indicates that, in fact, he responds to the personal touch and 
is not incapable of being affected by the right kind of approach. 
I will attempt to state his views, not as he precisely formulated 
them, because he is not given to precision in relation to modern 
events, but as I inferred them I think accurately, from hours of 
discussion, discussion which was confidential and as to the terms 
of which I would, therefore, desire not to be quoted:-
 
(1)He is of the opinion that Britain's cause in this war is
a just one and that the war was forced upon her.
 
(2)He would like Britain to win and feels that 80 per cent. at 
least of the people of Eire, though they are by instinct dis-
trustful of the British, would like the same thing.
 
(3)He has no grievance against Great Britain, except that Ireland 
is still a divided country. He is, however, convinced that the 
present British Government is hostile and unsympathetic.
 
(4)He tells a story of injustices to the Roman Catholic minority 
in Ulster, which after all is, in two of the six countries, a 
Roman Catholic majority. These injusticcs, to use his own phrase, 
"make his blood boil." Yet on examination they appear somewhat 
shadowy. There is the old controversy about a separate capital grant 
to Roman Catholic schools, which are, in fact, more liberally 
treated in Ulster than they arc in Australia. 'There is the sug-
gestion that Romen Catholics are prejudiced in employment. There 
is the statement that the Northern electorates have been so gerry-
mandered that inadequate minority representation in the Ulster 
Parliment results. This last seems of small moment, since the Ulster 
Parliament has a law that no elected member may sit without taking 
the Oath of Allegiance, and consequently this minority demand is for 
the right to elect members who will after election not sit in Parli-
ment. This complaint is therefore a strange intellectual phenomenon, 
which could perhaps be found in no country other than Ireland.
 
(5)This minority agitation in Ulster is, I think, largely fomented by 
Cardinal MacRory, and De Valera is prepared upon pressure to admit 
that the anti-partition feeling is much stronger among the Roman 
Catholics of Ulster than it is in Eire itself.
 
(6)When brought face to face with the fact, he recognises that Great 
Britain could not possibly throw Ulster into Eire if that meant that 
Ulster was also to become neutral and that Great Britian was to be 
deprived of even those bases which she now has. He infers from this, 
and admits reluctantly, that the unity scheme cannot very well be 
pressed during the war so long as Eire remains neutral.
 
(7) He affirms, however, that there is a passionate desire in the 
Irish heart to be neutral in the war;
a strange