Dear Sir
Your Diarist Ronan McGreevy (October 18) says that Lloyd George was sceptical about the partition of Ireland, whereas both Churchill and Lloyd George were determined on it since 1912.
C,P.Scott, fifty years Editor of the Manchester Guardian, and later its owner, nine years a Liberal MP was Lloyd George’s friend and confidant, and during December 1921 a key collaborator in securing the signatures of the Irish delegates to articles of agreement
A selection of Scott’s diaries covering the years 1911-1928 was published in 1961, apparently unnoticed in Ireland. Scott recorded in them conversations with John Redmond and John Dillon, T.P. O’Connor, Joe Devlin and other Irish Party leaders, revealing words of theirs never made public. In Britain he was in close contact for decades with Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, Admirals and
and Generals, and virtually with all the men that mattered.
Scott was an early and consistent advocate of Proportional Representation, which Lloyd George condemned “as a device for defeating democracy, the principle of which the majority should rule, and bringing faddists of all kinds into Parliament and establishing groups and disintegrating parties”‘
Under Westminster’s Government of Ireland Act 1920 Lloyd George was happy to impose PR on Ireland, ” to minimise Sinn Fein representation and maximise minority interests through transfer votes”. RIC Intelligence had warned Downing Street that “unless PR be passed Sinn Fein would carry all before them……and that Irish leaders really fear the example of Sligo Town where PR has given the Loyalists a say in local affairs and kept the republican element in their place”.
Yours faithfully
Donal Kennedy
LONDON
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