1. During a courtesy call which I paid on him on the 19th inst. Monsieur Jules Moch,¹ Minister for Defence, manifested a general interest in our position in relation to the Atlantic Pact. He seemed to be familiar with the reasons why we were not at the conference which drew up this instrument (although he was not associated with that conference) and to have some knowledge of the Partition problem. He remarked that the Americans might better have approached the problem by way of a bilateral agreement with us. Like many of his compatriots, M. Moch, however, knows the Six Counties as 'Ulster'. I put him right on this point and explained how the Stormont area came to be constituted. He seemed to be not unsympathetic to our attitude towards the Partition problem. I mentioned that we found it particularly difficult to understand why the British Labour Government (M. Moch is a Socialist) should have taken the action it did in the Ireland Act, and told him about the recent statement of Mr. Stokes, British Minister of Works, and Mr. Attlee’s reply to a question in the Commons about this statement. M. Moch seems to think that we could not remain neutral in a future war. He declared that the use of Shannon alone by American aircraft in the event of war would prevent this. His precise words were that if five hundred aircraft per day were to fly into Shannon, we would clearly have no prospect of keeping out of the war. I wondered, but cannot determine, whether the view expressed in this context by M. Moch was in the way of a casual remark on the spur of the moment or arose out of discussions which he may have heard (particularly in the light of his remark about a bilateral agreement between the USA and ourselves).

[matter omitted]