Telegram from Seán Nunan to Thomas J. Kiernan (Canberra)
(No. 4)

If you have not already replied to Watt’s letter of 31st December, you should send him the following immediately.

Quote. I have referred your letter of 31st December to Dublin and I am instructed to write to you as follows:-

My Minister fails to understand why you should say in your letter of 31st December last that my letter of the 28th December¹ made it clear that my Government would accept the suggested Letters of Credence contained in mine of the 31st December² ‘only if no Commission of Appointment is issued by Her Majesty to Mr. McGuire’.

My Government made it perfectly clear from the outset that they would cordially welcome Mr. McGuire as Ambassador carrying a Commission of Appointment from the Queen and assigned by the Queen to Dublin provided the Letters of Credence were addressed to the President of Ireland. In fact, I delivered to you officially for the record a draft of such Letters of Credence.

It was emphasized by your Government, and fully accepted by the Irish Government, that in accordance with Australian law, an Australian Ambassador could only be appointed by the Queen.

When the Australian Government finally refused to address our President in his constitutional title, my Government, in the interests of the good relations of our two peoples, were prepared to accept, as an interim arrangement, Ministerial Letters of Credence in the form suggested by me to Mr. Menzies on the 30th November or in the form I suggested to Mr. Casey on the 22nd December and sent to you for the record as a complete and final draft in my letter of the 31st December. The proposed Letters would have made it clear that Mr. McGuire would have been appointed Her Majesty’s Australian Ambassador by the Queen but that the assignment to Dublin would have been by the Australian Minister for External Affairs. The only question under discussion between us regarding the Ministerial Letters of Credence, and to which mine of the 28th referred, was by whom Mr. McGuire should be assigned and not by whom he should be appointed.

The only request which my Government made in return for accepting Mr. McGuire as ambassador carrying the proposed Ministerial Letters of Credence was an official assurance by your Minister that the Commission of Appointment by the Queen would not be in conflict with the terms of those Letters. My Minister requested this assurance because I reported that Mr. Casey would not tell me the terms of the Commission. My Minister would thus have been able to assure his Government that Mr. McGuire’s assignment had been made by the Australian Government to the Irish Government although he had been appointed Ambassador by the Queen, and that there could be no suggestion later on either in Ireland or in Australia that he had been assigned to Dublin by the Head of the Australian State while the Head of the Irish State was being ignored.

My Minister considers there is clearly no shadow of foundation for your conclusion, which is indeed a glaring non-sequitur, that the draft Ministerial Letters of Credence contained in mine of the 31st December were acceptable to my Government ‘only if the assignment of Mr. McGuire to Dublin is exclusively governmental – which means, to put the matter in another way, that Her Majesty the Queen would be excluded from any part in the appointment or assignment of Mr. McGuire to Dublin’.

In short, the only possible meaning of the draft of the 31st December was that the Queen was to appoint Mr. McGuire as Ambassador and that it was his assignment alone which was to be governmental. Unquote.