Letter from Frederick H. Boland to John J. Hearne (Ottawa)
(Strictly Personal)

My Dear John,
This is the personal letter which I promised to try to let you have before the Taoiseach's arrival in Canada. Some at least of the Taoiseach's speeches are bound to touch on external - particularly Commonwealth - affairs, and, in connection with these, he will naturally look to you for advice and guidance as to our Minister's views. Although I may not be able to add much to the knowledge you already have from reading the Dáil and press reports and the Departmental circulars, I thought it might be useful if I let you have this note setting out more informally than is possible in public statements the Minister's views on some of the matters which may possibly arise.

Let me take first our relations with the Commonwealth and particularly the question of the future of the External Relations Act. It is generally accepted here now that the days of the External Relations Act are numbered. We should proceed on the assumption that it will be repealed at a not too distant date by an Act vesting the usual powers of a Head of State in relation to external affairs in the President. You will probably have deduced as much from the Minister's statement when introducing the External Affairs estimate in the Dáil.¹ In the meantime, it is very important that any statements made about our relations with the Commonwealth should emphasise the undesirability and inappropriateness in our case of any constitutional arrangements of the kind which Britain and the overseas dominions maintain between themselves as symbols of their association in the Commonwealth. You have the line on this particular point in the Minister's statement on the Estimate.

Of course, whatever the position may have been before, the question of foreign recognition to which the repeal of the External Relations Act, and the consequent implementation of the President's powers as Head of the State, would give rise would nowadays present no difficulty at all. We have already indications from several Governments that they would readily recognize, and indeed welcome, the change as creating a position far less troublesome and embarrassing from their point of view than that presented by the ambiguities of the External Relations Act. The whole trend of unofficial comment in Britain itself indicates a willingness to accept and recognize a development which is now regarded as pretty well inevitable. The article by Nicholas Mansergh in the January, 1948, issue of 'International Affairs' - the official organ of the British Institute of International Affairs - is of particular interest, but quite typical.²

So much for the question of formal constitutional links. So far as the question of our position vis-à-vis the Commonwealth is concerned, the locus classicus now is the Taoiseach's reply to Deputy Cowan in the Dáil on the 28th July and the 5th August.³ That reply fully represents our Minister's view. We are not a member of the Commonwealth. Our association with the Commonwealth is of a purely practical character based on the objective facts and circumstances mentioned in the Taoiseach's reply. The Minister is anxious that even this association should not be represented as having any kind of formal character. He feels that it would tend to stabilise it if nothing is said to differentiate it too much from other international associations such as that which we have, for example, with the other Western European countries who participate with us in the O.E.E.C.

Any unwelcome ring which all this may have in Canadian ears is best counteracted - on the lines of the Minister's statement in the Dáil - by pointing out that formal constitutional links incompatible with our history and national outlook have only been a source of bad relations between Ireland and Britain and have occasioned controversies which have obscured the common interests in the two countries and defeated the forces making for goodwill between them. They have therefore been purely destructive in their effect. To get rid of them is not destructive but constructive in the sense that their removal will help to lay the foundations for a better and more stable relationship between the two countries. It is essential, of course, that any discussion of the problems of ensuring good relations between Ireland and Britain should take express account of the existence of Partition.

It follows from what has been said above that any public statements which had too 'Commonwealthish' a flavour would not give an accurate representation of our Minister's views. From that point of view, it would be better to avoid giving too much attention in public statements to the major developments in our constitutional policy in the past - the Statute of Westminster, the Optional Clause and so on. They belong to a past which is now dead and buried. The main interest they have for us nowadays is as arguments to illustrate the point that the constitutional arrangements of those days, however suitable and acceptable to Britain and the Dominions, were so inappropriate in our case that all our energies were devoted to loosening and disrupting them, thereby occasioning a long series of frictions and disagreements between ourselves and Britain.

There is one other point which our Minister is anxious to have emphasised as much as possible. He would regard the association of a purely practical character which would still subsist between Ireland and the countries of the British Commonwealth after the repeal of the External Relations Act as being, not any kind of exclusive relationship, but on constituting a nucleus around which the democratic countries of Western Europe and the American continent could gradually come together. He would be anxious that any public references to the association should specifically put it in this wider and more constructive setting.

I think these are the principal points which I had in mind to mention. They are all things about which the Minister feels pretty strongly, so I thought it just as well to deal with them in this note, which I should be glad if you would regard as strictly private.