Letter from John A. Costello to John Courtney¹ (New York)
(Copy)

I have received a copy of the resolution dated the 22nd February, 1957,² signed by you and by Mr. John F. Devine, the Vice-President of your Association.

I am very sorry that any of our friends in the United States should misunderstand our position in regard to the raids on the Six County area. The sympathy and support of such friends have been invaluable in the national struggles of the past and are no less necessary for the success of our efforts to restore the historic unity of Ireland’s national territory. It is important that you should fully appreciate our position, and I shall explain it as clearly as I can.

We are firmly convinced that Partition cannot be solved by force. In saying this, I do not mean merely that we have not the physical power to compel the British to withdraw their forces from the Six Counties. I mean much more than that. We must recognise the unfortunate fact that, even if the British withdrew every soldier tomorrow, we would still have to deal with two-thirds of the population of the Six Counties – 800,000 people, who have learned to accept the false belief that their religious and civil liberties and their national prosperity depend on their political integration with Britain. Would they meekly submit if our Army crossed the Border and we tried to enforce our rule in the north-eastern area? I am quite sure they would not. We would find ourselves in the position of trying to hold down by force the great majority of the people – Irish people – living in a region of considerable size. It would not be easy for us to convince either those people themselves or the outside world that we were not acting much as the British acted here in the years before 1922. What would become of our moral case for national reunion? Even if we succeeded in beating the local majority in the north-east into submission, what would their feelings be in the years to come? Is it not certain that they – and, after them, their children and their children’s children – would be eager to avail themselves of every opportunity to separate themselves from us again?

In the unlikely event of our achieving an apparent reunion of the national territory by such methods, nothing is more certain than that we would have perpetuated, not ended, the real Partition of Ireland, which is based on the fears of the local Six County majority – unfounded as those fears, in fact, are – that reunion would threaten their traditions, their loyalties and their way of life.

All that I have said represents the true feelings and convictions of the overwhelming majority of the people at home. I am quite certain that it also represents the feelings of most of the members of our race in the United States and in other countries abroad. These views are shared by all the Parties represented in the present Government – Fine Gael, Labour and Farmers. The Opposition Party, Fianna Fáil, has expressly endorsed our condemnation of force.

It is, therefore, beyond all question that the employment of force has no democratic sanction or authority behind it. Those who have planned and organised the recent raids are well aware of that fact. They comprise a mere handful of men, without any representative standing whatever. The entire group, including the boys and very young men who have been induced to join the organisations concerned, form only a very tiny minority of the population. Have they any right to go against the wishes of the whole body of the people, including the Nationalists of the Six Counties? Of course, they have no such right. They belong to a community which forms a sovereign, independent, democratic Irish State with a Parliament and a Government to which every member of the community owes respect and a Constitution which guarantees the people’s democratic rights. Among other things, that Constitution lays it down that the final arbiters of national policy are the people themselves and that no armed force may be permitted to exist except the defence forces maintained by Parliament.

What has happened is that a small minority group have refused to recognise the Constitution and the democratic institutions of this State or to accept the national policy which aims at a peaceful solution of Partition; and so they have formed armed forces of their own to enforce their own ideas of what the national policy ought to be. I am certain that every one of our friends in the United States who gives earnest thought to the matter will agree with me that this could not be tolerated by any Government. A Government that allowed a self-appointed minority group, without democratic sanction, to settle great questions of national policy would not be worthy of the name of Government. If that sort of thing were allowed to go unchecked in Ireland, there would be plenty of people abroad to point the finger of scorn at all Irishmen and to say that we were incapable of governing ourselves.

It has been alleged against the Government of Ireland that we helped the British to act against Irishmen by having produced in evidence, in open Court, the captured plans of an unlawful organisation for attacks on various posts and installations in the Six Counties. The particular officer who produced that evidence was, of course, acting on instructions which he was bound, in duty, to obey. Those instructions were given after the most careful and anxious consideration by myself and my colleagues. If the evidence were not produced, we would be a party to allowing the raids to proceed as planned, and we would share responsibility for the loss of life and the further damage to the cause of national reunion that would result. Needless to say, there could be no question of our conveying the information privately to the British or the Six County authorities. To do so would be to allow the men taking part in the attacks to be led into a trap. Where the names of persons involved were mentioned in the documents, these were excluded from the evidence produced in Court and special care was taken to prevent the disclosure of the names.

But our duty to do all in our power to prevent the carrying out of the plans remained inescapable. By making them public, we brought home to our people the extent of the danger into which those responsible for the plans were trying to bring the whole nation – the danger of a civil war that would, not improbably, defeat the hope of national reunion for all time. By making it impracticable for the men concerned to carry out their plans, we prevented bloodshed, loss of life and irreparable injury to the national cause.

The Government’s abhorrence of Partition and of the evils that flow from it has been publicly expressed on many occasions, and the British Government has been constantly kept aware of our attitude. We are convinced, however, that a true solution can be secured by peaceful means only.

Our policy for the ending of Partition was restated by me in a speech which I delivered in Dublin on the 6th February, 1957.³ On that occasion, I pointed out that our first task must be to endeavour to bring an end to the unjust discrimination which has been practised against the Nationalists of the Six Counties. We must, further, seek to convince as many as possible of those in the Six Counties who are now opposed to national reunion that their true interests will best be served by joining with the rest of their fellow-countrymen in working for the good of Ireland as a whole. It is too often forgotten that a favourable change in the attitude of little more than one-fourth of that part of the Six County population which is opposed to reunion would convert the existing local minority of Nationalists into a majority. It is our aim, also, to secure acceptance by the British Government and people of the truth that the welfare of all the people of the two neighbouring islands would be advanced by an acceptable solution of the Partition problem and to bring clearly before the minds of the freedom-loving peoples of the world the benefits for western peace and security that such a solution would bring in its train.

The United States is the home of the greatest of the freedom-loving peoples – the American people, to whose number you belong. You have it in your power to give us great assistance in our efforts by well-judged use of your influence among the community in which you live. Believe me, if you encourage those who would override the authority of our democratic institutions at home in Ireland, if you set yourselves in opposition to our measures to stop their activities, you will do grave disservice to Ireland and to the cause of Irish national reunion.