Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Murphy (Dublin)

Assistant Secretary¹

You will remember that it was decided some time ago that the Department should publish a report covering the work of the League Assembly during its sessions in the years 1932-4, as well as the work of the League Council from January 1932 until September 1933, the date on which our tenure of the non-permanent seat, to which we were elected in 1930, came to an end.

2. The work on this report is already sufficiently advanced to enable an accurate idea to be formed as to what it would be like in its final form. We are proceeding on the system of dismissing purely routine and technical matters, such as opium, intellectual co-operation and child welfare, in summary paragraphs recording briefly the decisions of the Assembly and Council with regard to them, and of reserving our space for more detailed accounts of the matters which, either because of their intrinsic political importance or because the Saorstát took an active part in the discussions with regard to them, may be considered to be of major interest. Now that this selective process has been completed, however, we find that the principal matters with which our report would deal would be: (a) the Sino-Japanese dispute, (b) Document H.C. 1006, (c) Bolivia-Paraguay, (d) Minorities, (e) the non-payment of League subscriptions, (f) the admission of Turkey, Afghanistan and Russia to the League, (g) the Colombia-Peru dispute and (h) the Assyrians in Iraq.

3. If the past two years had been a period of unruffled international peace and consequent inactivity at Geneva, so academic a report as this might well be defended as presenting an accurate reflection of the state of affairs which confronted the representatives of the governments of the world at their various meetings at Geneva during that time. But the condition is not fulfilled. On the contrary, the past two years have been a period of exceptional international activity, in which the League played, if anything, an increasingly important role. The trouble is, however, that practically all this activity took place outside the sessions of the Assembly and the Council with which our report would deal: for example, the activity of the League in the economic sphere during this period was concentrated in a general conference held at London and in the committees which were appointed to carry on its work; and all the political activity at Geneva took place in the ambit of the Disarmament Conference or, as in the case of the Saar question, at sessions of the Council at which we were not represented and which, therefore, would not be covered by our report. The simple fact is that during the last two years there has been a growing tendency at Geneva to leave the really major questions either to the Council or to general conferences ad hoc (at which, incidentally, we play just as active a role as we do at Assemblies), and this makes our practice of publishing annual reports on the work of the League Assembly an unsuitable method of supplying the Dáil and the public with information about the work of the League of Nations.

4. Apart, however, from the fact that our report would not present a true picture of the activity of the League of Nations during the last two years, circumstances have so altered since the decision to publish this report was taken, that I feel justified in suggesting that the matter should be reconsidered. Within the last two months, the European situation has become so tense that, in so far as international affairs are a subject of preoccupation to public opinion at all, people, even in the Saorstát, are thinking, to the exclusion of everything else, of the possibility of preserving peace in Europe and the situation of their own countries in the event of war. The result is that matters, such as the persecution of the Assyrians in Iraq and the conflict in the Chaco, which were of more or less burning interest at a time when people had nothing more alarming to think about, appear nowadays unutterably secondary and trivial. That being so, it seems to me that if the Department were to break its two years' silence now with a solemn report containing a more or less lengthy account of these secondary matters, but making no reference to the questions which are at present so much in the public mind, the impression created would be anything but favourable to the Department and the League itself. It would leave people reading it with the impression that the League of Nations is simply fiddling while Europe burns.

5. I have been considering what sort of report we could publish which would have the virtue of contemporaneity in the sense of bearing some relation to the present international situation and the probabilities of its future development. In view of the fact that the questions which are at present, and are likely to be for a long time, uppermost in people's minds are those relating to armaments, security pacts, mutual assistance, non-aggression and so on, it seems to me that a report which would be not only of great contemporary interest but of definite value to Deputies and other people anxious to follow and understand the course of current international negotiations, would be one containing a review of the work of the League in connection with disarmament and security since its inception.

6. I attach hereto a very rough sketch of the section-headings of such a report,² as an indication of what it would contain. It would consist largely of the relevant texts of treaties, protocols, communiqués, draft conventions, etc., or, where necessary, summaries of their provisions, the rest being short descriptions of the circumstances in which the documents in question were adopted, issued or rejected. There are the soundest precedents for such a publication to be found in the practice of other countries: its object would be to do for our public what the frequent White Papers issued by the British Foreign Office do for people in the United Kingdom, and what the Quai d'Orsay's Blue Books, and the Reports of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French Chamber, do for the people in France. It would enable people, when they read about such things as mutual assistance, the determination of the aggressor, the General Act, qualitative disarmament, the Geneva protocol and so on, to understand what these things mean: in addition, it would aim at showing exactly what has been done in connection with disarmament and security under the auspices of the League; the exact points upon which the various conferences and negotiations on these matters broke down; the part played by the Saorstát in this activity, and the content of the obligations by which the Saorstát is at present bound. I venture to think that such a report would be of definite interest and value, and that the official time and expenditure necessarily involved in the production of any report would be more usefully directed to the preparation of a report of this kind than of the report upon which we are at present engaged.

7. I should be glad if you would consider the matter, and furnish me with further directions about the report.