In August 1932 the Foreign Office received a curious letter from three British citizens employed at the Bray Printing Company in Co. Wicklow, just south of Dublin city. They described how their employer had received threatening letters from ‘the local Fianna Fail and I.R.A.’ demanding that they be dismissed from the firm because of their nationality. Following this, the printers were visited by two ‘ardent IRA men’ who bluntly stated that Fianna Fáil were determined to get them out of the country – ‘hints were thrown of physical violence’. The IRA men added that this was ‘only a beginning’; they intended to do the same to all offices where British nationals were employed. The printers wrote to the Manchester headquarters of the British Typographical Association, of which they were members, ‘appealing for protection’. At the same time they prudently decided to enlist sturdier allies. ‘As we are sure to incur the enmity of the militant section of the I.R.A.’, they pleaded to the Foreign Office, ‘we earnestly beg of you to render us assistance in some way through the powerful influences at your disposal, namely, the Intelligence and Secret Service Departments.’ They took the precaution of having their letter posted in Britain in case it was intercepted by their Irish enemies: ‘hence the English stamp’, they helpfully explained.

The way in which this letter was handled reveals a lot about how the British government perceived the political situation in southern Ireland in 1932. When the document was passed to the Dominions Office, two of its senior figures noted that if such a request had come from a foreign country, for example a South American republic (then a by-word for instability and corruption), they would appeal to the foreign government concerned and demand that protection be given to the British subjects. But in the case of the Irish Free State this was impossible: