Mr. E. McAteer, MP for Derry called on me to-day. He said that he had an idea and a few impressions which he wished to convey to the Minister or to the Secretary of the Department. The Minister being away, I arranged for Mr. McAteer to see the Secretary.

Mr. McAteer said that the first re-action amongst the Northern Nationalists to the recent violence was a fear of a repetition of Anti-Catholic pogroms. However the accident that the first official Six County victim was a Catholic RUC man has had a very definite effect on the Stormont authorities and on the leading Orangemen.¹ If the first victim had been, say, some local Grand Master of an Orange Lodge doing his tour of duty as a B Special, Mr. McAteer felt that definite and violent anti-Catholic action would have been hard to prevent.

From some hints made by important Unionists to his colleague Mr. P. J. Gormley,² MP for mid-Derry Mr. McAteer feels that, despite appearances, the Unionist leaders might be prepared to relax anti-Catholic discrimination, if such measures seemed to yield a hope of avoiding periodical outbursts of violence. Mr. McAteer considers that while it might be difficult to make an arrangement direct with the Unionists, a plan of action full of pitfalls and snags for everybody, that the present situation offered a certain opportunity to the Irish Government to obtain some amelioration of the position of the Catholics in the Six Counties. He suggests that while obviously our official stand must follow the lines of the Taoiseach’s reply to the British Ambassador’s recent protest³ insofar as the primary cause of all the trouble, namely Partition is concerned there is scope for negotiation in regard to the secondary causes namely discrimination against Catholics in employment, housing etc. and the policy of gerrymandering in certain areas and the frustrating tactics used by the Unionists at Stormont, county councils, city corporations, and town councils which render the normal forms of constitutional behaviour futile. He thinks that at this stage it may be useless going into the history of these factors but that their existence is plain and obvious and that the time is ripe for us to inform the British authorities that we are seriously concerned about the whole situation and that while whatever measures we may be considering undertaking may be taking effect that as long as these secondary causes continue to exist the British Government can only look forward to similar troubles arising again and again every so many years.

Mr. McAteer considers that there is a good chance that Stormont would yield to pressure on this point from either Whitehall or Westminster and he emphasises that every small strengthening of the minority position is an advance towards the ending of Partition by peaceful means.

The Secretary stated that he would convey Mr. McAteer’s views to the Minister.