Extract from letter from Conor Cruise O'Brien to Joseph P. Walshe (Holy See)

My dear Ambassador,
Many thanks for your letter of the 26th February.¹

I know that the present establishment in Rome is make-shift and unsatisfactory but I am afraid it is quite out of the question to set up a Rome Office with a staff man at the moment. How out of the question you will realise from the following:

The Agency asked for £37,000 for the current year and its claim was cut to £25,000. Agency business is, of course, extremely expensive and the present subsidy is barely enough to maintain our headquarters staff, run our outward service in Britain - our only full-scale outward service which is, you will be glad to hear, running very satisfactorily, averaging about four stories per day in the London editions of the British national dailies - and to get out an ad hoc airmail service to a group of American clients as well as furnishing certain continental clients with material of special interest from time to time. In this way we have furnished ANEP, the Dutch News Agency, with a service on the 'Dutch in Derry' affair, and they distributed our material throughout Holland where it was widely used in all the Dutch papers. This is the purpose - the getting of news on Ireland into foreign newspapers - for which the News Agency was principally set up by the Oireachtas and our whole line of development is dictated by this. There is a considerable potential public, both in America and Britain, for news on Ireland and these countries must, regrettable though it is for other reasons, take precedence over Rome as regards the setting up of offices. We shall not be able to afford, this year, to set up a New York office and in the circumstances I'm afraid it would be gross extravagance on our part to set up an office in Rome. I know that, as you say, 'we cannot run a Roman Agency on the cheap' but we are not, at this stage, attempting to run a Roman Agency nor have we entered on the stage of our operations when we can attempt to distribute world news to the world. It is my hope that we shall one day reach that point of development but we certainly have not done so yet.

[matter omitted]