FROM THE ARCHIVES:This description of Cathal Brugha's speech on the final day of the Treaty debate in January 1922 is part of a graphic account by an unnamed special correspondent.
THEN THE SPEAKER, just at about 5 o’clock, called on Mr Cathal Brugha, Minister of Defence, and for over an hour we listened to the most remarkable performance that ever was in the councils of Dáil Eireann, or, indeed possibly in any other National Assembly in Christendom.
Mr Brugha is a little man, with a slight limp and a singularly immobile face. He speaks quietly, weighing every word before he utters it, and makes little or no attempt to secure rhetorical effects. But his speech was saturated with bitterness. He spoke for some minutes in Irish, of which he is a master, and then switching over into English, delivered a series of attacks on the supporters of the Treaty.
Few escaped his withering scorn. Mr Cosgrave – "the jocular gentleman from Kilkenny" – Mr Sean Milroy, Mr Duggan, and many others were assailed with merciless venom; yet Mr Brugha rarely raised his voice. His bitterest thrusts were made with the utmost sang froid. Every now and then he would sting somebody into a heated protest, whereupon a lightning-like taunt in Irish would flash across the House, and the Minister of Defence would resume his dispassionate invective.
When he turned his ruthless onslaught against Mr Michael Collins the House prepared for a stormy time, but the Minister of Finance wisely held his peace. Mr Brugha’s attack on him was particularly fierce. Who was Michael Collins? somebody had asked. He was a subordinate officer in the IRA under Mr Brugha’s command. All the members of the Headquarter Staff had worked splendidly without any desire for notoriety, except one. Here a number of Deputies, red with anger, sprang to their feet but a sentence in Irish flashed from Mr Brugha’s ready tongue, and he took up the cudgel again. Mr Collins was that one. The Press had made him a romantic man of mystery. He was nothing of the sort. He had been referred to by Arthur Griffith as the man who won the war. “So he is,” shouted the Minister of Foreign Affairs amid applause. “And the war is won,” snapped Mr Brugha, “and we are talking here.”
It was an extraordinary object lesson in psychology. Mr Brugha hardly showed a trace of feeling of any kind during his long speech. He might have been dictating a letter to a stenographer; but how his words were winged with fierce reproach! How implacable was the mind that gave them life!
Having dealt with Mr Collins, he turned to Mr Griffith, to whom, after some hard words, he appealed not to vote for the Treaty. Leave it to the Dáil to accept or reject, he concluded, and your name will live for ever in Irish history. There was a short adjournment after Mr Brugha’s speech. Mr de Valera suggested it, and everybody was grateful to him. Nerves were all on edge, and the air was so highly charged with explosive material that half an hour’s rest was very necessary.
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