Mr. Stanleymoved, that the Order of the Day, that Thomas Sheehan do appear at the Bar of that House, be then read. The right hon. Gentleman then called the attention of the House to The Dublin Evening Mail newspaper of the 21st inst. and put it into the hands of the Clerk, who, having stated the title of the Paper and the publisher's name, proceeded to read an article entitled "Irish Tithes," in which it was stated that the Editors of that Journal had received, exclusively, through their resident parliamentary agent, the second Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons which sat upon the subject of Irish Tithes; that at the hour at which they had received it, it was only in their power to give it a cursory glance, but that they were enabled to 231 perceive, even from that hasty notice, that the Committee had recommended that the State should constitute itself the proprietor of all the tithes of Ireland; that they should be converted into a permanent land-tax, payable by the landlords instead of the tenantry—that Church cess should be abolished—and that there should be a new valuation of Church property. Another part of the paper was also read. It was headed "Second Report of the Committee of the House of Commons on Irish Tithes."
The Order of the Day, that Thomas Sheehan do appear at the Bar, was read, and Mr. Sheehan being in attendance was placed at the bar.
§ The SpeakerWhat is your name?—Thomas Sheehan.
§ The SpeakerLook at that Paper; are you a proprietor of it?—I am.
§ The SpeakerLook at its contents. Have you any statement to offer to the House on the subject?—The only statement I have to make with respect to the present proceeding of the House is, that the document referred to is that I sent to Ireland for insertion in this Paper.
§ The SpeakerIn what character or capacity did you forward that document for publication?—In my own individual character, and none other.
§ The SpeakerPurporting to be——
§ The SpeakerThen the House is to understand that you decline answering this question?
Mr. SheehanI am sorry to decline replying to any question which is put to me by the House; but I shall certainly give no reply that could compromise any other person.
§ The SpeakerHas the House any question to put?
§ The Speakerinquired if the House had any other questions to put? and there being none, Mr. Sheehan withdrew.
Mr. Stanleysaid, that in the present case there was evidently gross negligence amongst some one or other of the officers of that House, or of some person employed by them, and it would be a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the House if they did not take a decided step, with a view to putting an end to practices of that nature. With respect to the draft of the Report in question, there were but twenty copies of it printed, and those copies were transmitted under sealed covers, and it became, therefore, impossible that the document in question could have reached the hands of Mr. Sheehan otherwise than through a gross breach of confidence on the part of some person in the employment of that House. The House had had Mr. Sheehan at the bar, and had put certain interrogatories to him, and he having declined to answer any questions respecting the means by which he had possessed himself of the document in question, he thereby took upon himself the whole responsibility of the publication; and now one of two courses remained open to the House; either they might commit Mr. Sheehan to Newgate, or to the custody of the Serjeant at Arms. He should of course leave it to the judgment of the House to decide which course it would pursue; but before he sat down, he thought it right to call the attention of the House to an article published in The Dublin Evening Mail newspaper of the 28th of May, from which it was very clear, that it was the intention of Mr. Sheehan to set the authority of that House at defiance. In the conclusion of the article to which he referred, the writer stated, that having procured the Report of the Committee, at which the editors were much gratified, they would be wanting in the duty they owed to their readers, and the public, if they did not give it immediate insertion, referring, as it did, to a matter of the highest importance. The article then went on 'We have all becoming respect for the privileges of Parliament, and would not infringe an iota upon the rights of its Members; but we should be wanting in that duty we owe our readers were we to withhold from them a piece of interesting intelligence which happened to be in our possession. Mr. Stanley is talking of summoning the proprietor, editor, and printer, to the Bar of the House. He may save himself all this trouble. One of the former is now resident in London, 233 and has, if we be instructed rightly, apprised Mr. Stanley of his willingness to take all the responsibility attachable to the publication of the Tithe Report upon himself, and his readiness to give the Irish Secretary and the Committee just so much information as he thinks necessary upon the subject, and not a bit more.' Having made this statement to the House, he should not then trouble them further than to move a Resolution, declaring that the publication of that draft of a Report was a high breach of privilege. The right hon. Gentleman concluded by moving "Resolved—That Thomas Sheehan, Editor of the Irish paper called The Dublin Evening Mail, having published a Report purporting to be a Report of a Select Committee of this House, the same not having been presented to this House is guilty of a high breach of its privileges."
§ Mr. Huntobserved, that when they allowed the Press generally to publish so many things that constituted breaches of privilege, and openly and notoriously to commit those breaches of privilege, they could scarcely, with much justice or consistency, select Mr. Sheehan for a victim. The House and the country could not fail to see that Mr. Sheehan was laughing at the right hon. Gentleman opposite, and that all Ireland was laughing at him. When a display of artillery, cavalry, and infantry was recently made to protect the sale of some cattle for tithe, the people of Ireland laughed at the government of the right hon. Gentleman, and not a man in the city of Cork was to be found who would offer a single shilling for a bullock worth ten guineas. Could the House, then, shut its eyes to the fact, that the people of Ireland were laughing at the Irish Government? He wished that the House would not assist the right hon. Gentleman to punish Mr. Sheehan for joining in the laugh with the rest of his countrymen.
Colonel Percevalconfessed himself unable to discover upon what grounds Mr. Sheehan should have been selected, when so many others had been guilty of breaches of privilege; but it was to be observed, that the other offenders all belonged to the opposite party in politics, and it was on account of his opinions, he presumed, that this most uncalled for severity was exercised towards Mr. Sheehan.
§ Mr. Anthony Lefroycould not justify the publication of this document, nor 234 could he deny that a breach of the privileges of the house had been committed; but he did not think it expedient that the House should be called upon to interfere in this case. The right hon. Gentleman had placed the House in the very awkward situation of either abandoning its privileges, or of unnecessarily punishing the editor of a paper. He would not allude to papers in which much greater breaches of privilege were daily published, but he must say, that the right hon. Gentleman had acted most harshly in the course which he had thought proper to pursue with regard to this paper. If he had held out a warning to the editor, he would have acted wisely, instead of passing over affairs of a similar nature without notice, and suddenly falling on the proprietors of this paper. Under such circumstances, he considered the conduct of the right hon. Gentleman to have been most unfair and unjust.
Mr. Stanleyrose to reply to the uncalled-for attack made upon him, as if, under such circumstances, he could be at all actuated by the politics of the paper committing the offence. The duty which he was discharging was not one which he had taken upon himself—it was a duty imposed upon him by the Committee. In stating this, he felt bound to add, that the Committee, in coming to the decision of instructing him to adopt the course which he had pursued, came to that decision by a vote, in which the minority was only one, and that member of the Committee was of politics opposed to those of The Evening Mail and of the hon. Members opposite. He begged also to remind the hon. Gentleman who had spoken last, that a near relative of his had expressed an earnest wish that the conduct of Mr. Sheehan should be brought, as it had been, under consideration, and that hon. and learned relative of the last speaker was the more anxious that it should thus be gone into, seeing that he himself was one of those members of the Committee whom the draft so often referred to had not reached. He (Mr. Stanley) felt fully assured that Mr. Sheehan had never obtained the draft through that hon. and learned Gentleman. The last speaker ought to have known how the matter really stood, and, knowing it, he ought not to have made such an attack as the House had just heard; he should not have imputed party motives where none whatever existed, and when hon. Members com- 235 plained that Mr. Sheehan was the only person punished, they should have been prepared to show that other persons were accessaries to a breach of confidence on the part of the subordinate officers of that House, or any breach of privilege with which he (Mr. Stanley) was similarly connected. The complaint, it seemed, was, that other papers had committed breaches of privilege, but who originated them? The document had gone the round of the papers, and it was of that he complained. He also contended that Mr. Sheehan's chief offence consisted not so much in publishing the document, though that was of itself a breach of privilege, but in now refusing to assist the House in discovering the person who had really abused the confidence of the House.
§ Mr. Anthony Lefroyhad hoped that the good feeling of the right hon. Gentleman opposite would have restrained him from throwing out the insinuation he had thrown out against his relative ["no, no!"]. The right hon. Gentleman certainly had seemed to convey an imputation upon his relative as one of the two who had not received their copies of the Report.
Mr. Goulburnfelt perfectly assured that his hon. friend near him altogether mistook the right hon. Gentleman opposite: so far from implying any imputation upon the hon. and learned member of the Committee, he distinctly acquitted him of any participation in the affair. That this was a breach of confidence to the House, and to some members of the Committee, could not be doubted, for those Reports were enclosed in sealed covers, so that the packets must have been opened by some person having no authority so to do. The House should likewise look to the consequences of such a breach of privilege to the country, if persons into whose hands such papers fell, and they must occasionally fall into the hands of unauthorized persons—were allowed to give them to the public. He would instance the Committee, of which both he (Mr. Goulburn) and the right hon. mover were members, on the Bank Charter. The publication of some of the papers which were before that Committee, if divulged, might have the most alarming effect upon the public credit; yet many of them must occasionally come into the hands of subordinate and irresponsible persons. As to Mr. Sheehan, there could be no doubt that, under the circumstances, it would have 236 been thought expedient to treat him with lenity, had he not shown a disposition to resist the authority of the House. Seeing the many breaches of privilege that were every day committed, he might have thought it no great matter, especially as there was no caution appended to the document; but that had now ceased to be a question; there had been a manifest breach of duty on the part of some officer of that House, who had been instrumental in giving publicity to a document which had been carefully made up, sealed, and directed to an individual. He did not mean to say, that Mr. Sheehan had broken a seal, but from the refusal of Mr. Sheehan to assist them in discovering the real offender, he should support the Motion of the right hon. Gentleman opposite.
§ Mr. Littletonwas of opinion that the House should endeavour to ascertain who the real offender was. He, as a member of the Committee, had not been a regular attendant, for a paramount duty had called him elsewhere, but in the usual course, the draft of the first Report, and the evidence, were duly transmitted to him; but the draft published by Mr. Sheehan had never reached his hands. The case then before the House was of a character which they could not overlook, and he was decidedly of opinion that they should impose upon Mr. Sheehan a heavy sentence. That gentleman ought, in his opinion, to be made to endure a severe punishment, till he gave up the name of the person who had furnished him with the papers.
Mr. James E. Gordonrose to make a few observations upon what he considered the peculiarity of the case under consideration. Abstractedly considered, it amounted to no more than a simple breach of the privileges of the House, and, when viewed in that light, it stood upon a footing with those tolerated breaches of their privileges which were taking place every day throughout the year. He was bound to look at it in that character, because there was no evidence before them to prove that Mr. Sheehan knew that the document which he had transmitted to The Evening Mail was a private, and not a public document. The difference, then, between the present case and any other, consisted, not in the manner in which the privileges of the House had been violated, but in the refusal of Mr. Sheehan to answer certain questions which had been put to him by the House. This constituted the peculi- 237 arity, or what might be considered the aggravation of the case, and the House would recollect, that this contempt of their authority, or whatever it might be con sidered, resulted not from the breach of privilege, but from the course which had been pursued by the right hon. the Secretary for Ireland, towards the person who had committed the breach. He well remembered that the right hon. Secretary, upon a former occasion, had complained of a similar breach of their privileges, by the publication in a Dublin paper of opposite politics, of some of the evidence of Dr. Doyle or the Archbishop of Dublin; but that complaint was not followed up by his calling the party to the bar. Had the right hon. Gentleman taken the same course then as he had upon the present occasion, the result, he (Mr. Gordon) had no hesitation in saying, would have been precisely the same in both cases. The party complained of would, as in the present instance, have refused to give up the individual from whom he had received the information. This was a well understood compact, subsisting between the conductors of the Press and the persons through whom they derived their information upon the subject, and no editor or proprietor would give up or betray his correspondents without their personal consent. The only difference, therefore, between the present case and those which occurred every day of the year, consisted in the refusal of Mr. Sheehan to answer questions which no person placed in his situation would have felt himself at liberty to answer, and the House would recollect, in coining to a decision upon the question, that the onus of this responsibility had been forced upon him by the course which had been pursued by the right hon. the Secretary for Ireland.
§ Mr. Portmanobserved, that the case of Mr. Sheehan, considered apart from his conduct at the Bar, was not a new case; it was his refusal to assist the House with information, which constituted his chief offence. He would not recommend the committal of Mr. Sheehan to Newgate, but rather to the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms, where he might have a locus pœnitentiœ.
Sir Robert H. Inglissaid, there could he no doubt that a breach of privilege had been committed, and such a breach as ought to be punished in the usual manner; and it was, therefore, waste of time to oc- 238 cupy the attention of the House further with the subject.
§ Mr. Shawdisclaimed, on his own part, and on the part of his hon. friends, any intention of attributing to the right hon. Secretary (Mr. Stanley), that he had brought forward the subject with reference to the line of politics adopted by the paper in which the document appeared. Differing as he did from the right hon. Gentleman in politics, he was perfectly convinced that the right hon. Gentleman had not been biassed in any degree by the politics of the paper. His hon. friends considered, however, that it was a hard case to punish Mr. Sheehan for a breach of privilege, in publishing a Report of a Committee, when it was well known that breaches of privilege passed unnoticed every day. Without entering further into the general question, he wished to call attention to two points which appeared to be relied upon by the right hon. Secretary as aggravations of the offence. It was stated as an aggravation, that the report in question, though distributed amongst the Members of the Committee, had never been presented to that House; and the second circumstance was, an article which had been published in The Evening Mail, in reference to the pretended report. Now, as regarded the first point, it had not appeared that Mr. Sheehan was aware that the report had not been presented to the House; and as to the article which appeared in The Evening Mail, and which was printed subsequently to the publication of the report, there was no evidence that Mr. Sheehan had written that article. It was in evidence that he was the proprietor, but it did not appear that he was the editor; and he (Mr. Shaw) understood the fact to be that he was not the editor. He might have indiscreet friends in Dublin; but he was sure the right hon. Gentleman would not desire to visit that circumstance on Mr. Sheehan. He had merely thrown out these observations for the consideration of the right hon. Gentleman at the House.
Mr. O'Connell—I wish to ask, whether it makes any difference that the document did not refer to any proceeding of this House?
§ The Speakersaid, that no Member of the House, who was not also a Member of the Committee, could have been presumed to know anything of the document which the resolution referred to.
239 The question on the Resolution agreed to.
Mr. Stanleysaid, that, looking to all the circumstances of the case, be felt bound to follow up the Resolution which had just been agreed to, by moving that Mr. Sheehan should be committed to the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms. He thought it was also better that the officers concerned in printing and distributing the Reports of Committees should be in attendance to-morrow evening, in order that, if Mr. Sheehan persisted—as he (Mr. Stanley) trusted he would not do, upon better reflection—in concealing the means by which he became possessed of the document, they might endeavour to trace it out by a strict examination.
§ Ordered accordingly.