Letter from John J. Hearne to Frederick H. Boland (Dublin)
'Republic of Ireland Bill. Interview with Prime Minister St. Laurent'¹
(704/4)

I have the honour to report as follows.

On receipt of your telegram No. 107 of the 20th of November² I informed Mr. Gordon Robertson, one of Prime Minister St. Laurent's Special Assistants, of your instruction to call upon the Prime Minister to express to him the good wishes of the Government on his taking office. Mr. St. Laurent was then in Nova Scotia, and has been away from Ottawa until some days ago.

He had me come to him last evening (30th November) at 5 p.m. so that I could give him your message. I remained three quarters of an hour.

The Prime Minister was very sincerely appreciative of the delicate courtesy and thoughtfulness of the Government in sending him their good wishes for a successful administration and desired me to convey his warmest thanks.

I took occasion to refer to the Minister's message to Mr. Pearson sent to me that morning in your telegram No. 113.³ (I have given a copy to Mr. Claxton who is Acting Secretary of State for External Affairs). Mr. St. Laurent said that he was afraid that his statement on the Republic of Ireland Bill went very little further than giving us the word 'Ireland' instead of 'Éire'. I said that the Canadian Government had always given us the word 'Ireland' in official communications in the title 'High Commissioner for Ireland' in the Diplomatic List, and so on. I added that the statement had given us an assurance which was most welcome in Dublin that the Canadian Government desired close relations with the Republic and was studying measures to that end.

The Prime Minister went on to say that Mr. King had become very worried about the Crown if no way could be found of continuing close co-operation amongst countries some of whom desire to retain the Crown and some of whom do not. If a way could not be found there would, Mr. King felt, be a recession of the whole position with regard to the Crown as a formula of association.

'We are going', he continued, 'to be faced with a Council proposal. We will not accept any proposal of that kind'.

'You have always' I remarked 'been against the Australian idea of a Commonwealth Secretariat. The Council is the same kind of proposal'. Mr. St. Laurent agreed. 'And' I added 'you have been the prime movers in altering the character of Commonwealth Conferences and creating the present kind of meeting of Prime Ministers in London. A standing Council would be a set back to these developments'.

'The whole trend' the Prime Minister said 'is away from a Council'.

He then turned to the questions of citizenship and trade preferences arising on the Republic of Ireland Bill. He said that he saw little prospect of their being able to bring in new legislation on citizenship. They would, he thought, rely on the existing position with regard to the treatment of immigrants born in Ireland. They would base themselves on the fact that every person born in Ireland prior to the enactment of the Irish citizenship law of 1935 is a British subject. That would get over their difficulty.

I asked the Prime Minister whether he had seen my correspondence with Mr. Robertson when the Canadian Citizenship Act, 1946, was going through. (He did not seem to have read it). I said that what I thought our Government would wish would be that Irish citizens as such would receive the same treatment in Canada as Canadian citizens receive in Ireland. I had asked for that in 1946 in my letters to Mr. Robertson and had referred Mr. Robertson to section 23 of our statute of 1935, which - I submitted to Mr. St. Laurent - had anticipated the present situation by a number of years. I made it clear that I had no authority to raise these legal matters and expressed my appreciation of the Prime Minister's permitting me to give him my personal views. He bade me go on. I made three points (1) that just mentioned, namely, our desire for recognition of Irish citizens as such, (2) that an arrangement whereby persons born in Ireland prior to the 10th April, 1935, would be given a status in Canada as British subjects made no provision for persons born in Ireland since that date, and (3) that our separate citizenship situation began in 1922, not in 1935. All we did in 1935 in this connection, I said, was clean up our statute book by an ex abundante cautela repeal of the British law relating to nationality in so far as it could be held to be then in force in Ireland. Internationally we had previously had a separate political community with which other States had entered into diplomatic relations. The members of that community had carried Irish passports recognised by all other countries. Irish citizenship had thus received international recognition before the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1935. It would be a pity, I urged, if our citizens were now to receive a standing in the Canadian community only as British subjects. They were not British subjects under any Irish law now in force and they would not be British subjects even under British law. I informed the Prime Minister in this connection that the British had asked us in 1922 to accept a proviso to the citizenship Article (Article 3) of the Constitution of 1922 to the effect that that Article would not prejudice the operation in the Irish Free State of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Acts 1914-1918, and that we had refused to accept the proviso. It had been struck out of the draft by Mr. Griffith.

Mr. St. Laurent was greatly interested in the points but he did not give me any assurance that the Canadian Government would bring in new legislation to deal with the status of Irish citizens as such in Canada.

He referred to certain Provincial difficulties. Irishmen e.g. are given rights as British subjects in Provincial Statutes. He referred to a difficulty for Canada in the way of the adoption of a principle of general reciprocity. If that principle in wide terms were set up as between Canada and Ireland, India would claim its application to Canadian-Indian relations. They could not have that.

The Prime Minister appeared to be more at ease on the position with regard to trade preferences. He said that they would wait for others to raise the matter. They would continue the existing practice. He referred to the point that in the Geneva International Trade Agreement, the preferences are preserved for Ireland apart from Ireland's constitutional or political relations with Commonwealth countries.

At the end Mr. St. Laurent said that the Crown created no serious political difficulty in Canada at the present time. It was taken for granted. There was no movement on a national scale against it. He repeated that he had told Mr. MacBride in London that many people in Canada shared the Minister's views on the Crown but that they were not the majority.

'Who would have thought prior to the year 1926' Mr. St. Laurent concluded 'that so close a colonial organization as the old British Empire of that time could have developed into the Balfour Declaration? Who would have thought it a possible formula?' Mr. St. Laurent added that we had all advanced further since 1926 and in 1948 some other formula expressing the relations between like-minded peoples may be found.