the brick-throwing activities of journalists should be confined to their own Government, because other Governments might not like it. Apart from what other Governments may like, I do not think our own Government likes it, and according to what the Minister said last night no paper will be allowed to throw bricks at him or to criticise the censorship. Mr. Lemass, evidently, is willing to accept his chance of being hit by a verbal brick, but the Minister will not permit the throwing of a brick in the form of criticism.
I said that the Minister, in his speech, had thrown some sidelights on what is his attitude towards his duties as head of the censoring system. There was a very remarkable instance in the debate last December. To me it seemed to be one of the most remarkable and illuminating points of the debate. Senator MacDermot had drawn the attention of the Seanad to the fact that some months ago, as he said, the censorship closed down on references to the desirability of a national Government in this country. What Senator MacDermot said was this:—
"I remember some months ago the censorship closing down on references to the desirability of a national Government in this country. Why should that be?"
The Minister replied that he had forgotten that particular instance, but suggested that there might be some other idea associated with it. Now, this seems to me to be of very great importance. The Minister then said:—
"Anyway I do not think it has any particular popular appeal with any Party."
Are we to understand, from the Minister's reply to Senator MacDermot on that occasion, that unless an idea has a popular appeal with some Party it is not to be allowed publication in our Press? That is the essential, logical result of the Minister's statement. Are we to accept that? Again, the Minister used the same argument against Senator MacDermot last night. Senator MacDermot had raised a certain point, which has been laboured, perhaps, unnecessarily, in later speeches, to the effect that there is a certain most important public question in this country on which, perhaps, a large majority take one point of view and on which others, perhaps, a small minority, take another view. We had the same kind of argument to-night, that Senator MacDermot should not put forward any views he holds on that topic because there are not many people who would agree with him on it.
Surely to goodness the greatest excuse for freedom of talk is that it is not listened to, and if the Minister or anyone else will not listen it cannot do any harm. If Senator MacDermot produces an unpopular argument he is not likely to do much harm. In the other instance whoever put forward the view that there should be a national Government, if that had no popular appeal with any Party, then it was a very harmless topic and I do not see why any censor should interfere. Only those things which are popular with the majority are to be permitted peeps out from the view of the Minister. That is a danger. When the Minister looks at the past and at the history of our own country or of any other country, did he ever know of any great reform being brought about except by a small party? Did it ever begin except with an individual? Is that individual not to be allowed to speak in this country while the Minister is in control? That is the essential conclusion to be drawn from his remarks on the two occasions that this question was discussed.
This has been an interesting debate but I regret that in many respects it has been degraded by personal attacks, and by implications of personal motives. They are lowering to the dignity of this House. It is possible to suspect a particular Senator of personal motives, but it lowers the dignity of the House to impute that he put forward certain views because of his personal motives. That has been done and, I am sorry to say was done by the example of the Minister, who suggested that because Senator MacDermot thought it to be his duty to preach a particular doctrine, and was not permitted by the censor, therefore he put down the motion we are now discussing. I do not know what the intention of the proposer of the motion is. I do not suppose that he expects it is going to be accepted, nor is he simple enough to believe, even if it were accepted by the Seanad, that it will be accepted by the Minister while he is in control of censorship. But I cannot but think that, even the amount of publicity that this debate will be allowed in the public Press, will have done some good in educating the uninformed mind of the country; that there are people, though they may be a small minority, who think it important that they should not be kept in blinkers, even though they only get a newspaper once a week or, as one Senator mentioned to-night, that they do not care a jot. That is not the ideal before the Minister and his officials, and I regret that it should be put forward this time.
It is with some reluctance that I intervene in this debate. When a motion of a similar kind was discussed last December, I ventured, probably ineffectively, to give expression to my views. In any event, two or three days afterwards I received a message from the editor of one of the metropolitan newspapers, and he told me I was very much worse than Mr. Aiken himself. It is in order to make my position clear in respect of the whole question of the freedom of the Press that I wish to say a few words now. I am a greater advocate of the freedom of the Press and of the right to free expression than Senator MacDermot can ever hope to be. I am particularly interested in the Press, having been associated with it for 37 years, representing, as I do, a body of very eminent craftsmen engaged in the technical output of newspapers. Having listened to the debate to-day, and also on a previous occasion, I have definitely come to the conclusion that Senator MacDermot is more concerned about dragging this country in on one side of the present conflict than in the maintenance of the freedom of the Press, the liberty of the Press, or freedom of expression. I am firmly convinced of that. I do not make that charge against those who support him. I respect the views put forward by Senator Alton and by Senator Rowlette. I know their outlook on affairs. I know where their spiritual ideals lie, and I appreciate them, while I could never subscribe to them. I want to make my position clear. We have certain restrictions on the Press at present. They may be irritating. The national need demands that there should be some sort of censorship of the Press. I am convinced that Senator MacDermot is concerned, not with that liberty, but to drag this country into one side of the present conflict. I leave it at that.
When Senator Johnston was speaking, he said that he could not follow Senator Mrs. Concannon's somewhat tortuous reasoning. I confess that I was lost in Senator Johnston's tortuosity, and I could not make out what he was driving at. As he was turning the corners of his tortuous path, I remember one sentence in which he referred to the denial of the right of the people to discuss the moral issues involved in the war. We heard a lot about the moral issues involved in the last war, and we know the arguments that were used on behalf of one belligerent in that war, the moral rights that that nation stood for, and its concern about the rights of small nations. However, we found how these expressions of opinion were put into operation when that war ended. While it was in progress there were great professions of concern about freedom and about the rights of small nations. We know how the small nations were treated when the war in Europe terminated.
That brings me to another point. During this debate we heard great champions of the liberty of the Press. At the time that this country was going through a period of torture, there was published here what a British general described as the "Mosquito Press". That Press started with one paper which was suppressed, and it was succeeded by another paper that was also suppressed. Finally the late Arthur Griffith published a paper which was known as Scissors and Paste, comprising cuttings from British newspapers in connection with the war. That paper was also suppressed. The point I want to make is this, that while there are people to speak in this House and to express concern about the liberty of the Press at present, we did not hear their views on that subject when this country was suffering greater torture than any country suffered. There was no expression of regret or concern then about the liberty of the Press. We know what happened. Newspapers were suppressed, printing offices were smashed up, and the means of producing newspapers were denied to the Irish people. We also heard about the atrocities that were committed by certain nations during the great war. These people who want liberty now are saying the things that were said in those days. In my opinion that is the underlying motive at the back of this motion. I remember the late Arthur Griffith pillorying those who were concerning themselves about the moral rights of other nations. In one issue the following doggerel rhyme appeared:
I met a man who saw a man,
Who told an awful tale of
How those wicked Germans,
One day in half France,
Cut off the tails of twenty cats
And fried them on a lance!
That was Arthur Griffith's way of deriding the efforts made by a certain section to hold one of the belligerents up to the world as torturers.
When speaking about this matter of censorship, there is one aspect which has not been stressed by anybody, and that is the freedom that the Press itself has to censor other people. We all know how newspapers, being in the main political organs, will—I will not say distort—take words out of their context and give a wrong interpretation to what a person may say. I have no complaint to make on that score personally, nor do I intend to make a complaint in any general way against the Press, but they have the facilities and the means to do that, and it is very effectively done.
If the House will bear with me for a few minutes, I will tell a very interesting story. It was brought to my mind by the references made by Senator Hayes and others, or the allegation that the Minister was induced to cut something out of an article in the Irish Independent or to censor some part of it because of a leading article published by the Irish Independent in 1916. I can give the reverse side of that picture. Five or six years ago I was engaged in trade union negotiations which involved the closing down of the Irish Press in a hurry one night. The negotiations took place at the offices of the Department of Industry and Commerce. Having threshed the matter out, we said very definitely that we would not allow the Irish Press to injure either the Irish Times or the Irish Independent by a closing down that night. The suggestion was that the Irish Press should close down and that the other offices should close down in sympathy. I ventured to say, although I was not a friend of the Irish Independent's and never could be on account of the one cardinal crime it committed by publishing a certain leading article in 1916, that I would not permit that injustice to be done to it.
There was an interesting sequel to that. An order was issued in the Independent office that my name was never to be mentioned in any connection in the paper. I could not believe that. Some weeks afterwards, however, I happened to attend a funeral, and a member of my own organisation, who set up the report of that funeral, brought me back the proof of the first setting of that report. The instructions were that everything in which my name appeared was to be submitted to the editor. The editor got a proof of that report and struck my name out of the list of those attending the funeral. That was incredible to me; I could hardly believe it, except that the man who gave me the proof was a member of our organisation and had brought it out of the office. Even then, for five or six years I could hardly credit it. Last year, however, a certain organisation appeared before the Commission on Vocational Organisation and the question of the right of the Press to interfere with the interests of the community by withholding information, or in any other way, came up. By a strange chance, the man who did that was one of the witnesses at the commission, and he turned to me and said: “You put me in a very awkward position.” The Bishop of Galway, who was presiding, said: “Surely that is not possible,” and, very reluctantly, this witness, who had retired from the editorship, admitted that he had instructions to keep my name out. That persisted for some years. I have no complaint against the Irish Independent any more than I have against the Irish Press or the Irish Times. I only mention that to show that this is an aspect of the matter which has been lost sight of. What can be done in connection with a little matter like that can be done in a more intensified and extensive way.
The House has given a great deal of its time to the consideration of this whole question of censorship. Some of us have sat here on two or three occasions listening to the speeches. I sat through the December debate and the present debate, and I think it is the sheerest waste of time in this hour of the nation's crisis to be challenging the right of the people in whose hands lies the definite responsibility of guiding the nation through these dangerous times. Senator Hogan brought forward a motion to-day and certain people were in a desperate hurry to get rid of it, as if it were of no concern to the people of the country. So far as I know the minds of the people of the country, they are concerned with one thing and one thing only, and that is, what their position will be in six months' time. We have had every indication from the Ministers responsible for defence, supplies and other matters of the dangerous situation that confronts this nation, and that is the predominant fear in the heart of every citizen to-day. The people are not concerned about these petty censorship regulations. This country is too independent, too conservative and too individualistic to tolerate perpetual censorship of the Press. Some people profess to believe that this is just the beginning of dictatorship. In their hearts I do not think that they believe it. In my opinion, what is at the back of this motion is a desire to drag this country in on the side of one belligerent, and the people of the country will not stand for that. Let there be no mistake about that. If, by any mischance, harm is done in that way, the Irish people will hold these people responsible for dragging them into that position and will deal with them accordingly.
I am sure that some Senators think my first words will be an attack on Senator MacDermot. I am not going to say one unkind word of him. I have great sympathy and pity for Senator MacDermot, who poses as an Irishman while he is out of touch with the feelings of the Irish people. I would more or less repeat the statement made by Senator Campbell on the last occasion when we were discussing this matter. I go amongst the people who really count in this country, namely, the farmers, the farm labourers and the other workers, the people on whose work this nation has to depend if it is to survive, people who count for far more than professors and others, learned and educated as they may be, but who do not work as hard as those other people. The people I speak of are not concerned about the censorship. As a matter of fact the farmer, the farm labourer, the worker and the unemployed are solidly behind the Government in their effort to keep us out of this war.
I am certain, if there were no censorship and if all Senator MacDermot's statement yesterday did get out to the public, that if we were not involved in an outside war, there would be a little one at home and it would be very much one-sided. I should like Senator MacDermot to remember that. As I said, I have the greatest pity for him. I think it is terrible to see an educated man, residing in this country and posing as an Irishman, so much out of touch with the Irish people in every way. He stated that at the beginning of this war the people may have been in favour of neutrality but that they have the right to change. I am afraid Senator MacDermot will never change. As a matter of fact, he is going from bad to worse. I repeat that the plain people of the country, the people who count, are solidly behind the Government. They look upon the censorship as a weapon of defence, and, so far as that weapon of defence is concerned in keeping this country out of the war, there will be no change.
I supported the decision of this country to maintain what I regard as non-belligerency. I am not in any way ashamed of the fact that they did so, nor have I changed my mind. But I very much resent the attitude of those who believe that persons who consider that censorship might be run on somewhat different lines, or who are anxious to guard it and see that the least possible harm is done by it, are necessarily persons who believe that this country ought to walk straight into the war. I do not think any good service is done to any cause by assuming that anything of the kind is true. Further, while I have great sympathy with Senators like Senator McEllin, whose skin is so thin that they are irritated by having to listen to opinions that they disagree with, I nevertheless believe that it is a good thing to have to listen to views which you disagree with as long as you are not ashamed of your own views and not afraid to state them when you disagree.
Now, as far as this motion is concerned, I am satisfied that, whether we like it or not, we are bound to have a censorship. I believe that censorship of itself, particularly a Press censorship, is a bad thing, and for my part I would be prepared to accept the general attitude stated by the Minister for Supplies as the general principles which should be adopted. I think it should not be used to prevent internal discussion of matters relating to our own affairs. I think it should not be used to censor criticism of the Government, except when of a nature which would give away information, or which would be liable to embroil us with belligerents in the war. If it be true that portions of the Minister's speech here yesterday were censored, I consider that is an abuse of censorship, because I do not believe that any speech made in public by a Minister, that is by a member of the Government who has full information as to what the position is, ought to be censored. If the speech is one that should be censored, then I think it should not be made in public. It is not quite the same with those of us who are not Ministers but who may be in public positions and may inadvertently make statements which we might not make if we had full knowledge, but I certainly think that is the position with regard to Ministers.
Now, there is an impression abroad, and I think it is only honest that we should face it, that, whether deliberately or unintentionally, there is a censorship of the expression of opinion. There is free speech but not free reporting of that speech. Though we may criticise, and I think criticism is good, I think we ought to recognise that there is still a very considerable amount of freedom. I am glad to say, for instance, that there is no censoring of books simply because they are propagandist. It is possible for anyone who wants to obtain most of the propaganda on either side, in so far as it is available, to do so, and it is possible to form a fair opinion. I think the main fault at the moment is due, not solely to censorship, but to the fact that our Press, whatever be the reason, does not give enough general information of what is really happening in the world.
To my mind, the world is in what may prove to be a crisis in its history. I do not believe a small nation such as ours, suddenly taking steps which would end its position of non-belligerency, is going to help. If I really believed that it would, and that it would bring about right as against wrong in the world, I think I would be prepared to take the risk; but at the same time I am not satisfied—I know that I am in this matter in a minority, and I think it is only right to say it out—that it is a good thing for this country that there can be no reporting of discussions on the question of non-belligerency. I believe that the majority of the people here could, quite definitely, face that discussion, and that they would be of the same opinion still, but with more information and with perhaps a better-considered reason behind it than at the present time. Now, I may be quite wrong. It is a matter which I would not like to press too far, but I am convinced that we cannot avoid some censorship. The object should be not to censor except where it is necessary. This is not a time in which the censorship can be properly or usefully used to improve the general standard of our discussions here, to censor indiscretions or various things said at the present time, unless they are in some way or other related to the countries which are engaged in this war, or where they might cause offence or misunderstanding of our position.
I consider that the statement made the other night by the Minister for Supplies was, taken as a general statement, a very good statement of what should be the guiding principles as long as we have to have censorship. If that is accepted, in letter and spirit, it is inevitable that there will be errors, and that at some time there will be unfairness from one side or another. I do not believe that any country can produce an infallible censorship. I believe the very nature of it means that there will be things that ought to be criticised. I, personally, believe that the principal difficulty in censorship, as regards certain matters, is the fact that it is not done by a National Government. I believe if it was done by a National Government, instead of by a Party Government, there would be very much less criticism than there is at present, because there would be, not in public probably, discussions between different types of minds with a compromise between them to arrive at a fair balance.
My principal reason for rising to speak at this late hour is to deal with one suggestion that was made in the course of the debate. The Minister seemed to indicate that he might not be totally against it, though he might not like it in too formal a manner. I am satisfied there was no venom behind any of the criticism made here. I believe that, as far as the vast majority of Senators are concerned, the criticism made was simply an effort to give expression to things which they had heard outside and which they believe are of some importance. With regard to the suggestion I have referred to, I think it would be an excellent thing if a small representative committe, meeting about once a month, were set up which would make suggestions to the Minister. That committee would pass on information in a general friendly way, and would try to assist the censorship. If you had a committee of a representative character, composed of six or seven members at the outside, of both Houses, I think you would find there would be very little desire to have further debates such as we have had dealing with details rather than principles.
Now as far as the motion is concerned, I am rather in a similar position to that of Senator Hayes. I completely agree with paragraphs (1) and (2) of the motion, but I am very doubtful indeed about paragraph (3) because I am afraid it would be almost impossible to set out general principles. If the motion were amended and set down under four headings, instead of in its present form, with the proviso that it ought not to exclude matter unless under these four headings, I would be inclined to give it general support. As far as the giving up of fundamental constitutional rights and of liberty is concerned, I think that should only be done where it is inevitable and where it cannot be avoided. In matters, however, relating to criticism of the Government or to the discussion of matters inside this country, I would prefer to see the censorship erring on the side of letting too much out than in preventing the publication of too much. I have not dealt with individual cases although I know of several I could refer to. I am inclined to think that in some cases the existence of the censorship meant referring to the censor things which editors ought to have dealt with themselves. Cases relating to the publication of letters have been reported to me which I do not think should have been censored. If I were an editor I myself would have stopped the publication of some of them, not on the grounds that their publication would do any harm, but because they were not up to a standard which would justify publication. I think there is that tendency to pass matters on to the censor that ought to be dealt with by editors themselves.
My attitude towards censorship is not one of hostility but rather one which I would prefer should be helpful. If we could have some representative committee set up by consent, I think the Minister would find that you could get enough members on both sides to meet entirely for the purpose of passing on suggested improvements and of general criticism in a friendly way. I am not suggesting that they should interfere with his final judgment. The committee, however, could make suggestions, and I think that, on the whole, the setting up of such a body would add to the general confidence.
Several questions have been asked me in the course of this debate. I shall answer them now or, if Senator MacDermot prefers to wait—I expect he will prefer to have the last word—with the permission of the House, I should like to reply.
If necessary, I shall move the suspension of Standing Orders to enable the Minister to speak again.
General agreement will suffice, but this must not be taken as a precedent.
I take it that the Minister will merely answer questions and not develop arguments.
The Minister has made his request.
My reply will not be altogether answers to questions. I should like to say that I am delighted with the way this debate has, generally, gone. It was good to find general acceptance by this House of the policy of neutrality. Accepting that, I am quite prepared to admit that there is plenty of scope for criticism as to how that policy is being worked. A number of Senators admitted, in principle, the necessity for censorship but said that, in their view, censorship was being badly run. That is, of course, a matter of opinion. My opinion is that no matter who was in charge of censorship for the past 18 months or so, he would, by now, have convinced a large number of people that he was not the man to run it. In a neighbouring country, in 18 months, a number of Ministers gave up charge of that department for one reason or another.
Was not that a publicity department? It was for giving out information.
They called it that.
And they do a bit at that, too.
They do some of the other, too. I have been asked on what principles we are working censorship. I endeavoured to outline those in the Dáil at the beginning of the war and I have done it on several occasions since. On the 27th September, 1939, in the Dáil, I said that the censorship instructions, generally, covered four or five points—(1) that newspapers shall not publish information which would, or might, endanger the security of the State, such as information relating to the movement or equipment of our defence forces or matters calculated to cause disaffection, either amongst our defence forces or amongst the people or matters which might prejudice recruiting; (2) matters which are likely to prejudice the neutrality of the country; (3) matters which would, or might, prejudice our economic or financial security. While those are the general principles, they have to be applied—and applied to a couple of hundred thousand words submitted every night, by a staff who have to be exercise, in large measure, their own judgment in the interpretation of these instructions. Judging the censorship staff by the work they have done and under the circumstances in which they did it, I think they have done a magnificent job and that, by and large, there have been no legitimate grounds of complaint left to the newspapers.
Newspapers will object to censorship. They will always do that. It is of their nature to object to it. The newspaper editors have been acting as censors all their lives. Senator Campbell gave an instance of that to-night. I could give many other instances from my own knowledge. There has been a lot of talk here about the censorship of his Eminence Cardinal Hinsley. One Dublin newspaper censored the Dean of St. Paul's recently and we might have been blamed for it. The Dean of St. Paul's said that he believed that, when Britain had won the war, she would be compelled to hold Europe for a considerable time by force of arms and would be compelled to enlarge the British Empire. One newspaper—the Independent—censored that. That was an exercise of the editor's judgment.
I regard censorship very much as Senator Mrs. Concannon regards it—as a very important instrument in the defence of our neutrality and of the security of the State generally. We are trying to operate it as an effective instrument for that purpose. I would regard any legitimate criticism that could be levelled against the censorship, a charge that could be sustained, as blunting the effectiveness of the censorship as an instrument for the maintenance of neutrality. I, personally, am convinced, as the vast majority of the people are, that neutrality is essential for the best interests of this nation, and I would consider that we were doing a very bad job if, through operating the censorship inefficiently, we, in any way, rendered the defence of neutrality less effective. I believe in the freedom of the Press in normal times. As the Minister for Supplies said when addressing the journalists last Saturday night, I believe in a free Press and a good Press. But practically every speaker in this debate has admitted that in time of emergency limits have to be put to the freedom of the Press. Senator MacDermot himself admitted that——
The motion says so.
I want to ascertain at what point we reach disagreement. We all agree that limits should be put to the freedom of the Press, and the question is where the line should be drawn. There is not a Senator who would agree with any other Senator as regards a lot of the material that goes through. Each would have his point of view. I admit that I have my point of view. I have to be guided by my own judgment when matters are submitted to me. I exercise that judgment if the censorship staff do not feel competent or at liberty to exercise their own judgment in a major matter. I was asked by Senator Hayes why a leading article of the Independent, quoting Mr. Lemass, was cut out, and my answer to that is the same as the answer to Senator MacDermot in relation to the first leading article which was censored, that is, that we do not allow, and do not propose to allow, the newspapers to criticise the censorship department from day to day.
There is no criticism in this.
It is approval.
There is implied criticism in it. Senator Hayes has a knowledge of words as well as I have, and that article read: "Everybody engaged in the production of newspapers will read with extraordinary interest...." Why should they read it with extraordinary interest, unless it was an indication that Mr. Lemass and I had different views on this matter, when, in fact, we do not differ by one iota?
Would that not be just as extraordinarily interesting as the other?
Would it not be interesting either way?
We have decided, whether it be right or wrong—and we can discuss that—that the newspapers throughout the country will not be allowed to criticise the censorship. If something is cut out of the news columns of a newspaper one day and the newspaper is allowed to criticise that cutting out in an editorial next day, where are we going to be? There is going to be no censorship.
Would the Minister say what national evil would result from this being published, even if the newspaper got a bit of a score out of it?
There is none in that particular article, but Senator Hayes knows that editors, like civil servants and everybody else, like to follow precedent, and if they get an inch, they will take an ell, and we decided that we would not give the inch.
That is not true of the Civil Service. They take the ell.
I was not talking about the Civil Service.
The Minister cannot have it both ways.
We would not allow that precedent to be established, even though there was nothing very much wrong in that particular leading article. If we were to allow the newspapers to undermine the censorship by daily criticism, objecting to this, that and the other thing being censored, we might as well have no censorship at all. As somebody pointed out here, the essential element of censorship is secrecy, and the only way you can have secret and effective censorship is that, when a thing is censored, it will stay censored.
Senator Hayes made a point against me, arising out of a reference to a certain newspaper article of bygone days to which reference was made here, and he said that my speech had been censored because it contained that reference. That was not the case. It was a logical consequence of the instruction that was given, that Senator MacDermot's speech quoting the censored Independent article should not be allowed to appear. It had been censored, and it was not allowed to appear, and we were not going to allow it to appear in the form of a report of the Seanad.
That is terribly convenient.
Senator Hayes can have his own opinion of it, but that is the fact. That quotation, and everything arising out of it, was cut out. Senator Hayes amused himself by making a personal attack on me.
No. I deny that. I simply said what I thought a censor should be and what I thought the Minister is. Like the censoring of the 1916 article, I could not do it any other way.
The Senator said that it would be an insult to a gutter-snipe to call me a gutter-snipe, or words to that effect.
Oh, no; I did not say that. It is not fair that I should have that thrust upon me. The Minister may be the censor, but he cannot carry censorship so far as to thrust things we never said on us. I never said anything remotely resembling that.
He said, in my hearing and in the hearing of Senators—I am not particularly interested in this just now, but I took his words down—that a gutter-snipe would be ashamed to use the language I used in the Dáil.
That is exactly what I said.
I should like to tell Senator Hayes what I think of him, but, on this particular occasion, I happen to be in the state of grace.
The Minister was not yesterday.
I try my best—I am only a human being—to behave on all occasions in a reasonable manner, and sometimes it is very difficult when one is faced with unreasonable argument and unreasonable attack, but that is portion of the game, and we have to put up with it as best we can. On this occasion, I am not following Senator Hayes, because I believe that this debate should be kept on a reasonable level. The subject is a very important one for the future of this country. Senator Hayes raised the question of articles in a certain Leinster newspaper which were allowed to appear over several weeks, and I think he is under the impression that every line printed in any newspaper is submitted to the censorship beforehand. That is not the case. The editors submit only matter which they think worth submitting, something about which they have a doubt, and the newspaper editors down the country submit only very occasional articles. We have had one trouble with provincial newspapers, and one only, that is, that a large number of them are one-man shows, and when the editor goes off, somebody is left behind who creates trouble both for himself and the censorship before very long. During this particular series of weeks, I understand that the editor of that newspaper was ill. When the matter was called to the censor's attention, he wrote a very vigorous letter to the editor, who, in his reply, gave that reason for the appearance of these articles to which Senator Hayes objected.
Are not the editor and writer of the articles the same person? I thought they were, but apparently they are not.
It appears not, in this particular instance. The question of the postal censorship was raised by Senator Alton and Senator Keane. Postal censorship is done under an Emergency Powers Order, 1939. It is one of a long list of orders which were prepared before the war, and which were put into operation immediately. It stated in Section 17, Part IV:—
The Minister may by order make provision for securing that postal packets of any such description as may be specified in such order shall be detained by the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and produced for censorship to such authority as may be named in the order.
We have been operating that in relation to the censorship of post going out of the country. We have not operated it in regard to internal post. It is important that we should control the outgoing and incoming mails as far as we can do it, and we have been able to stop a number of stories going out of a scare-mongering type which would indeed have done great damage to the people of the country. We do not care what private people's opinions are. No one beyond the censorship staff sees any of these letters except where there is a case of sedition or treason or near-treason discovered.
Or military information being given.
Yes. There are so many of these letters that no particular operator in the censorship department could take any personal interest in them. There is a huge volume of letters going through. If I have placed correctly the case to which Senator Sir John Keane referred, where an individual was taken into the censorship department and told off, I think practically every Senator here, would agree, if he saw the correspondence, that it should have been stopped, that it was in fact seditious, and that we did the right thing in taking the writer in and telling him it was seditious and that it must stop.
I make no complaint against the stopping of seditious or traitorous items going out of the country but I think we must take an exception to interfering with private opinions on purely domestic points.
If private opinions and information do not impinge on national security nobody is going to bother with them; nobody can be bothered with them, but if opinions are expressed that are seditious or treasonable they are stopped. In the case of Senator Sir John Keane's friend, if I have identified it correctly, a number of letters were stopped with a view to a prosecution and it was thought that it was better simply to take him in and say: "Remember where you are living and stop this sort of thing." The man undertook to stop it and that was an end to the matter. I would wish that people writing out from this country to other countries would bear in mind that in this particular crisis they are bearing their little share of the responsibility for the national security, and even if it means the sacrifice of refraining from saying some of the smart things they say about this country and about our state of preparedness and about what is happening, they should make that sacrifice when the national security is involved.
A letter going from here to England or from here to the Continent, or from here to America, is looked upon as being of more than ordinary importance in these times, and the people should be very careful as to what they say, and particularly in regard to anything which would be harmful to this country if used by an enemy of this country and an enemy of our attitude in this emergency.
I think we are referring to different classes of letters.
I am only saying if I placed Senator Sir John Keane's friend correctly. He said three letters were stopped; that was the number. He says he was brought into the censorship department: there was a man brought into the censorship department and I think I have identified the particular individual. While I am generally responsible, I cannot be personally acquainted with every fiddle-faddle, and if any Senator has any grievance about a letter that has been censored, if he brings it to my attention I promise I will look into it. That is all I can do.
Senator Sir John Keane said that pictures of bomb damage in England were completely cut out and that the people did not know there was a war on. Anybody can take up any of the newspapers any day in the week and see pictures of the bomb damage. I think the Senator has some particular type of bomb damage in mind, but, generally speaking, the people of this country know from the newspaper illustrations here that there is a war on and a very disastrous and destructive war.
I must say that, although I disagree with some of Senator Alton's criticism of myself and censorship, I agree with a lot of the last part of his speech, to the effect that the present generation wants light. Anyway, we are not trying to stop the light, we are only trying to stop some of the smoke that clouds the light.
In regard to newsreels, I am not directly responsible for newsreels, but I can say this, that it has been agreed that newsreels showing war pictures will be stopped for the duration of the war. The reason is that we do not want any trouble in picture-houses. If a newsreel is shown in which one belligerent or the other is prominent, somebody may start to "booh" and somebody may start to cheer, and we do not want that sort of competition to start. We allow war pictures to appear in the newspapers simply because they are in cold print, and if a man gets a newspaper in the morning he will not start either cheering or boohing the paper.
Senator MacDermot generally wants us to open our papers to opinion of one kind or another, opinion for one belligerent or another, propaganda for one belligerent or another.
Sir, the Minister has already answered me, and I submit it is really pressing his privileges too far to answer me all over again.
I want, if I may, to say one or two sentences in regard to this. The Senator said that there was no indication that there was any foreign gold coming in here with which to buy newspaper space or to buy people here to write in a belligerent way in favour of one of the belligerents. With that I totally agree, and I think that Senator MacDermot and any other Senator who spoke here to-night spoke from his own conviction, but if we allowed our newspapers to carry belligerent propaganda we should remember the history of the last war. We here are all pretty young men yet, but we remember what went on, and we have since read with great interest what occurred. We know that in neutral countries belligerents vied with each other in buying up the newspapers of those countries. Our newspapers here may be above that—I believe they are—but they certainly would send in paid agents to write their propaganda and get it into the papers.
The Government could easily stop that.
The best way to stop a lot of things is to stop them before they start. We are trying to stop any row in this country among ourselves about issues that the people do not want raised. We want to stop a row with other countries by preventing it from starting if we can help it. I think I have answered pretty well all the questions that have been raised; I have done my best to do it anyway.
An American visitor broadcasting from this country a few days ago said that in Ireland one looked down upon the war from a mountain top. At the time I did not think that image was altogether a happy one, and I am more than ever convinced of it after listening to this debate. It would have been much more appropriate to have said that we here were in a deep valley, that mountains surrounded us, and that we had no outlook over the mountain-tops.
I am simply appalled by the attitude that has been taken by many of the Senators who have spoken on this motion. There are two very important things that they seemed to me to take no notice of at all. One is that national security is not the same thing as neutrality, and that it is not the same thing as a strict censorship. They have paid no attention to the example which I cited of Holland, where the censorship was as strict as it could possibly be, or to the fact that, nevertheless, Holland was overrun. The second thing that most Senators who spoke on this motion seemed to have paid no attention to is that there may be actual danger—not merely over-caution but actual danger—in a strict censorship. Senator Campbell, for example, gets up and talks of this whole subject as a trifle that the people did not feel any interest in and should not feel any interest in. I quite agree that the mass of agriculturists who have no contact with the censorship and do not even realise what it is doing —a large number of other people in this country are in the same position— may care very little about it, and may not at all realise its importance, but its importance nevertheless is great.
I happen to believe that this country is in terrible danger, and the answer to some observations that Senator McEllin made this evening, and has made on previous occasions and will probably make on future occasions, is simply this, that in bringing forward this motion. I regard myself as taking a step not for promoting the danger but for promoting the safety of this country. To be perfectly frank, as I was frank yesterday, I believe that the real danger facing this country is the possibility, almost amounting to a probability, of a German attempt at invasion in the course of a few months. I am not satisfied that the censorship is so operating as to make a defence against that attempt efficient.
I believe that the country is being kept in the dark about the situation, and I believe that this business of holding the balance so evenly as to suppress all moral considerations, and sedulously to cut out of our minds and out of our newspapers all references to the fate of Holland and of Belgium and of Norway and of Denmark, and the fate that was attempted to be imposed upon Greece, is absolute madness, just as I think it is madness to cut out of our newspapers the other facts that I mentioned yesterday with regard to the extent to which the British have stood by us in the matter of supplies, including arms. Now it may be—I am sure it is—in the opinion of Senator Tunney totally unIrish to make a statement of that kind, and the man who makes such a statement deserves the pity of every true Irishman, but I cannot help it if people do think that when I consider that it is my duty to say it, and that it is important to the Irish people to realise it.
The Minister has professed satisfaction with the general tone of this debate. I am afraid that, apart altogether from the points which I have already mentioned, I fail to share that satisfaction. Practically every speaker against the motion followed the illustrious example set by the Minister, and made a personal attack on me and on my motives one of the main features of his speech. Well, after all that, my head, in the words of the poet, "is bloody but unbowed." Let me amend what I have just said by saying "practically every opponent of this motion in the Minister's Party." It has been my lot to plough a fairly solitary furrow for a good many years. Some malignant fairy who was not invited to my christening seems to have decreed that it should be my lot in life to advocate unpopular causes, causes that may be popular in some places, but it has been my lot to advocate them in places where they are unpopular.
The Minister has talked of me as having "blown in" from some obscure place in the world, and as having committed an error of taste and judgment in venturing to project myself, as he described it, into certain of the higher spheres of Irish life, prominent among which is, of course, his own administration. Now, I do not want to labour personal issues, but there is a certain importance in this because of the extraordinary revelation of the Minister's totalitarianism. He considers, in the first place, that once he has been elected to the Government, and once certain powers have devolved upon him, thereafter the natural and democratic thing for the people to do is to fold their hands and leave it all to him, and never to venture a word in the way of criticism or suggestion or guidance. That is totalitarianism—if that is democracy, then the régime that is in force in Germany at the present time is democracy—and it seems to me that the whole of the Minister's philosophy of government is consistent with the totalitarian régime and is inconsistent with a democratic régime properly understood.
I am unfortunately a good deal older than the Minister, and even though I was absent from this country when he was so distinguishing himself in the period to which he referred last night, I can claim that I was advocating Irish self-government on platforms both in this country and in England at a time when the Minister was still in the nursery. If we are to talk, as Senator McGinley did, of planters and natives, I have a notion that I have, at any rate, as good a right as the Minister to be considered as a native. And I am not so ignorant as the Minister supposes of the years to which he refers.
There have been very short periods in my life when I have not followed, with close attention, events in Ireland, and there are not many books of any worth at all written about that period that I have not read. And that is not the whole of Irish history. I cannot admit that any primacy can be claimed for that particular period of Irish history. As I have told the Minister, I should be very happy to sit as a competitor with him in any examination on Irish history in general.
I much resent the kind of approach he has made to this matter. He has accused me of having a sort of superiority complex and has tried to justify that by saying that I had no sooner gone to the Dáil than I accused people of being gutter-snipes. I am rather grateful to the Minister for having alluded to that particular speech, because it has considerable relevance to the situation we are in to-day and the very discussion we are now conducting. The speech in question—it was not my first, but my third—was made on the subject of the Bill to abolish the Oath of Allegiance, and the line I took was not that we had not a right to do so, not that we would be gutter-snipes to separate ourselves from the Commonwealth, but that we should do one thing or the other; that if we were going to abolish the Oath of Allegiance and begin the process which ended at the time of the constitutional crisis when Edward VIII abdicated, we might as well walk out of the Commonwealth at once with our heads up and not go on astutely enjoying all the material advantages that we could get out of the Commonwealth, while at the same time keeping up a spirit of hostility towards it.
It was in connection with that argument that I said: "We are an ancient race with noble and moving traditions, with tragic and glorious memories. Do not let us behave like gutter-snipes." I am not ashamed of having said that, and I think the whole course of our history since 1932 proves I am right. I think that at this moment we would have escaped from the reproaches levelled at us, and, in my judgment, levelled at us with considerable justification by other parts of the Commonwealth—that, having gone on getting all the advantages we could get out of it in times of peace, we desert them in the hour of their greatest need.
Several Senators said that we have a right to be neutral. Of course we have. I have never denied it for a minute. We have the right to be neutral, but certainly our credit in regard to that position of neutrality would stand much higher than it does if we had not followed this ambiguous policy of trying to make the best of both worlds. I make no excuse for having tried to prevent that, and having brought forward motions that we should go out of the British Commonwealth, motions that were always attacked by members of the Minister's Party on the ground that they were insincere, in spite of my assurances that they were perfectly sincere. That is more than enough about that.
The outlook of the Minister, when he wishes to exclude from the discussion of important affairs people whom he considers are a small minority, is a totalitarian outlook. When I was elected for County Roscommon, my constituents did not ask me to abstain from projecting myself upon certain spheres of Irish life. When I was reelected with an increase of 3,000 first preference votes, again no such condition was made, nor would I have consented to enter Parliament upon any such condition. When the Minister's own Prime Minister was good enough to nominate me for this House, he did not make any such condition, nor did I anticipate that anybody in his Party would ever be so narrow-minded as to suggest that I should keep my mouth shut because I represented only a minority.
Am I really so very unrepresentative? Is it certain, if there was an election to the Seanad to-morrow by a nationwide constituency, that I would not have as good a chance of a seat here as a great many of those who constantly abuse me for being unrepresentative?
I resent the fact the people have been ascribing all sorts of motives to me for bringing forward this motion. My action should be judged on its own merits. My motives are not very important anyway. I have asserted, with all the force and sincerity of which I am capable, that my motive is to assist the welfare and security of this country and not to destroy them. I believe from my heart that the more rational exercise of the censorship could do a great deal in that direction. Many Senators have spoken as if we were proposing to abolish the censorship. We are not proposing to abolish it, but to rationalise it, and we have not done so in any arrogant manner. We have suggested certain principles and we would have been willing to consider suggestions for their improvement if such were put forward by the Government, but they have not been put forward.
Senator Campbell says that he has been subjected to criticism because of his speech on the last occasion when the censorship was discussed here. I hardly think that criticism will be at all assuaged by the speech he made here to-night. I have rarely read a speech that showed more complete indifference to democratic principles in regard to freedom of speech and freedom of the Press than the speech he made here on December 4th. He described people who were interested in such things as fine theorists who come here and indulge in high falutin' talk about freedom when what they mean is not freedom but licence. He said he represented 250,000 people; he heard no great outcry against the censorship, and consequently the whole thing was trivial. He said there was a little coterie in this country who affected to be devotees at the shrine of liberal thought, and who did not like censorship of books, nor our divorce laws, nor many other things which people of this country favour. He dragged in the divorce laws by the tail, although they have nothing to do with the subject.
The general idea of the speech was to blacken the plaintiff's attorney by suggestions of that description. The vast majority of the people, he said, favour censorship—not alone the censorship we are discussing at the present time, but censorship in other matters. I am not at all surprised that some of his friendly critics told him that he was worse than the Minister for the Coordination of Defensive Measures in his outlook on the censorship. There is nothing he said to-day that is at all likely to remove that impression, not even his attribution of all sorts of sinister motives to me.
You have admitted it already in your speech.
I quite agree that the working of the censorship is a difficult matter and it may be that, as Senator Hayes says, there is no entirely satisfactory solution except to get the very wisest and most tactful and most broadminded man you can find in the whole country to be censor. Senator Hayes finds me the reverse of soothing, on occasions, but at any rate we are at one in thinking that the Minister does not quite come up to specification in that regard.
Senator Hayes said that more courage is required on the part of those who have complaints to make. The trouble is, if I am correctly informed, that there are some complaints they cannot make because of the conditions of secrecy that are imposed on them. I know, at any rate, that much of the information I got in connection with cases that I cited in this debate came to me in envelopes from people who did not sign their names because they felt, apparently, that they would get into trouble if I should quote their names. Naturally I did not use any information that I was not able to authenticate, and I am glad that, of about 13 cases I quoted in my speech yesterday, there was not a single one that turned out to be unauthentic.
The Minister made some attempt to deal with some of them. I do not think, personally, that he justified what was done by the censorship in most of those he dealt with. In fact I am not sure that he did so in any of those he dealt with. There were also some left with which he did not deal at all. There was the suppression of the writer who wished to quote from the Bishop of Waterford in The Standard. There was the suppression in the cinema news reel, the suppression of the fact that the bombs which had been dropped in Dublin had been identified as German. There was the suppression of part of the speech of his colleague, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, made some time ago, and there was the suppression of the facts in regard to the flying of Mrs. Clarke's flag. With none of these things did the Minister deal at all, and they still seem to me to remain as sins upon his head.
Senator McGinley, in reply to my remarks about democratic usage, objected to my taking any examples from England. I gathered he did so upon patriotic grounds, but after all England is one of the oldest democracies in the world and democratic usage is well established there.
Ní doigh liom-sa go raibh síad democratic riamh.
In that case, if the British are undemocratic, we ought easily to excel them by our democratic practices, whereas the sad fact is that we fall behind them in this particular matter of free speech. The Senator instances the suppression of the Daily Worker as an example of non-democratic methods but, as a matter of fact, it is an example of quite the contrary. The Daily Worker was allowed to go on for months publishing things that were extremely hostile to Government policy and it was in the end suppressed because Ministers, including Labour Ministers, and practically the whole of the British Parliament, became convinced that it was deliberately promoting sabotage and the breaking-down of the war effort in Britain. It is even now perfectly legal to speak or write in favour of peace in Great Britain, so I think that the Senator has been misinformed when he says that the British are undemocratic.
Ce'n cineál democracy atá ann?
Tá siad democratic sa bhaile.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
Nil morán baint idir sin agus an tairsgint.
I do not say this in any hostile sense but the Senator himself, if I am correctly informed, affords a very striking example of their tolerance and their democratic feeling. I said last night, and he nodded assent, that throughout his life he had been an ardent propagandist for the Irish language and that it was far from being in any way to his discredit. Was he interfered with by the British during the British régime?
Bhios, go minic.
At any rate, he was not so far interfered with as to cause him to cease being a propagandist.
Dhibrigh siad as Eireann mé uair amháin agus bhagair siad orm mé dhibirt dha uair eile. B'éigean dom, fe'n bhaghairt sin, eirighe as Connradh na Gaedhilge ar feadh sé bliana.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
I would suggest that Senator MacDermot might refrain from further reference to Senator McGinley's career.
I do not wish to enlarge upon that except to suggest that one who has had such a long experience of Government service under the British régime here, and has nevertheless been able to carry on propaganda which he regarded as highly unpalatable to them, should not be the first to accuse them of not practising the principles of tolerance and democracy. I say that without any hostility to the Senator, but because I think it is a fair point to make.
I should like, in conclusion, to direct attention to the actual terms of this motion. Senator Rowlette complained that not enough has been said about those terms, so perhaps I might quote them at this stage. The motion reads:—
That, in the opinion of the Seanad:
(1) Fundamental constitutional rights ought not to be abrogated more than is necessary for national safety even during war or the threat of war.
Senator Mrs. Concannon and Senator Rowlette took exception to the word "abrogated" and suggested that the word "suspended" would be more suitable. Possibly, but I do not think that the word "abrogated" implies any sort of permanence or finality. I think it merely means "cancelled". A thing could be cancelled for the time being as distinct from being cancelled for ever and a day. I do not think that that point need be taken very seriously.
The motion goes on:
In particular, the right to express opinion on Government policy and to persuade one's fellow-citizens ought not to be so abrogated as to give excuse for unconstitutional action.
Now, nothing has been said about that point in this debate, but I did say something about it on the last occasion when the Seanad discussed the censorship. I do not think we ought to lose sight of it altogether. You do give an excuse for unconstitutional action if you deny the right of people to express their opinions and to persuade their fellow-citizens. There are subversive elements in this State who might take advantage of that excuse. If there are people who believe that we ought to go to war on the side of Germany, I personally think that they should be free to say so and to try to persuade their fellow-citizens.
It so happens that the element who would wish that we should enter the war on the side of Britain are not a type who would be likely to take subversive action, but the same argument applies to them, too, and if there were amongst them people of subversive inclinations, the censorship does give them that excuse. That is a thing we ought to bear in mind.
While we are on that point, I cannot agree with the suggestion of Senator McGinley that the bulk of those who sympathise with Britain and the British Commonwealth in this country are planters or the descendants of planters. That has not been my experience. I know a considerable number of people who are actually in the British Army. I have several near relations who are actually in the British Army. By far the majority of Irishmen that I know who are in the British Army at the present time are of Gaelic descent, and are not the sons of planters. As regards the Irish in other countries, the Senator has said that some Gaels from England told him that they were against Great Britain in this war. That may be, but I will say that the vast majority of Irishmen in every country in the Commonwealth and a considerable majority in America are decidedly on the side of Great Britain and her allies.
Sin é an rud adubhairt mé nach creidim.
I lived for six years in America, and spent two weeks there this summer, and I was absolutely astounded by the change I found in the attitude towards the British. I met a number of Irish people who had subscribed heavily for years to the Irish cause in the old days. There was not a single one amongst those Irish who were not ardent for the cause of Great Britain in the war; nor did that apply only to rich people capable of giving big subscriptions. One of the first people I spoke to was a man from Clonmel, a porter in the hotel, and his feelings were the same. I found that everywhere, and learned the same thing from others I spoke to who had moved about among the Irish people, while I was in America. The Senator is very misinformed if he does not realise that there has been a profound change in the sentiment towards Great Britain of the majority of the Irish people in the United States, because of the issues they see at stake in this struggle. The motion goes on:—
Consequently, the Press censorship ought not to exclude matter from publication except upon one or more of the following grounds:
(a) disclosure of military secrets;
(b) treason, sedition, or incitement to disobey the law;
(c) violence and intemperance of language tending to excite civil commotion or provoke external attack;
(d) dissemination of unfounded rumours, likely to produce disaffection or panic.
It is possible that these categories could be usefully supplemented, but the Minister has not sought to supplement them. At any rate, they are wider, and they cover a good deal more, and give the Minister a good deal more latitude and discretion, than the general principles he quoted here to-night in referring to a speech which he had made in the Dáil. After all, they are not so bad, and I do not think they deserve the imputations which have been made against them of being utterly reckless and tying the Minister's hand to an intolerable degree. They do represent an honest effort to suggest something which might be workable.
Apart from what I regard as the negligible and unmeaning suggestions of Senator Mac Fhionnlaoich, no attempt has been made to improve upon those categories. Therefore, I propose to stand by them, always bearing in mind, at the same time, that I am in favour of a committee being set up to whom complaints could be brought—such a committee as Senator Douglas has again supported this evening—to whom complaints could be brought and with whom the Minister could, in a friendly manner, discuss outstanding problems and difficulties raised by the newspapers.
I suggest that this motion deserves support, even from those who believe that these categories are in themselves insufficient, as the most important part of the motion is perhaps contained in the first two paragraphs, and I am not so confident as some are that these paragraphs are accepted at heart by the members of the Minister's Party. I would like to be sure that they were. If the general spirit of the motion has the assent of Senators who are inclined to think that the categories are insufficient as they stand or are even inclined to think that it would be better to dispense with categories and to have a committee whom the Minister could occasionally consult, I suggest that, on general principles, it would be wise for them to support this motion rather than give the Minister a clean sheet and enable him to go away saying that the Seanad had decided that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, so far as censorship is concerned.
Amendment put and declared carried.
Division.
Leas-Chathaoirleach
Would the Senators claiming a division please rise?
Senators Alton, Joseph Johnston, MacDermot and Rowlette rose.
As fewer than five Senators had risen, the Leas-Chathaoirleach declared the amendment agreed to and stated that the Senators who had risen would be recorded as dissenting.
Question: "That the motion, as amended, be agreed to,"—put and declared negatived, there being no voice in favour.
The Seanad adjourned at 9.10 p.m.sine die.