My dear Fred,
I was very glad to receive your letter of the 11th May¹ this morning. I had really despaired of ever rousing the interest of the Department again in this mission. I know you realize how bad it is to believe that people abroad are not doing their work just as well as the Department at home, and, to ignore their essential needs absolutely, produces a feeling of isolation which only the most robust of us can resist. It is a pity to let the different sections of the Department treat us as if we were just paid clerks living on the Taxpayer, in the lap of luxury. The sentence 'We are paying you 270,000 Lire' is certainly overdoing the 'haut en bas' attitude to the point of raising the assumption that we are not part of the Department at all. The Department of Finance is an abstraction, a buffer, or whatever we may wish to call it, and its cautious handling of our State finances is perfectly understandable. But why must the Dublin section of our own Department take on its tone when dealing with colleagues abroad.

I can't understand the reluctance to provide some grant for the official visits. It cramps me enormously for the rest of the Holy Year. As I said before I am now more or less in the position of the Head of the French mission, because my original allowance plus what remains after accounts of the three visits have been balanced, will about equal his allowance for a normal year. In spite of discreet inquiries I can find no case where official visits are included in an allowance to meet a new general situation. I hope you realise that I have to live to the extreme limit of my salary and allowances combined, and my food purchases in Dublin alone are going over the average of 160 pounds a year. At least, I am sure that nobody believes I have been able to meet the extra demands of this year without having recourse to measures which should not be imposed upon me. Apart from the visits in question (and the Taoiseach's and President's visits involved keeping four persons in the house) and the round of special lunches together with three receptions, I have a constant flow of visitors who have to be entertained in some way. I have had groups of up to thirty and more at a time from Cork, Dublin, Waterford, Meath, Sligo etc and 140 from New Zealand. I'll have to go on at the same rate no matter what expedients I have to adopt about finance, or I shall let the job down. If you have a chat with Mr. Dillon or any one of the Pilgrims who had to stay in good hotels you will realize that the pound at home is hardly the equivalent of 2,700 lire here, so far as living expenses are concerned. With the difficulty of turning over a staff, trained to run the house at a normal low pressure, on to such high pressure work, it would have been better if I had been told from the beginning to get a caterer to do the work and to produce receipts. I might then have had a better chance of being treated fairly. Now that the visits are over I know what is going to happen. But has it not a little bit the appearance of excessively bad treatment. So far as I can get information, I have incomparably the lowest allowances and I have the smallest staff of any mission in this country ... both for house and office.

I am not going to write about this matter anymore. It may look well in the Dáil, but it is most unjust. But I still must request that I be given immediately four months advance instalment of the one hundred pounds allowance so as to allow me to free myself from present embarrassments.

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