Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(B.111/3)

I enclose herewith, for your information, a copy of a letter with enclosures which I have received from the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child.¹ The documents speak for themselves. I have simply acknowledged the letter with an assurance that it will receive our careful consideration.

I don’t suppose that any single question has been given more anxious and painstaking consideration in the Department within the last seven or eight years than this matter of the migration of young and immature Irish girls to this country. If my recollection is correct, it constitutes one of the largest files in the Department and was the subject – as recently as 1948 or 1949 – of a report by an interdepartmental committee on which Mr. Gallagher acted for our Department. Previously the material means of stopping the traffic existed because the travel permit system was still in force; the essential difficulty was that any official action in the matter involved the substitution of the State for the parents as the judge of the best interests of the female minor. Nowadays, however, the travel permit system has gone and it is not easy to see – even assuming the essential difficulty referred to did not exist – what effective action could be taken in the matter now other than measures of publicity.