Confidential report from John W. Dulanty to Frederick H. Boland (Dublin)
(Secret Report No.16)¹

At a party given to Mr. Norman Robertson on the eve of his departure for Canada, Mr. Noel-Baker came up to me and said the reason for his attitude when talking with the Minister last week in London was the hard things which had been said recently by some of our people, notably the Taoiseach. I told him I could see not the slightest justification for the line he had taken with the Minister and that I deplored what seemed to me to be a retrograde tendency on his part about the relations of the two countries.

He mentioned the statement which we released to the Press immediately prior to the Six County Elections last month and said it was an action which they would certainly not have tolerated from a foreign government. When I asked whether there was any foreign government with a past or present relationship with Britain even remotely similar to ours, he made no answer but said that they would not have taken it from a Commonwealth country. I said I couldn't follow his reasoning since there was still less an analogy.

The conversation was of about three minutes duration only because he left hurriedly explaining that he was overdue elsewhere.