The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

by Margaret Thatcher

  The return of Garret FitzGerald as Taoiseach in December 1982 provided us with an opportunity to improve the climate of Anglo-Irish relations with a view to pressing the South for more action on security. But I was wary about allowing the Irish to set the pace: Dr Fitz-Gerald’s understanding of Unionist sensibilities was no greater than Mr Haughey’s and I had plenty of experience already of the exaggerated construction which both nationalists and Unionists placed on even bland pledges of Anglo-Irish co-operation.

  I had a meeting with Dr FitzGerald at the European Council at Stuttgart in June 1983. I shared the worry he expressed about the erosion of SDLP support by Sinn Fein. However uninspiring SDLP politicians might be…at least since the departure of the courageous Gerry Fitt…they were the minority’s main representatives and an alternative to the IRA. They had to be wooed. But Dr FitzGerald had no suggestions to make about how to get the SDLP to take part in the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was pointless without their participation. He pressed me to agree talks between officials on future co-operation.

  I did not think there was much to talk about, but I accepted the proposal. Robert Armstrong, head of the civil service and Cabinet Secretary, and his opposite number in the Republic, Dermot Nally, became the main channels of communication. Over the summer and autumn of 1983 we received a number of informal approaches from the Irish, by no means consistent or clear in content. It became apparent that Dr FitzGerald’s Government did not speak with a single voice. At various times and with various degrees of specificity they seemed to be offering to amend Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, by which the Republic claims sovereignty over Northern Ireland. We became increasingly sceptical of their ability to deliver this, since it would involve a referendum and divide the Irish Government. We also had well-justified doubts about talk of a more helpful line from the SDLP. On the security side the Irish were offering better cooperation, but proposing also a direct role for the Irish police (the Garda), and possibly the Irish Army, in Northern Ireland itself, as well as a Southern involvement in the Northern courts. They urged another attempt at devolution and, surprisingly, appeared ready to contemplate a return to majority rule.

  Most of these ideas were impossible, implying some kind of joint sovereignty over Northern Ireland. Moreover, I disliked intensely this kind of bargaining about security. It seemed to me that to withhold full co-operation to catch criminals and save lives because one wanted some political gain was fundamentally wrong. But the Irish side did not see it like that.

  I allowed the talks between the two sides to continue. I also had in mind the political danger of seeming to adopt a negative reaction to new proposals. This in turn meant that I had, within limits, to treat seriously the Republic’s so-called ‘New Ireland Forum’. This had originally been set up mainly as a way of helping the SDLP at the 1983 general election but Garret FitzGerald was now using it as a sounding board for ‘ideas’ about the future of Northern Ireland. Since the Unionist parties would take no part in it the outcome was bound to be skewed towards a united Ireland. For my part I was anxious that this collection of nationalists, North and South, might attract international respectability for moves to weaken the Union, so I was intensely wary of them.

  BACKGROUND TO THE ANGLO-IRISH AGREEMENT, 1983–1985

  I saw Garret FitzGerald at Chequers on the morning of Monday 7 November 1983 for our second bilateral summit. It was a modestly useful discussion, but the Irish always had difficulty understanding that joint sovereignty was a nonstarter. Immediately after the Irish team left I held a further meeting with ministers and officials. I felt that we must now come up with our own proposals and I asked Robert Armstrong to draw up an initial paper setting out the options. I laid special stress on the need for secrecy; a leak would destroy the prospects for a new initiative. This meeting, from our side, was the origin of the later Anglo-Irish Agreement.

  The need for Irish help on security was again evident after the appalling murder by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) of worshippers at the Pentecostal Gospel Hall at Darkley in County Armagh on Sunday 20 November. In spite of all the fine words about the need to defeat terrorism which I had been hearing from the Taoiseach, the Irish Justice minister refused to meet Jim Prior to review security co-operation and the Garda Commissioner similarly refused to meet the Chief Constable of the RUC.

  Then the IRA struck again on the mainland. After lunch on Saturday 17 December I left Chequers to attend a carol concert in the Royal Festival Hall. While I was there I received news that a car bomb had exploded just outside Harrods. I left at the first opportunity and went to the scene. By the time I arrived most of the dead and injured had been removed but I shall never forget the sight of the charred body of a teenage girl lying where she had been blown against the store window. Even by the IRA’s own standards this was a particularly callous attack. Five people including two police officers died. The fact that one of the dead was an American should have brought home to US sympathizers with the IRA the real nature of Irish terrorism.

  The Harrods bomb was designed to intimidate not just the Government but the British people as a whole. The IRA had chosen the country’s most prestigious store at a time when the streets of London were full of shoppers in festive mood looking forward to Christmas. There was an instinctive feeling…in reaction to the outrage…that everyone must go about their business normally. Denis was among those who went to shop in Harrods the following Monday to do just that.

  Two days after the bomb we received word that the Irish Cabinet was to meet the following day to consider proscribing Sinn Fein south of the border. I summoned a meeting of ministers straight away to consider our response. Clearly if the Irish proscribed, we would take similar action. But our tentative conclusion was that proscription would not directly affect the fight against Irish terrorism in Great Britain, and would probably lead to disorder and violence in Northern Ireland. In the event the Irish Cabinet decided not to go ahead.

  On Christmas Eve I visited the province myself, meeting members of the security forces and the general public. I was all but mobbed by cheering well-wishers in the main street of Bangor, a seaside town in County Down, and added to my rapidly growing collection of Tyrone crystal, purchased on Ulster visits, while Denis acquired another tie.

  By the end of the year the prospects for some kind of negotiation seemed reasonable, but the acid test for me would be the question of security. Not that the picture on security was wholly bad. The Irish Government devoted significant resources to security…more on a per capita basis than the United Kingdom. Also co-operation between Dublin and London was good. The real area of difficulty lay in cross-border co-operation between the Garda and the RUC. In spite of our efforts to help, Garda training and use of information were unsatisfactory. These shortcomings were worsened by personal mistrust between Garda and RUC personnel. We wanted to find solutions to these problems, some of which required the Irish to deploy more resources to the border, others of which were really a matter of political will. The best hope on both accounts seemed to lie with an Anglo-Irish Agreement which would acknowledge in a public way the Republic’s interest in the affairs of the North, while keeping decision-making out of its hands and firmly in ours. This was what I now set out to achieve.

  In January and February 1984 I held meetings to run through the options. The Irish were keen to pursue possibilities of joint policing and even mixed courts (with British and Irish judges sitting on the same bench), about both of which I had the gravest reservations…reservations which grew stronger still as time went on. The idea, favoured by Dr FitzGerald, of the Garda policing nationalist areas like West Belfast seemed quite impractical: not only would the Unionists have been outraged, the Garda officers would probably have been shot on sight by the IRA. As for joint Anglo-Irish courts, this would have cast doubt on the whole administration of justice which had taken place in the province. Majority decisions in terrorist cases by a mixed court would have been disastrous. The same argum
ents, with slightly less though sufficient force, applied to the proposal for three-judge courts in Ulster, which was another option favoured by the Irish.

  We decided to put forward our own proposals at the beginning of March. Robert Armstrong travelled to Dublin and presented our ideas orally…no papers were exchanged until much later in the talks. Our main idea was to establish a Joint Security Commission, to work up proposals that might include a measure of joint policing along a zone on both sides of the border…the element of reciprocity was crucial to us. We were prepared also to consider other measures with respect to the criminal law and local government in Northern Ireland.

  The Irish responded immediately by ruling out the idea of a security zone, though encouraging further talks. They made a counter-approach in May, still based on the idea of ‘joint sovereignty’, though they sought to get around our fundamental objections by using the term ‘joint authority’. I was not at any point prepared to concede this, but at the end of May I authorized Robert Armstrong to develop the idea of a consultative role for the Republic in Northern Ireland. I also requested a study of a quite different approach to the problem: redrawing the existing border with the Republic, which followed the old Irish county lines. My instinct was that there might be political and security gains from getting rid of the anomalies, in the event that our talks with the Irish came to nothing.

  There was an important development over the summer: the Irish for the first time explicitly put forward the idea of amending Articles 2 and 3 of their Constitution to make Irish unity an aspiration rather than a legal claim. This was attractive to me, in that I thought it should reassure the Unionists. But it was clear that the Irish would expect a good deal in return, and I still doubted their capacity to deliver the referendum vote. So the net effect of their proposal was actually to make me more pessimistic and suspicious. Also they were trying to go too far too fast. The Irish still hankered after joint authority (indeed this lay behind the subsequent contrary interpretations we and they placed on the provisions of the Anglo-Irish Agreement). I made these points forcefully to Dr FitzGerald when he came to see me at No. 10 on Monday 3 September.

  Jim Prior resigned as Northern Ireland Secretary in September 1984 to become chairman of GEC. I brought Douglas Hurd, a former Foreign Office mandarin and a talented political novelist, who had been Ted Heath’s political secretary at No. 10 but who had shown a willingness to work in the new ideological climate, into the Cabinet as his replacement. Shortly afterwards I widened the circle of those involved on our side of the talks to include senior officials in the Northern Ireland Office (NIO). We held a meeting of ministers and officials in early October which brought out the likely extent of Unionist objections, and in particular the fact that amendment of Articles 2 and 3 might cut little ice with them; indeed, I was told that ‘an aspiration to unity’ was scarcely less offensive to the Unionists than an outright claim.

  It was at this point that the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. I was not going to appear to be bombed to the negotiating table; the incident confirmed my feeling that we should go slowly, and I feared too that it might be the first of a series which might poison the atmosphere so much that an agreement would prove impossible.

  In what remained of October and in early November we toughened our negotiating position. On a visit to Dublin Douglas Hurd and Robert Andrew (the Permanent Secretary of the NIO) made it clear to the Irish that we did not believe that an ambitious package involving amendment of Articles 2 and 3 was possible. It seemed to me that a breakdown might not be far off.

  On Wednesday 14 November 1984 I held a meeting of ministers and officials to review the position. I was to meet Garret FitzGerald at our regular Anglo-Irish summit the following week and I was alarmed by the lack of realism which still seemed evident in the Irish proposals. I decided that while I would go to the summit willing to make progress on co-operation I would disabuse him in no uncertain terms of the possibility of joint authority.

  When Dr FitzGerald and I met at Chequers on Sunday 18 and Monday 19 November I tried to do just this. I was prepared to offer a Joint Security Commission (though operational security matters in Northern Ireland would remain in our hands) but Dr FitzGerald was still talking of the minority needing to be ‘policed by people from their own community’. He was still arguing for power sharing in the Northern Ireland Assembly as a precondition for the SDLP taking part in it, which was almost equally unrealistic given Unionist attitudes. As foreseen, we disagreed sharply over the Irish desire for joint authority. But I agreed that talks at an official level should continue.

  At my press conference afterwards I was asked about the conclusions of the New Ireland Forum which had issued a report earlier in the year setting out three ‘options’ for the future government of Ireland: unification, confederation and joint authority. I listed them and said that each of them was ‘out’. There seemed no point in pretending that these were acceptable approaches when they were not. Almost immediately a wave of Irish indignation broke against the defences of Downing Street. Dr FitzGerald attacked me in a ‘private’ address to his own Parliamentary Party, and was reported to have described my remarks as ‘gratuitously offensive’. The Irish Minister of Justice warned our Ambassador that the current crisis in relations was such that the Irish public’s tolerance of the IRA would grow and that the Irish Government’s ability to deal with terrorism had been weakened.

  I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that the Taoiseach wanted a private meeting with me when I was at Dublin Castle for the European Council in early December. I agreed and we had a short discussion in which he pleaded that extra sensitivity was needed in what was said after eight hundred years of misunderstandings. I felt at the end that I had gained an insight into every one of those eight hundred years.

  Nevertheless, discussions with the Irish continued through the first half of 1985. In January they agreed to begin detailed consideration of an agreement on the basis of a British draft, based on the idea of consultation rather than joint authority. But more and more leaks appeared about proposals on joint courts and joint policing from the Irish side. This worsened Unionist distrust still further.

  In our discussions with the Irish of a joint Anglo-Irish body as a framework for consultation there was a succession of misunderstandings and disagreements. Although the idea of amending Articles 2 and 3 was clearly now off the agenda, we pressed the Irish for some kind of firm declaration committing them to the principle that unification could only come about with the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland. We hoped that such a declaration would reassure the Unionists, to the extent that such a thing was possible. The Irish wanted the proposed joint body to have a much bigger say over economic and social matters in the North than we were prepared to concede. Nor did the gains we could hope for on security become any clearer. I found myself constantly toning down the commitments which were put before me in our own draft proposals, let alone being prepared to accept those emanating from Dublin. If the arrangements worked badly we must leave ourselves a retreat. In early June I insisted that there should be a review mechanism built into the Anglo-Irish Agreement. I also continued to resist Irish pressure for joint courts and SDLP demands for radical changes in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the RUC.

  When I met Dr FitzGerald at the Milan European Council on the morning of Saturday 29 June 1985 he said that he was prepared to have the Irish Government state publicly that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of the majority of the people and acknowledge the fact that this consent did not exist. He was prepared to have a special Irish task force sent to the south side of the border to strengthen security. He was also prepared to have Ireland ratify the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism (ECST). But he was still pressing for joint courts, changes in the RUC and the UDR…to be announced as ‘confidence-building measures’, rather than as part of the agreement itself… and now added the proposal for a major revi
ew of sentences for terrorist prisoners if the violence was brought to an end. It remained to be seen whether he could deliver on his promises. But in any case the demands were still unrealistic, as I told him. I could go no further than considering the possibility of joint courts: I was certainly not going to give an assurance in advance that they would be established. I considered a review of sentences quite out of the question and he did not press the point. I warned him that announcing measures on policing at the same time as the Anglo-Irish Agreement would cause a sharp Unionist reaction and jeopardize the whole position.

  At this point Dr FitzGerald became very agitated. He declared that unless the minority in Northern Ireland could be turned against the IRA, Sinn Fein would gain the upper hand in the North and provoke a civil war which would drag the Republic down as well, with Colonel Gaddafi providing millions to help this happen. A sensible point was being exaggerated to the level of absurdity. I said that of course I shared his aim of preventing Ireland falling under hostile and tyrannical forces. But that was not an argument for taking measures which would simply provoke the Unionists and cause unnecessary trouble.

  By the time our meeting ended, however, I felt that we were some way towards an agreement, though there were still points to resolve. I also knew that a lot of progress had been made in the official talks, so I had good reason to believe that a successful conclusion was possible. Dr FitzGerald and I even discussed the timing and place of the signing ceremony.

  THE ANGLO-IRISH AGREEMENT—AND REACTIONS: 1985–1987

  At two o’clock on the afternoon of Friday 15 November Garret FitzGerald and I signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland. It was not perfect from either side’s point of view. Article 1 of the agreement affirmed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland and recognized that the present wish of that majority was for no change in the status of the province. I believed that this major concession by the Irish would reassure the Unionists that the Union itself was not in doubt. I thought that given my own well-known attitude towards Irish terrorism they would have confidence in my intentions. I was wrong about that. But the Unionists miscalculated too. The tactics which they used to oppose the agreement…a general strike, intimidation, flirting with civil disobedience…worsened the security situation and weakened their standing in the eyes of the rest of the United Kingdom.