Extract from a confidential report from John W. Dulanty to Joseph P. Walshe (Dublin) (Secret)

At the close of my last meeting with him on the 19th March, Lord Addison spoke of his life-long support of the Irish fight for autonomy and said he would like, when he was less pressed for time, to have a fairly full talk with me about the relations of our two countries.

Acting on this invitation, when we had finished the conversation about the Residence Permit position in the Six Counties, I made use of the occasion to refer to the question of Partition, saying that I had a fairly large acquaintance with many members of his Party and a long established friendship with several, and that conversations with them led me to believe that the Labour Party could not honestly stand for the continuance of Partition.

Lord Addison, with some emphasis, described Partition as a completely ridiculous situation. That being the case, I enquired whether it was not incumbent on the Government to state, on some appropriate occasion in Parliament, that it was not their policy to continue the existing anomaly.

Lord Addison told me that the first memorandum which he presented to the Cabinet, within a few weeks of his taking up his present Office, was one dealing exclusively with Partition. He submitted that there were only two ways of dealing with the problem. One was to use force and the other was to try to get reason to prevail. They could not, of course, entertain the idea of force, nor would Mr. de Valera, a statesman of the first order, use force, even if he had the means. That meant therefore that the only course for them was development along the lines of reason and to use every opportunity that presented itself of making the way to end Partition easy. He would welcome any suggestions, at any time, along these lines.

He was quite unreservedly critical of the Six County Government and said that, during the whole of his political life, he had never found the Ulster Unionists amenable to reason. When I remarked that this description made me feel that we might wait until the crack of doom for reason to prevail, he said that he was sure that we had to depend on Sydney Webb's¹ 'inevitability of gradualness'. The view that he had put forward in the memorandum, which he mentioned, had been accepted by all his colleagues.

He told me that, before the Dublin Convention was set up under the late Sir Horace Plunkett,² he had himself presided over a Committee of all British political Parties in the House of Commons, the Tories being represented by the diehards Lords Curzon³ and Cave.⁴ A scheme was then formulated which provided for two Parliaments, one in Dublin and one in the Six Counties and for an all Ireland Council which would have dealt with the interests common to the whole country and would, in his opinion, have made before very long for a united Ireland. The Tories said 'we will attack you in public for this scheme because we cannot do anything else but we will take it and we will make it work'.

Unfortunately he said Mr. Lloyd George⁵ wanted something dramatic, thinking that he would secure the same result by the Dublin Convention.

As proof of his wish to help he had lately fought a battle in the cabinet over the question of unemployment benefit for Irish soldiers, who had fought in the last war. There were those, he said, who argued that because these men came from a country which was neutral they should not, when they returned to their own country, receive any ex-Service payments. This proposal he had vehemently opposed with the result, he thought, that he could promise that our men would receive the same treatment as the British ex-Servicemen. An arrangement of this kind he was positive would not have been possible under Mr. Churchill's Government.

He concluded by saying 'you come here with one grouse after another, today I have a grouse against you' and went on to refer to a statement in certain newspapers about planes going to Belfast carrying our flag. That was going to give him some awkward moments and he was therefore glad to have received An Taoiseach's telegram. Would I express his cordial thanks to Mr. de Valera for the promptitude of his action.