Memorandum from John J. Hearne to Frederick H. Boland (Dublin)
'Still "The Ports?'
(14.F.12)

I attended a dinner at the Country Club on the 6th December in honour of Mr. Malcolm MacDonald¹ (whose marriage here took place on the 9th December). The dinner was a subscription affair organised by the best man, Mr. Arnold Heeney, Secretary to the Cabinet. Mr. Heeney and Mr. MacDonald were fellow-students at Oxford. The Prime Minister was there and Mr. Brooke Claxton² for the Cabinet. There were thirty-five present in all. The American Ambassador, the British High Commissioner and I were the only non-Canadians.

The event itself would not fall to be reported in an official report. The three speeches made (by Mr. Heeney, Mr. Mackenzie King and Mr. MacDonald) were good but not noteworthy. After dinner, we sat around the salon of the Club in groups. At one stage, Mr. Leonard Brockington, K.C., Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Heeney, Dr. Clifford Clark and some others were together. Mr. Brockington opened a broadside (at me) on the subject of 'the ports'. 'Ireland missed her God-given opportunity', he said, 'when she failed to enter the war after Pearl Harbor. That was de Valera's great mistake. He could have saved Ireland's soul whole. Basil Brooke was shivering in his breeches for days after the Japs attacked. If Dev had gone in with America, Ireland would be united today. As it was, they're throwing their hats in the air in Northern Ireland.' All this in a jocular vein with nods and winks at the others. No one present, not even Mr. Brockington, would have wished me to be drawn into this, or to take it seriously.

Mr. Heeney, however, did. He said: 'Brock, haven't we all had all this over and over? The best service the Irish ever rendered the British Commonwealth was to show the possibility and workability of neutrality while the rest of the Commonwealth was at war.'

'And what has been the result?', Mr. MacDonald asked. 'The result', he went on, 'has been that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland are better today than they have ever been in our time. We were criticized - I in particular - for giving back the ports. If we hadn't, the situation during the war would have been tragic. The older I grow the more I am convinced that what we did was right.'