Note from Frederick H. Boland to Seán MacBride (Dublin) enclosing a memorandum on
'Outstanding grievances against Britain'

Dear Minister,
This is the best we can do towards getting up a list of 'grievances'.

[enclosure]

1. Our outstanding grievance against Britain is, of course, the fact of Partition with all that goes with it - including the practice of British Ministers in going to the Six Counties and making speeches encouraging Orange intransigence and intolerance and giving unjustifiable offence to Irish national sentiment.
2. Among specific developments in connection with Partition which we can justifiably blame Britain for expressly approving or at least condoning are recent action in calling up the B Specials, the Statutory Order (repealed last year) requiring native-born Irish people, even those born in the Six Counties, if not resident, to obtain a residence permit before they could live in the Six County area, and the Statutory Order still in force prohibiting Irish-born persons (other than those resident in the Six Counties on a certain date) to take up employment in the Six Counties without a permit.
3. In the matter of the general attitude of British public opinion towards Ireland, we can justifiably complain that whereas anti-British feeling here has all but disappeared, the approach of the British press and British news agencies in this country is one of consistent hostility and ill-feeling. It can be alleged with much force that the British news agencies in particular make an invariable practice of stirring up ill-feeling against this country throughout the commonwealth by false or distorted accounts of this country and its policies.
4. So far as our trade to Britain is concerned, we have the feeling that while Britain buys from us freely and at fair prices when it suits her own interests to do so, she is quite ruthless about sacrificing our interests to her own. The best example of this, of course, is her use of Article 9 of the Anglo-American Loan Agreement as a pretext for excluding from the British market - in violation of the Trade Agreement of 1938 - a wide category of Irish goods which she didn't happen to want particularly (this grievance cannot be stressed too much, because the Minister for Industry and Commerce feels that following the recent Trade Agreement, the British Government have done their best to redress the position in this regard).
5. This is not the only respect in which the benefits we should derive as a country enjoying Commonwealth preference have been nullified by the action of the British Government. People who talk about the value of preferential tariffs to us forget that our largest item of export - cattle - enjoy no preferences whatever because the Import Duties Act, 1932, does not provide for any preferential tariff on live cattle. Not only does our principal item of export enjoy no preference, however, but our farmers are robbed of part of the export value of their products by the practice of the British Government in subsidizing their own agricultural producers against ourselves, thereby artificially lowering the level of prices in our principal export market.
6. The potentialities of this unjust exploitation by the British Government of their position as our principal buyer have been greatly increased by the British system of bulk buying. A good example is seed potatoes. Out of a desire not to divert their normal supplies from them in a moment of difficulty, we continued sending seed potatoes to Britain at the official price offered by the British Ministry of Food until we found that they were re-exporting the potatoes to foreign markets to take advantage of the higher prices which we ourselves had foregone in a desire to maintain our supplies to them.
7. We had serious reason for suspecting up to recently that Britain was deliberately withholding supplies of raw materials and capital equipment from us in a desire to keep down employment here and maintain the flow of manpower to Britain. The Department of Industry & Commerce tell us, however, that this position has now been completely changed and that at present we are getting everything we need and have no cause for complaint.
8. The unduly legalistic attitude of the British Government in the matter of the Lane pictures is not indicative of sincere goodwill towards this country.