I move the amendment. This is a motion of very great importance. It is important not because any of us want to seek out evidence of corruption anywhere, but because of its application to the question of Parliamentary government and to whether Parliamentary government in this country can be conducted in a proper way and can survive and hold the esteem of the people. I agree entirely with the Taoiseach that it is not a matter for us here to go into these accusations. I have no interest in the Deputy who made the accusations in the other House, and I have no animus against any member of this House, no matter what his politics may be. For my part, I should regret that any member of this House or the other House should be convicted of any kind of improper conduct with regard to the discharge of his Parliamentary or public duties. I regret that the matter was debated twice in the Dáil. That it was debated twice in the Dáil, was, I think entirely owing to the inaction of the Government. They got from the Opposition in the Dáil a motion to set up a Parliamentary committee to investigate this matter. They got that motion on Friday. It was discussed the following Wednesday but the Government had, up to the following Wednesday, decided upon no line of their own. Late that evening, they produced an amendment to have a judicial tribunal, which amendment is now before us in the form of a substantive motion. That motion had to be discussed separately in the Dáil and, yesterday, that House spent a considerable portion of its time dealing with the matter.
It is very regrettable that the matter should have been discussed twice in the other House. Perhaps the most regrettable thing in connection with it was that, when an endeavour was made in the other House to discuss this matter entirely objectively and from the point of view of what type of tribunal should be set up, a member of the Government—the Minister for Industry and Commerce—thought fit to make a speech of a threatening, blustering, cross-examining type, which, unfortunately, lowered the whole tone of the debate.
So far as I am concerned, I am opposed to the type of tribunal the Taoiseach proposes to set up and to which the Dáil, by a majority, agreed yesterday. I am opposed to it because I think it is bad for Parliament that matters which arise in Parliament should be made the subject of judicial inquiry. I have no animus against anybody and I should like to say that I am not ashamed of this Parliament after 25 years' experience of it. Considered either by absolute standards or in relation to other Parliaments, I think that there is nothing we need be ashamed of, generally. I am interested in the survival of Parliament and in the retention of the confidence of the people in Parliament. The question we have to discuss to-day is not a Party question. It is not a question entirely of finding out facts or ferreting out some defect in somebody in the Parliament or outside it. It is a matter of vital interest to us and we have to discuss and decide upon this motion not in the light of our Party interests but in the best interests of Parliament and Parliamentary government. I do not propose to discuss in any way the accusations made. The issue is, accordingly, whether a Committee of the Dáil or, better still, a Joint Committee of both Houses, would be more suitable than the tribunal proposed in this motion.
Let us see how the matter arises. It arises from the exercise by a member of Dáil Eireann of his privilege. Privilege is absolutely guaranteed in the two Houses. It is an inheritance from the British and, in the most explicit way, the present Constitution guarantees, and the Constitution of 1922 guaranteed, that privilege. I am entirely in favour of privilege for members of both Houses and I think it should be guaranteed. It is necessary that it should not be diminished or hampered by any code of rules drawn up a priori, dealing with what members of either House may or may not say.
I am entirely in favour of that undiminished privilege but I agree that the privilege should be carefully exercised. When a Deputy or Senator exercises his privilege and makes an accusation, it may serve the good purpose of exposing evil or it may be used recklessly, as it has on some occasions been used, to injure the innocent. When such a charge is being investigated, it seems to me that it should be investigated in two aspects: (1) whether the accusations are true or not and (2) whether the exercise of privilege by the member of the House who made the accusations was justified or not. But a member of either House may be very grievously at fault without acting either illegally or criminally. That is another reason for my objection to this tribunal of judicial persons. They are concerned entirely with the law—with illegalities and with breaches of the criminal code or some other legal code. They are not concerned with the propriety, or otherwise, of the conduct of members of Parliament and they may take a very different view from that which Parliament or a committee of both Houses would take. A member of the British Parliament has just been expelled from that Parliament by a completely non-Party vote for an offence which did not bring him within the law at all, which did not merit his trial in a court of law in England, or sentence by any form of judicial tribunal. A committee of the House of Commons, and, subsequently, the House of Commons itself, acting entirely apart from the Party Whips, acting as a House without regard to Parties, considered the offence, which was not a criminal offence, to be so serious that the member in question should be expelled from the House. No judicial tribunal would have come to that conclusion. It is not the business of judges to come to a conclusion as to the propriety or otherwise of the conduct of members of Parliament. That is a very grievous defect in this motion. We have to watch and make sure, not in our capacity as members of different Parties but in our capacity as members of this House and persons who believe in Parliamentary Government, that members of both Houses shall conduct themselves in such a way as to merit the approval of their fellow-members. That is quite a different thing from approving of somebody's opinions. There must be a code of conduct and, if that code of conduct is broken, it is the House, or a committee acting for the House, that should come to a decision. Members have rights and privileges but they also have duties and, while we should be jealous to see that our privileges are preserved, we should also be jealous to see that we carry out our duties properly.
Let us consider what a judicial tribunal is and what the ordinary duties of judges are. In the first instance, it seems to me that it is very objectionable that judges whose function it is to administer the law and who are supposed to be removed and aloof from politics, and politicians, if possible, should be dragged into this kind of thing—I should say, advisedly and literally, dragged down to this kind of thing. That should not be the case. I am sure that the judges find it distasteful work. I am sure that none of the judges desires to turn aside from his ordinary work which, I understand, is sufficiently heavy at the moment, to take part in this kind of business. Another question is whether judges are suited to make this kind of inquiry. I think the answer is that they are not, that their whole training and the exercise of their ordinary functions makes them unsuitable for investigating a matter of this kind. Our judicial system is based upon the notion that an accused person is innocent until he is proved guilty. Judges are accustomed to come to their decision only after the case has been put to them by counsel on both sides, after examination of witnesses by skilled counsel, cross-examination, sometimes re-examination, and speeches made on both sides. Judges are not in any sense persons who probe for information or who themselves carry out investigations and examine witnesses. In fact, I think that it is not disrespectful to say that the judge who himself acts the part of prosecutor is generally regarded at the Bar and in the courts as not a good judge but the very reverse. The good judge adopts an attitude of aloofness, he hears the evidence, allows counsel to cross-examine the witnesses, within certain limits, and then takes his own line. He is not what is known in France as a juge d'instruction, a title which has never been properly translated and which it is almost impossible to translate. The French functionary examines an accused person with a view to proving that he is guilty. No such officer is known to the British code or to the code we have adopted from the British.
That is exactly what you want in this case. It is exactly what you might have in a Dáil Committee or a Joint Committee but exactly what you cannot get from the Bench and that you cannot get from any form of judicial person. The judges are accustomed to having the facts put up to them and indeed it is in many cases for a jury and not for a judge to decide on the facts—in other words, for a body of people similar to a Joint Committee of the Dáil and Seanad to decide the facts. The tendency also of judges, I think, is to be narrow—quite a proper tendency when they are doing their own ordinary job—and to decide matters on legal principles. This tribunal which the Taoiseach suggests to us now will have no prosecutor and no defending counsel. I understand. Although this tribunal has power to prescribe its own procedure. I wonder if the Taoiseach has given any consideration to this point, as to whether the tribunal could appoint counsel either to prosecute or to defend. I think it would be very difficult. Anyhow, the matter at issue in this case is not a legal matter and that is the point that I want particularly to insist upon. A Dáil Committee would be better or a Joint Committee would be better still to get the facts and report to both Houses their view on the facts.
My experience of committees is a fairly wide one and even at a time when feeling ran high in the Dáil, when feeling was, so to speak, made to run high by manufactured excitement on the part of an Opposition front bench which was manufacturing excitement for its own political purposes, under the able guidance of the Taoiseach himself, even then Committees of the Dáil worked absolutely smoothly—the Committee of Public Accounts, the Committee on Procedure and Privileges in the Dáil, and Committees in this House too. Members on all sides of this House who have acted on committees can have brought away from these committees only one feeling, that is, a feeling that a committee is a place where there is no friction, no acrimony and very rarely divisions.
It is alleged, for example, against a Dáil Committee that it would report entirely on political considerations. I do not think it would. Committees have always worked well and their opinions and verdicts have been fairly given. In the other House the Taoiseach himself quoted reports of a committee dealing with certain mining rights and he read the unanimous report of that committee which contained members of the Opposition and members of the Government and members of the Labour Party, and which was presided over, I think, by the Leader of the Labour Party, and which was able to present an unbiased, calm, well-reasoned, unanimous judgment. Therefore it is not true to say that a Dáil Committee cannot investigate this kind of thing. It is, I think, rather true to say that a judicial tribunal given very strict terms of reference and construing them very strictly, itself, will not be able to do the job at all.
It is vital, I think, that Parliamentarians here should decide these things for themselves. Remember, now, what is called the Ward Tribunal was a different thing. The aspects of the Ward case which were considered by a judicial tribunal similar to this one arose by the intervention of a person outside the Dáil—a letter to the Taoiseach from a non-member of the Dáil—but a matter which arises within the Dáil or within the Seanad or within the Oireachtas should be decided, I think, within, instead of by an outside tribunal. It is vital that we should decide these things for ourselves and it is all-important that we should not be threatened, as the Minister for Industry and Commerce threatened in the other House, I think, with great deliberation, because I admire the Minister for Industry and Commerce as a Parliamentarian. He never loses his temper, and if last Wednesday he pretended to lose his temper, he certainly had not lost it at all but, for his own political purposes, he was taking a particular line. He did succeed in reducing the level of the debate.
I do not agree for a moment that members of the Dáil or Seanad should be subjected to a code drawn up beforehand, but I do think that as cases arise, like this case, and as other cases have arisen, they should be investigated and opinions should be given by a Dáil Committee or by a Joint Committee and the decision should serve as a guidance for the future and be accepted. If we do not do that it seems to me we will have completely failed to keep our own House in order.
There is a peculiar feature about this question of tribunals and reports. Numerous things have happened which have never been reported upon and things have happened which seemed to me, with my view of Parliament, to be nothing short of outrageous. I have heard the Taoiseach, as Leader of the Opposition, making an accusation against the head of the Government which was rebutted that night in the Dáil and had to be withdrawn, but there was no inquiry into it. The Taoiseach, from his place as Leader of the House and head of the Government, made a very foul accusation against Deputy Mulcahy, which he gave a run to for a week and then came in and said it was not true; his informant would not stand over it. But nobody ever inquired into it and nobody ever heard who the informant was and nobody ever heard what happened to the informant. There was no inquiry. So, the position we are in is that wild accusations have been made before but were never inquired into and were never violently protested against by the people who are now so enthusiastic that we should have in this case a particular type of inquiry with a particular type of terms of reference.
Indeed, so far as I am concerned, I think the worst thing that ever happened for the Dáil happened some time ago and there was no inquiry into it at all, when a Minister of the Government, at a political meeting of its Party, attacked the present Ceann Comhairle, and there was no inquiry and no punishment. If a Committee of the Dáil had ever considered that, they would have decided unanimously, irrespective of Party, that that was an outrage upon decency in Parliament because a person was attacked who had no opportunity of making a reply of any kind, either inside or outside the Dáil. Yet, the Taoiseach, by a familiar example of casuistry, was able to say it was not a crime to do that until the Ceann Comhairle had said so. It is an extraordinary state of affairs.
I think that we should be concerned entirely for Parliamentary decorum and I am not enthusiastic about Parliamentary decorum being stodgy, and I never was. We should be concerned to defend the privilege of Deputies but we should also be determined to see that when Deputies exercise their privilege they will do so with due sense of responsibility and, if they overstep the bounds, they will be exposed, and the opinion, not of judges who are not competent to discuss it, but of their own colleagues, will be given as to whether or not they did overstep the bounds of decent and proper use of privilege. I think that is due, not only to members of the House, but to outsiders outside the House who have in this particular case been maligned, if that is the right word.
Now, Sir, my whole case is this, that no one can save Parliament except itself and that, when something of this kind occurs in Parliament, Parliament itself, through a committee, must investigate it, must get facilities for investigating it and must declare quite clearly its opinion on the matter. I have no concern as to what the opinion is. I have no hopes in the matter beyond what I expressed in the beginning that, looking at Parliament as I do, and as I always have done, I would regret that any member of this House or of the other House, of any Party or of no Party, should be found guilty of improper conduct, because that is a come-down for every single one of us. We should remember that. It is in that spirit, I think, that an investigation would be conducted by a committee selected from the Dáil or from the Dáil and Seanad. I do not think anyone can save us but ourselves. I do not think judges can do it nor judicial inquiries nor judicial decisions. In cases of this kind these decisions are always unsatisfactory. They are always canvassed after the event. The responsibility is ours and I think that we should carry out that responsibility.
I say we should carry out that responsibility acting in the spirit, not only of justice, but also the spirit of charity because this thing seems to me to be entirely a matter concerning the future of our people and the future of our institutions, not so much the reputation of any individual. We must establish a proper kind of conduct and I think when we go to appoint a judicial tribunal we are shirking the issue ourselves and we are refusing to accept a responsibility that should be ours and that should be nobody else's. That should be our position in this particular case.
With regard to the amendment, I wish to say a brief word. If we are not to have a Dáil Committee—and I think we ought to have a Dáil or a Joint Committee, and I am going to vote against this motion for that reason and for no other reason—I think that the tribunal set up should be as little hampered as possible. I suggest that my amendment is a reasonable one and would leave entirely to the tribunal the settlement of whether or not a particular matter was of public importance. They should be able to discuss all the facts and circumstances of the proposed disposal, not only as it concerns either House or any Government Department, but in so far as any other matter may, in the judgment of the tribunal, be of public importance.
I make an appeal to the Taoiseach not to consider this matter in the light of the defence of anybody, but to have some confidence in this Parliament. If confidence were reposed in Parliament and in a committee or a joint committee, the results would be more in accord with justice and would tend more to raise Parliamentary prestige than the kind of tribunal and inquiry now suggested.