Extract from a confidential report from Frederick H. Boland
to Seán Murphy (Dublin)
(Secret)

At a public dinner last week, I was sitting beside Field Marshal Sir John Harding,² Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In the course of conversation, he told me that he fully agreed with the prevailing view that the danger of war had very greatly receded. He thought the likelihood was that the world was facing a comparatively long period of peace. The evidence that the Soviet Government was seeking to relax international tension and avert the prospect of a major conflict could not be gainsaid. Probably the only real danger of war for a long time ahead would be the risk that, as a result of miscalculation or of yielding to emotional public pressures, one of the major powers on either side would stumble into a situation from which it would find it impossible to withdraw but which it could not maintain without precipitating a conflict.

2. In the course of the conversation, Sir John Harding asked me more or less jocularly what Ireland was going to do if there was a major war with the Communist Powers. I said that, as long as Partition lasted, public opinion in Ireland would be opposed to active participation, whatever its sympathies in the struggle might be. Sir John Harding said that he expected that would be the case. He knew that that was our present policy and he did not criticise it at all. From the strictly military point of view, which was all he was concerned with, a policy similar to that followed during the last war would not necessarily be disadvantageous to Western defence. Speaking as Chief of the Imperial General Staff — although he would shortly be vacating the office — the important thing from his point of view — because it affected planning — was to know for certain in advance what our attitude in any major conflict was going to be and what the Defence services here could rely on us for, in the way of technical co-operation.
3. Sir John Harding didn’t specify what kind of technical co-operation he had in mind, but I understood him to refer to arrangements of the same kind as obtained during the last war.