The night before the High Court dropped the axe on special inquiries by Dáil Committees, Tom O'Dea stumbled upon a television recording of what turned out to have been the last sitting of the Committee investigating the CIE mini-CTC imbroglio. The broadcast was not scheduled by RTÉ - and, needless to say, Aertel did not list the change - but it turned out to be so absorbing that he stayed with it until 3 o'clock in the morning.
The first thing that made me sit up was the quality of the responses of two CIE worker-directors: Paul Cullen, a train driver, and Bill McCamley, a bus driver. I had often wondered what kind and calibre of worker made it to the boardroom of the company that paid his wages. Watching Mr Cullen and Mr McCamley in action, one could only wish that all boardrooms had worker-directors of their capacity. Not only were they well informed as trade unionists, but they showed a wide knowledge and an intimate understanding of the intricacies of company policy and its application.
Then came Treas Honan, former Senator on the Fianna Fáil ticket, a redoubtable, capable woman who thinks like a man. The inquisitors went persistently but politely around her - except for one of them, a legal person, whom she smartly put in his place. The committee was clearly taken with her rural emanations, and entranced by her quips and her quiddities.
Juggling language
Pat Rabbitte was, again, the star of that committee, as he was of the DIRT inquiry which unearthed £350 million for the Exchequer. The Chairman, Sean Doherty, also doing a good job, juggled language euphuistically, as though enjoying games of acoustic Scrabble with himself. If the Committee ever resumes, he may ultimately transmogrify into that "celebrated, cultivated, underrated nobleman, the Duke of Plaza-Toro".
All this brings me to the point of these words, which is that the work of Dáil committees, accessible to the public on television, must not be terminated. What we have seen of it is encouraging and reassuring. The cost of that work is a fraction of the price of lawyer-cornered tribunals - from one of which Ray Burke is emerging as the greatest Frenchman in all Swords. Furthermore, our parliamentary committees could teach an ethical thing or two to Congressional committees in the US, which can be, in the idiom of that country, scary. I cite in evidence the case of Arthur Miller, as guiltless and patriotic a man as ever walked.
Mr Miller, author of Death of a Salesman and other plays, was indicted for contempt of the US Congress in 1957. If convicted, he was liable to a year in prison and a fine of $1,000 (more than $30,000 at present values, I should think). What got him into hot water was his refusal to rat on his friends before the infamous House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC). From our perspective, it seemed odd that persons were charged with anything so vague as activities deemed "un-American". (The term has now been revived, however, and is being spat at US citizens uneasy about the maltreatment of "suspects" in the Guantanamo Bay camp.)
To the ineffable Senator Joe McCarthy and those around him in the 1950s (including Bobby Kennedy), everything was deemed "un-American" that did not conform with the right-wing views of the HUAAC boys who terrorised the US at that time.
Elasticised rules
The power of Congress to investigate had been limited by the courts, which decided that witnesses could not be brought before a Congressional commitee, except to testify on matters of legislation. As McCarthy and HUAAC were strictly Commie-chasers, they elasticised the rules to get their quarry before them. Arthur Miller had never been a Communist; so, he was called as a witness in a legislative study of passports, because he had been refused a passport when he wished to travel to Brussels for a performance of his play, The Crucible, whose theme - the Salem witch trials in 1692 - was a parable of the activities of McCarthy and his associates.
Having hauled Miller before it, the committee quickly dropped all pretence of interest in his passport history, and asked questions such as whether he had opposed the Smith Act (which made it a crime to teach or advocate the overthrow of government by force and violence) and whether he had attacked and satirised HUAAC itself. The answers to those questions were well known not only to the committee but to the American public at large, because the newspapers, in the terrible spirit of that time, had conducted a campaign against Miller, who was already blacklisted by Hollywood and by television - both of which came disgracefully out of the 1950s witch hunt.
The committee asked Miller to identify two persons as having been present at certain meetings, years before. This was a mere play-acting, as HUAAC already knew their names. For its purpose, it merely wished Miller to act the informer: to define himself, in the words of Mary McCarthy (no relation of Joe!), "as the kind of person who would interpose no obstacle between them and their right to know".
Private conscience
Miller told them everything they wanted to know about himself - he had nothing to hide - but he was damned if he would accept, Mary McCarthy says, "the principle of betrayal as a norm of good citizenship". She sums up by saying that "the whole purpose of such hearings is to reduce the private conscience to a niggling absurdity". There, in another guise, was the Spanish Inquisition, transposed to the land of the free and the home of the brave - a land in which a Harvard lawyer has recently attempted to justify torture of war prisoners "in special circumstances".
Democracy nearly lost its way in the United States of the 1950s. But then, the Founding Fathers were careful not to define the breakaway Thirteen Colonies, constitutionally, as a democracy but as a republic. For instance, the President is not elected by the direct vote of the people but by an electoral college. Hence, Bush Junior, today. "In God We Trust," the US banknote (significantly, the banknote) proclaims. Whatever that god be, it sure ain't Demos.
In our own country, should the Supreme Court see its way to it, Demos may yet be reinstated.