§ LORD MORRISMy Lords, I desire to ask whether the Government are taking steps to ensure that parties who were eye-witnesses of the Castleconnell shootings, and who have publicly expressed their willingness to give evidence, should be examined; and whether, in this view, the Resolution of the House in favour of an impartial Inquiry can be regarded as having been carried out in an Inquiry which omitted to call independent eye-witnesses who are known to have been present, and to be willing to give evidence.
§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD BIRKENHEAD)If any other noble Lord wishes to make any observation upon this matter, I will gladly postpone my answer until I have had the advantage of being apprised of any further view that may be held.
§ LORD PARMOORMy Lords, I wish to make one or two observations, and, in accordance with the Lord Chancellor's suggestion, I am quite willing to make them now. Being desirous of doing nothing which may be provocative in reference to a matter which seems to me to be one of a judicial character rather than one of controversy, it would be unbecoming of me to repeat what I have already stated as regards the Castleconnell outrage. I could not trespass a second time upon your Lordships' 364 patience. I have already stated at length the information which I have received in reference to it. Unfortunately, I was not present when the Lord Chancellor made his answer in this House after he had had the Report from what I think is called the Committee of Inquiry.
§ THE LORD CHANCELLORThe Court of Inquiry.
§ LORD PARMOORI am much obliged to the noble and learned Lord. Of course, after a Court of Inquiry has been held I recognise the difficulty of seeking in any sense to re-open a matter of this kind, but I noticed that in what the Lord Chancellor said he used some expressions with reference to my brother, which I hope that perhaps, on further consideration, he may think it well not to press. He suggested that the conditions were such that my brother might have been mistaken, or that his nerves might have been affected. Any one who knows my brother, and particularly his surgical experience, would, I think, hardly believe him open to such a suggestion. On the same day there was a discussion in the House of Commons, raised, I think, by Captain Wedgwood Benn, and the Attorney-General expressed the opinion that if the military authorities in Ireland would do so he would advise that the matter might be re-opened. I am not very much in favour of re-opening an Inquiry. It is a very different thing from taking evidence in the first instance, because a full impartial inquiry could hardly be held in the absence of witnesses who appear to me to be essential witnesses. I do not desire on this occasion to say anything further, particularly of a provocative character. I regret that this evidence was not called, because I think it would have led to the Court of Inquiry having impartial witnesses before it, and that would have been of great value if we are to regard the Report of the Court as satisfactory.
§ THE LORD CHANCELLORMy Lords, the noble Lord who asked this Question, as he was fully entitled to do, contented himself with putting it, and my noble and learned friend who has just sat down has not added anything which ought to have the effect of making any further discussion upon it provocative. Let me first deal with the actual terms of the Question. The noble Lord asks "whether the Government are taking steps to ensure that parties who 365 were eve-witnesses of the Castleconnell shootings, and who have publicly expressed their willingness to give evidence, should be examined." I do not know whether the noble Lord is aware that the family of Mrs. O'Donovan was represented by a solicitor at the Court of Inquiry. It is hardly necessary to say that he was fully apprised of the whole case which was attempted to be made on behalf of Mrs. O'Donovan, and lie vela, freely made it in the course of the hearing.
At the conclusion of the case the President of the Court asked the solicitor whether or not he desired to call any further witnesses, and, of course, if the solicitor had informed the President that he did desire to call other evidence, or that he had been informed that there were eye-witnesses who at the moment were not available but who could be made available, any necessary adjournment would have been granted. No such application was made, and the inference an irresistible one, that in the opinion of those who had been employed expressly for the purpose of exploring these facts, in the sense that complaint should be made against the action of the Forces of the Crown, there was no necessity, when invited to do so, to apply for an adjournment.
I must inform the noble Lord that it is, in my view, not the duty of the Government to take steps to ensure that parties who publicly express their willingness to give evidence about these outrages should be examined. It is, no doubt, the duty of the Government to provide a suitable tribunal, and to see that there shall be an inquiry, so far as the troubled conditions of 'Ireland to-day permit of such an inquiry without detriment to the public interest; but the idea that the Government should go about collecting expressions of willingness to give evidence on the part of persons who have made them—I am not now dealing with the ease of the noble and learned Lords brother, hut am speaking generally—and who go about making excitable statements with reference to these outrages, is, if the noble Lord will forgive me for saying so, ludicrous. No such function is ever attributed to any civilised Government under conditions which are normal, and the idea that in the conditions now prevailing in Ireland, where we are fighting for our very lives against a campaign of vile murder—the idea that any such obligation should he imposed upon the Government there, which has 366 never been accepted by any civilised Government that 1 am aware of, is an idea which does not need, in my opinion, further combating.
The noble Lord then asks me whether "the Resolution of the House in favour of an impartial Inquiry can be regarded as having been carried out in an Inquiry which omitted to call independent eye-witnesses who are known to have been present, and to be willing to give evidence." To that Question I reply with a most unqualified affirmative. The tribunal which was appointed was one which, until I read the implication in the Question of the noble Lord, had not been impeached, and could not be impeached. Those who constituted the Court were officers of experience and of humanity. and although as full and complete accounts have been published as could be, consistent with the safety of the witnesses, no suggestion has been made against them, either in respect of decorum, demeanour, patience and accessibility of the Court, which was of as high a standard as any Court that could be appointed for the purpose of conducting investigations. In justice to the noble Lord the latter part of his Question suggests that he does not desire to impeach the Court, except in the one respect to which I have referred—namely, that he asks whether the Government are taking steps to ensure that parties who were eve-witnesses of the Castleconnell shooting, and who have publicly expressed their willingness to give evidence, should be examined. I do not know whether the noble Lord in asking that Question had in his mind the case of the brother of the noble and learned Lord. As I have already said in the earlier debate to which Lord Parmoor made reference, it does not appear front the tenour of the letter which my noble and learned friend read that his brother was an eve-witness of any of the material incidents. In those circumstances the Inquiry was not re-opened, and the noble Lord has followed the events with sufficient chronological care, I am sure, to have discovered that it would involve re-opening a Court of inquiry not otherwise impeached in order to admit the evidence of a gentleman in respect of whom there was the greatest doubt as to whether he had been an eye-witness of the only incidents which were really material. Such a proceeding would not appear to be very promising, and it would certainly he very unusual in my experience.
367 The truth is—and I hope I have made it plain that I have neither made, nor make, complaint of those who in the first place introduced the attention of your Lordships to this melancholy incident—it is very easy to receive an account of occurrences which appears to be well founded and accurate and of such a nature as to cause great anxiety in the mind of the recipient. But the moral which I have ventured to draw from the whole matter, if I may say so with the greatest possible respect, is that noble Lords would do well to continue to observe the practice which has honourably distinguished this House of examining and re-examining, testing and re-testing, every case which is brought to them in derogation of the conduct of the Forces of the Crown. Very searching influences are at work, as I have already pointed out, attempting in every such case to import a colour, in the overwhelming majority of instances unwarranted, to the facts, and most injurious to the reputation, and wounding to the feelings, of men who are engaged to-day in duties as terrible as those in which, in my judgment, the Forces of the Crown have been called upon to embark in any corner of the world even in the terrible wears of the war.
Even in this case it is true that through the lamentable and tragic misunderstandings which prevailed many of these cadets fell under the revolver fire of their own comrades. But can we ignore, ought we to ignore, the fact that their presence there, their exposure to those risks, was admittedly occasioned by the fact that on this spot, either a day or two before, or on this very day, there hail been meeting men whose indisputable object was to concert, and possibly to carry on, murder and assassination against the Forces of the Crown It was in the effort to meet and to foil that attempt that these young men, under the guidance of their officer, concerted a counter-scheme, and through one of those lament' able misunderstandings which sometimes happen, one party mistook the other party, and so they were involved in this hideous and unnecessary destruction.
Although a misapprehension was the immediate origin, the danger to them in this scene, in which on every side revolvers were being fired, and the courage that was called for, were just as great as if they had been actually engaged in resisting those men whom they had gone there to resist. And it is a terrible thing to think, in a case 368 in which not a vestige of moral blame can fairly be imputed to these young men, that, in addition to the anxieties in which they live and carry on their duties they should be spoken of—not in this House—in a way which, if it were true, would he the source of the greatest pain and humiliation to their friends and their families in this country. In nineteen cases out of twenty, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, in my judgment, they are worthy of the admiration and affection of their families and friends for the risks they are running and the constancy with which they are discharging their duties.
I make no complaint of any one in this and the previous debates, but I most earnestly express the hope that before any such statements are made publicly, either here or elsewhere, those who receive them will in the first place take the precaution of ascertaining precisely from a member of the Government what are the facts of the case. Do not let us assist those who are devoting all their insidious energies to the work of propaganda, in this very sense notoriously, by intercepted documents, regarding this as one of their most powerful weapons. Do not let us assist them, unless we have first of all exhausted the method of inquiry, and satisfied ourselves that there really is a case in which wrong has been done. No one would draw the inference from what. I have said that, if the conclusion follows after such private inquiry that wrong has been done, it is the duty of any member of either House of Parliament to withhold his knowledge and his complaint from the notice of Parliament. On the contrary, I most positively affirm, for what my opinion is worth, that in such a case any Peer is discharging his duty. Let us most carefully avoid the risk of giving currency and undeserved importance to complaints which, as I venture to think I have most fully shown in the present case, have no real foundation in the facts of that case.