There is a delicious historical irony about the controversial move by Fianna Fáil, as part of its general election strategy, to pay An Post €9,500 for the right to have pro-Fianna Fáil messages franked on all stamped letters passing through the automated mail centres in Dublin and Portlaoise this month - about 70 per cent of the State's personal mail.
More than six decades ago, a Fianna Fáil government found itself in the embarrassing position of having to censor political franking messages on letters, even though it whole-heartedly agreed with the messages they were censoring.
The year was 1938. The new Constitution was not long in force, and its irredentist sentiments had found an echo north of the Border. In Derry, an anti-partition organisation with the rather quaint name of the Irish Union Association started a campaign in November aimed at persuading local authorities in the South (not yet a Republic in name) to frank all their outgoing mail with a short anti-partition slogan.
Administrative caution
They did not have to wait long to find willing recruits to the cause. The first was Galway County Council, which decided in December 1938 that it would put an anti-partition franking message on all its letters but, with classic administrative caution, decided to ask for the approval of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs first.
If the council had thought this would be just a formality, it was quickly disabused. Its letter threw P & T into a tizzy, as officials in Dublin realised there were a number of compelling reasons why they would find it difficult to accede to this request, and equally compelling reasons why they could not disclose these reasons to Galway County Council.
The problem was caused by international postal regulations, embodied in a number of international agreements to which Ireland had signed up in the late 1920s. Under these regulations, each country was free to organise its internal postal service as it thought fit, but international mail was governed by a different set of provisions. This was because there had been instances on mainland Europe in the early 1920s of some countries which had territorial disputes with their neighbours either franking their mail with irredentist slogans, or even printing postage stamps on which politically contentious boundaries had been altered.
To put a stop to this sort of potentially inflammatory propaganda, the International Postal Union decided that any country could refuse to handle or transmit mail from another country if it found the stamps or franking slogans politically offensive. Under these binding international rules, therefore, mail from Ireland carrying an anti-partition message as part of its postal franking could be refused transmission by the postal authorities in Britain, if they saw fit to do so. Given the nature and extent of the Irish diaspora, this would have had far-reaching consequences.
The Department of Posts and Telegraphs, therefore, decided it could not accede to the Galway request - but, for obvious reasons, did not want to admit publicly that the reason was because of the potential offence to Britain. Accordingly, it delayed replying to Galway.
Political pressure
In the meantime, political pressure was building up, and one of the main anti-partition organisations tried to bypass the Department of Posts and Telegraphs by appealing directly to Mr de Valera. Putting anti-partition slogans on local authority letters, it argued, would increase (which it plainly thought was a good thing) the "resentment" of the Northern minority at the unjust division of the country.
De Valera, unaware of the niceties of the international postal regulations, and conscious of the political embarrassment which would be occasioned by a refusal, asked Maurice Moynihan, secretary to the Cabinet, to follow the matter up urgently. Moynihan did so. In short order, Posts and Telegraphs made Moynihan aware of the complexities of the issue; Moynihan passed on the information to de Valera; and de Valera, evidently, decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Galway County Council was eventually sent a polite letter refusing its request, but fudging the reason why - a classic piece of civil-service-speak.
Although his failure to intervene in favour of Galway County Council shows plainly that he had accepted the rationale of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, de Valera was careful not to put anything on paper about his own view - and indeed may have engaged in quiet communication with Fianna Fáil members in Galway and elsewhere to ensure that the issue was not pressed to the point of public embarrassment.
A decade later, as Ireland was in the process of declaring itself a Republic under the first inter-party government, Moynihan found himself in an identical situation, but responding to a different set of political masters. Again, the question of franking public authority letters with an anti-partition slogan was raised. Again, Posts and Telegraphs repeated their reasoning, adding, by way of strengthening their case, that the postal authorities in Northern Ireland would react adversely.
Belfast stickers
"During the war years," the Department elaborated, "when Censorship was in force, it was observed that 'stickers' emphasising that Belfast was in 'Ulster' and formed part of the 'United Kingdom' were used frequently enough on letters originating in Belfast. We removed all those which came under notice." (P&T to Moynihan, October 7th, 1949, National Archives file G 23934/38.)
The issue was not entirely dead, but it was dying. It was revived finally, and briefly, in Cork in 1958 when the publishers of the United Irishman started selling anti-partition stickers for people to put on letters. It seems the postal authorities on that occasion decided to ignore the activity in the hope it would expire naturally, which evidently it did. The fact that Fianna Fáil, which censored political messages on letters in 1938, is happily promoting them in the new millennium, is a small but significant footnote in the history of political communication in Ireland.