Dear Seán,

Your note of yesterday about F.¹

You will recall that after receiving my Secret Report of 4th November² the P. decided to adopt F.'s suggestion and told me to ask him to come over straight away. F. you remember said it would not be possible for him to get away until the new Government was in being, and further, that he thought it would be far better that he should not cross until he had had some talk with the new Prime Minister and the Chancellor and saw what the new Ministry was like.

The making of the Cabinet is of course now going on and the anticipation here is that the full list of the new Ministers will be announced towards the end of next week. Any immediate visit to Dublin by F. is therefore unlikely.

But as you know we were very disappointed, to put it no higher, at not getting from the British a definite assurance about the site of the proposed airport. At Liverpool both our friends seemed rather disappointed about this and urged me to try to get F. to give me the assurance definitely and officially that we had already been given semi-officially. I told them that when I last spoke to F. - 4th November - he suggested that we should meet again for a further talk in about a fortnight's time.

At Liverpool when they were both pressing me to see F. I said my own feeling was that it would be a mistake for me to go to him unless and until he asked me. I think they accepted this view but said that if and when he asked me I should press very strongly the desirability of translating the unofficial assurance into official terms.

To my surprise I find indirectly that F. is away and will not be back until next Tuesday. This I am told is a jealously guarded secret. I gather that immediately he returns he is going to ring me up and we ought to be having a conversation on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

As I mentioned to Leydon at Liverpool and as I mentioned also to you on the telephone yesterday, I doubt the wisdom of not doing anything on the coal-cattle pact questions until F. has been over. In the event of F.'s not being able to get over or in the event of his visit getting no farther than an exchange of views, I think we should be ready immediately to resume the discussion that was started at the meeting already reported which I attended with F. and other representatives of British Departments, that is to say, I think we should be ready to say what we could do in the way of modification of the duties of which the British complained at the meeting in question. We have not much time and it would be unfortunate if we had to begin later examining all these duties which we could quite well be doing now.