Scott’s political diaries were published in 1961, nearly 30 years after his death, apparently unnoticed by Irish commentators. Below is his entry for 15 July 1921: –
“Saw de Valera in his hotel this afternoon. A whole bevy of people in the sitting-room, through which Childers showed me to the bedroom, where the great man shortly afterwards appeared. After greetings I remarked that I had fancied he had a little quarrel with me for something in the Manchester Guardian (I had heard this from Denoir, a good Irishman of our London staff whose suggestion it was that de Valera would be glad to see me) and he replied with alacrity that he had and at once launched forth……
It appeared that his grievance was that we had denounced some of the Sinn Fein outrages as murder on a par with the agents of the (British) Government. He regarded this as outrageous and spoke of the Irish Republican Army as the cream of the population, as chivalrous and honourable as existed anywhere in the world. I said we discriminated between acts which were really acts of war done in the open and assassinations of individual like the Dublin murders which we did certainly and utterly condemn.
But he would hear of no such distinction. The murders he said were executions carried out for a purpose against spies or suborners of spies or persons convicted on evidence of similar offences. He even defended the dreadful Dublin murders on the ground that the men murdered one by one in their beds were officers of the (British) Government secret service and Childers, who was present throughout the conversation of about half an hour, concurred with him.
He said these men were members of the (British) Government headquarters staff and were in spying out to destroy Sinn Fein headquarters and they had a right to kill them,
Throughout de Valera based himself on the absolute right of the Irish people to “self-determination”. Their elected representatives were the sole lawful Government of Ireland and those who opposed them were intruders and usurpers to be resisted in every possible way…”
Throughout Scott wrote of the British Government as ” the Government”, as if it were the legitimate Government of Ireland, seven years after the pretence that it was fighting for the freedom of small nations.
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