Extract from a confidential report from Michael Rynne
to Seán Murphy (Dublin)
(19/4A) (17/5/14) (Copy)

[matter omitted]

The return-call of the Portuguese Ambassador¹ started by following the usual routine of diplomatic conversations in Madrid at this time of the year, by relating mainly to our respective plans for the Ministerio de Jornado, or summer season, at San Sebastian. Unfortunately, Mr. Nosolini at one point remarked that he and all his Portuguese diplomatic colleagues throughout the world had suffered an appalling summer last year and they expected a repetition of this in the present summer. When I asked why, the reply was ‘Goa’ and I had to listen to a long disquisition on the subject of Nehru’s perfidy lasting over an hour.² I explained to the Ambassador how embarrassing a subject Goa was for us in Ireland. I said we had felt a good deal of sympathy with his then colleague Mr. Brazao³ when he sought our support in 1954, just after the present Irish Government took office. In the absence of my Minister and my Secretary, I had made a personal study of the Goa problem and our Taoiseach had been good enough to hear me out on the matter. He too had been sympathetic especially with the Portuguese argument that Goa was a stronghold of Christianity and the scene of one of St. Francis Xavier’s principal missionary triumphs. Nevertheless, it was only too apparent to Mr. Costello and his colleagues, as, indeed it was to myself, that so far as Irish public opinion was concerned, Goa stood for the ‘Six Counties of India’. Accordingly, it was reluctantly decided to adopt a neutral attitude or, at any rate, to remain silent in the matter, declaring ourselves for neither side.

At this point in my monologue, the Ambassador (speaking in French) exclaimed that the Partition of Ireland was quite unrelated to the situation of Goa. Our position, with which he had every sympathy, was just like that of Spain’s in regard to Gibraltar (with which he also sympathised and which, incidentally, is being again worked up in the Madrid papers, with maps and photographs). The Ambassador asked me to try to distinguish between the case where a Great Power walked into an old civilised united country and occupied part of its territory by force and in the case of a peaceful penetration by a civilised State, hundreds of years ago, into a disunited continent like India. If America invaded Mexico now, he would be scandalised but, on the other hand, he saw no reason why the Americans should at this stage get out of the United States in order to leave it to the Red Indians. For the sake of politeness I agreed with Mr. Nosolini that there did indeed seem to be a distinction and even a real difference between the Six Counties and the Goa situations, but I added that in my own view the Six Counties situation was unique and a crime unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Nevertheless, I had to explain that Irish public opinion, led by a very free Press, was simply not educated to these nuances and I saw little prospect of any Irish Government coming out 100% on the side of Portugal in this affair if it were to be revived again. The Irish people had strong feelings of friendship for Portugal which they regarded as one of the various countries of refuge in which their ancestors had found asylum in previous centuries. They also, in perhaps a vaguer way, recognised certain similarities of religion, constitutional theory and even geography between the two countries; but it must be remembered that India, like Ireland, is only just emerging from a long struggle for its freedom from Britain and that fact, rightly or wrongly, inclines the average Irishman to favour Nehru’s national aim to unify as much of his Republic as he can. The fact that Nehru promised last year to preserve the right of the Goanese missioners to carry on their good work naturally appealed to the ordinary Irish observer. The Ambassador laughed at the Irish people’s blind faith in Mr. Nehru and he gave me a long description of the Pandit’s double dealings in relation to the Goa question. He mentioned that despite Nehru’s dishonest counter-propaganda last year, Portugal had secured quite a good deal of support for its intransigent attitude regarding Goa. Only the more defeatist Western countries urged Portugal to get out of Goa. For example, his Belgian colleague here (Prince de Ligne,⁴ who retired last month) had strongly advised him to tell Salazar that the time had come for Western small Powers to give up their outdated colonialism and that ‘unless they got out they would be put out.’ I intervened to say that I could see the Belgian Minister’s point but that, of course, so long as Goa remained a useful naval base for the Western Powers (SEATO) I supposed Portugal should keep on being intransigent. This undiplomatic remark obviously pained Mr. Nosolini, but I thought of how the Portuguese President and Government had refused to even hear Count O’Kelly⁵ a couple of years ago when we instructed him to enter a protest about the visits of Portuguese ships to Derry for NATO exercises. Possibly we were wrong to expect any hearing and even mistaken in our policy at the time, but no other Power had treated us so ruthlessly as Portugal in regard to a démarche involving Partition.

The conversation terminated at long last by the Ambassador begging me to ask our Government to endeavour to perceive the underlying legal principles involved and to ignore the superficial appearances, because one can fight the Communist bloc only by sticking to legal principles and never ‘appeasing’ the enemy by surrendering principles to the threat of force for the sake of expediency. I agreed that this kind of argument might appeal more to an Irish Government than the more ‘religious’ one put to them last year; yet, at the same time, there would be always great difficulty in persuading the Irish electorate that anything which looked like Partition or Colonialism could possibly merit their positive support.

[matter omitted]