Confidential report from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Murphy (Dublin)
'Sinn Féin activities in Britain'
(Confidential) (Copy)

As you are no doubt already aware from press reports, the Sinn Féin organisation had a rally in Trafalgar Square last Sunday fortnight. A report in one of the Dublin dailies put the attendance at 2,000 and gave the impression that the meeting was a pronounced success. A competent observer whom I had asked to attend, told me that the attendance at no time exceeded 500 and most of the time was barely more than 300 — about the same number of people as are to be found in Trafalgar Square on any Sunday afternoon feeding the pigeons.

2. It had been announced that the platform would include important speakers from Ireland. In fact they did not turn up and the chairman apologised for their absence but did not attempt to explain it. All the speakers were Irishmen living and working here in London. The trend of the speeches followed the line of recent official declarations by the Sinn Féin organisation in Ireland. The use of force to expel British troops from the Six Counties was openly justified and advocated but, it was noticeable that the statements on this point evoked no reaction or applause from the crowd. All the speakers went out of their way to make the point that the volume of support given to the Sinn Féin candidates in the recent election in the Six Counties showed that Sinn Féin was the party of the really nationally minded people in Ireland and was the coming organisation in Irish politics. In other words all the votes cast for the Sinn Féin candidates were represented as votes in favour of the Sinn Féin organisation and its policies instead of being — as the vast majority of them undoubtedly were — simply votes against the local Unionist candidate.
3. Prior to the meeting, the organisers called on Mr. Tadhg Feehan of the Anti-Partition League and invoked his advice and assistance in making the necessary arrangements for the Trafalgar Square rally. Mr. Feehan had the impression that the organisers had little or no experience and had no organisation worth speaking of behind them. According to the best information I can get, the number of active Sinn Féin sympathisers among our people here is very small. The organisation is probably not as strong today as it was three or four years ago, when it controlled the Gaelic League in the London area and carried on a fairly active propaganda among Irish people here. In the meantime, there have been a series of ‘splits’, one of which resulted in the foundation by a man called Fitzsimons of a new organisation known as the ‘United Irishmen’, about which we had some correspondence with the Department. There is some evidence that at least one of the ‘splits’ was occasioned by some of the members suspecting others of being police spies and informers.
4. According to Mr. Feehan, there is little or no evidence of Sinn Féin sympathies in the ranks of the Anti-Partition movement here. Area and branch secretaries report that, generally speaking, the physical force aspect of the Sinn Féin policies doesn’t appeal to Irish people here. They fear that trouble in the Six Counties would arouse public feelings in Britain prejudicial to their own positions. At an early stage of the first meeting of the annual conference of the Anti-Partition League last month, one delegate stood up and proposed that the conference should send a telegram of support to all the Sinn Féin candidates standing in the election in the Six Counties. The proposal evoked no support and when Mr. Frank Short, former president of the League, stood up on the floor and opposed it, it was defeated without a division.
5. Mr. Feehan tells me that he received a letter from Mr. Anthony Mulvey,¹ the former Anti-Partitionist MP for Tyrone, expressing the view that the Sinn Féin candidates in both mid-Ulster and Fermanagh and South Tyrone, would have been defeated but for Mr. Topping’s ill-judged threat that, if they were successful, they would be unseated. Mr. Calloway, London correspondent of the ‘Northern Whig’, told Mr. Feehan that the Ulster Unionist MPs were strongly opposed to any effort to unseat the successful Sinn Féin candidates and that this was also the attitude of the government at Stormont. According to Mr. Calloway, the initiative taken by a local group to unseat the member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone was taken in the teeth of advice and exhortations from Stormont and the Ulster Unionist Council.