Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Conor Cruise O'Brien (Dublin)

Dear Conor,
I have been considering the suggestion referred to in your teleprinter message, No. 588,¹ that a Gallup Poll on Partition might be taken in selected areas in Britain.

It seems to me that, if such a scheme were to be worth while from our point of view, we would require to be sure of two things beforehand - firstly, that the result of the Poll would be reasonably positive and secondly, that the Poll should not be capable of being too easily impugned as a 'frame up'! The real problem is, of course, to reconcile these two desiderata.

Quite frankly, I doubt whether the result of any genuine Gallup poll held in this country would be very useful from our point of view. On the contrary, I think we would run a certain risk in putting the Gallup Poll idea into the heads of our opponents. We have to face the fact, I am afraid, that any really representative cross-section of public opinion in this country would not, in present circumstances, show a percentage of feeling against Partition sufficiently great to justify our putting the matter to the test. The proportion of opinion the other way would be an encouragement to our opponents.

I agree, of course, that this difficulty could be got over by arranging the details of the Poll in such a way as to maximise our chances of a favourable result. We could get the poll made, not by a recognised concern like the Gallup people, but by the local branches of the Anti-Partition League. We could confine the poll, as you suggest, to selected areas. Moreover, all public opinion polls of this kind are, as you know, conducted on the basis of 'samples' and we could make up the 'samples' with an eye to the desired result. The question is, however, whether, when we had done all this, we would have something which would stand up to critical examination and carry conviction. It would be disastrous to give our opponents anything they could impugn too easily - all the more so if, as I am afraid they would be only too likely to do, they were to retaliate by asking some unimpeachable agency such as the Gallup people, to conduct a poll in the same areas as we had selected!

On the whole, therefore, my feeling would be against adopting the suggestion referred to in your message. What we have to remember is that the volume of active Anti-Partitionist opinion in this country, as elsewhere, is mainly marginal in its importance. When public opinion is fairly evenly divided on other issues, the strength of Anti-Partitionist sentiment may be decisive. It is to the realisation of that fact that we owe the present tendency to revive the Irish issue in British party politics. It is in this marginal importance of Anti-Partitionist opinion that our strength lies. In a straight fight between active Anti-Partitionism on the one hand, and British public opinion - undivided on other issues - on the other, however, the strength of our forces in this country is seen at its very lowest. It is because any poll such as you suggest would bring public opinion here up against the Partition issue in an undivided state, so to speak, that, tactically, it would be to my mind a bad move from our point of view, unlikely to achieve the aim you have in view.