Those present noticed that her mood had changed. Watching from the Irish side, Michael Lillis observed:
When she was getting ready to go down and sign the Agreement, I sensed the most intense tension. And I wonder subsequently, did she know what a difficult thing this was going to be for her? It sort of reminded me of the famous remark of Michael Collins [the Irish Republican leader] when he was leaving Downing Street in 1921 – ‘I have signed my death warrant’ … If that’s true, I give her all the more credit for taking this tremendous risk, which, I believe, paid off. She did a very courageous and extremely valuable thing and I am sorry that she came to dislike it.186
She signed. The Taoiseach followed, using the Irish version of his name, Gearóid Mac Gearailt.†
After the signing, Mrs Thatcher went back upstairs with officials to prepare for the press conference. She was agitated, and began scribbling on scraps of paper and reading aloud sections of the agreed text. She recruited Dermot Nally to assist her and instructed Robert Armstrong to help FitzGerald: ‘Dermot, you ask me the questions I might have to face. Robert, you ask Garret.’187 She was trying to rehearse the lines which both sides wanted. With her usual slight muddle about the right terms to use in Irish matters, she kept referring in this practice session to the Anglo-Irish ‘Treaty’. David Goodall pointed out the unfortunate historical associations for the Irish of that word, and reminded her to stick to ‘Agreement’.188 She then descended for the press conference, which was very hot and crowded. The ‘frightful hammering noise’189 from the Paisleyites beyond the gates was audible. Mrs Thatcher spoke first. She started with the rejection of violence and the mutual recognition of ‘the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland’,190 and placed only third in her order of priority the most controversial aspect – the intergovernmental conference which allowed the Irish government to put forward ‘views and proposals’ about the province. Using clumsy nomenclature, Mrs Thatcher described herself as ‘a unionist and a loyalist’ and FitzGerald as ‘a nationalist and republican’. FitzGerald began with a few words in Irish, ‘A Naisiúntachtai Uaisceart Eireann, tógagaí bhur gceann,’ roughly translated as ‘Nationalists of Northern Ireland, lift up your heads!’* Tom King thought this was ‘a pretty insensitive thing to have done without any warning to us, when neither Margaret nor Geoffrey nor I had the slightest idea what he was saying’.191 Otherwise FitzGerald stuck carefully to pre-agreed lines. He spoke of himself and Mrs Thatcher coming to the negotiations ‘with different historical perspectives and, as it were, different title deeds’, but agreeing about the future. The press conference passed off without untoward incident.
The wider world welcomed the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Helmut Kohl extolled its ‘historical significance’.192 President Reagan produced a statement, supported by Speaker O’Neill, offering US assistance: ‘We applaud its promise of peace and a new dawn for the troubled communities of Northern Ireland. I wish to congratulate my two good friends – and outstanding Prime Ministers – who have demonstrated such statesmanship, vision, and courage.’193 As Mrs Thatcher herself put it, ‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement put us on side with Americans.’194 There was a wide welcome in the House of Commons too, which eventually voted for it by 473 votes to 47, though since the Labour Opposition praised the Agreement as a means of advancing a united Ireland, this was not wholly helpful to Mrs Thatcher. In the Republic, Charles Haughey immediately opposed the Agreement as compromising Irish claims on Northern Ireland, but there was a general mood of triumph, and he was soon forced to soften his opposition. Garret FitzGerald – deservedly, given his immense efforts – had won his place in history.
But, as Mrs Thatcher told FitzGerald when she met him on the margins of the European Council in Luxembourg at the beginning of December, ‘You’ve got the glory and I’ve got the problems.’195 Among the Unionists, there was rage. In a special session of the Northern Ireland Assembly the day after the signing, they denounced it. A week later, a huge rally in Belfast demonstrated a united Unionist front. In a sermon at his Martyrs’ Memorial Church, Ian Paisley prayed that God would ‘this night … deal with the Prime Minister of our country. We remember that the apostle Paul handed over the enemies of truth to the devil that they might learn not to blaspheme. O God, in wrath take vengeance upon this wicked, treacherous, lying woman.’196*
The Almighty did not intervene as Paisley ordered Him, but He certainly did not hurry to Mrs Thatcher’s aid either. Failing in their demand for a province-wide referendum on the Agreement, all Unionist MPs resigned their parliamentary seats, standing in by-elections with each of the Unionist parties giving the other a clear run in seats which it had previously held.† The slogan for the campaign was ‘ULSTER SAYS NO!’ In Tom King’s view, Mrs Thatcher ‘didn’t anticipate the strength of Unionist opposition, and the position in which ministers found themselves’.197 He was jostled and spat at, and the Unionist MPs boycotted him completely, though they went on seeing Mrs Thatcher.‡ A Unionist protest march descended on Maryfield, where the Anglo-Irish secretariat had been sited, and tore the gates down. Some Unionist politicians incited revolt, urging RUC officers that the Agreement was contrary to their oath of allegiance to the Crown. But the Chief Constable, Sir John Hermon, stood firm and the security situation, though tense, never ran out of control. ‘I find it difficult to believe that there is an incipient crisis of confidence amongst the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the Chief Constable, the NIO and Government,’ Mrs Thatcher told the Conservative MP Sir Eldon Griffiths. ‘The loyalty and dedication of the Force is not in question and, as Tom King and I have made clear on many occasions, the Chief Constable enjoys our full confidence.’198§
On 3 March 1986, the Unionists ordered a ‘Day of Action’ in Northern Ireland, in effect, a general strike. It was widely observed.
Being the sort of person who, once she has decided something, does not budge, Mrs Thatcher was not moved by these protests, except to anger. ‘I was not prepared for the depths of the hostility,’ she later recalled, ‘but we get these things in Ireland.’199 Anxiety in the Republic that she might resile from the Agreement was unfounded. Michael Lillis, who led the Irish delegation in Maryfield, and watched the assault on the Maryfield gates on television, was impressed by her resolve: ‘It was a tremendous hurricane of fury, and she didn’t back down. She confronted it. The RUC were put in a position of having to deal with it, and they did.’200
Provoked to justify her position over the Agreement, Mrs Thatcher started to take up arguments about Unionist misbehaviour over the years. The present author met her (for the first time) at a private dinner in the House of Commons at the end of November:
She went on about Ulster and how the Unionists had persecuted the minority and how she couldn’t send ‘wave after wave’ of young men to look after the place. She imagines she can win the Unionists over by offering power-sharing. She was sparky. She referred to matters of Ulster as ‘foreign affairs’. I asked her how her devotion to the British nation could justify her sort of behaviour. She said human rights mattered more than anything else. I did my best to needle her and she became gratifyingly angry.201
She particularly reproved the Unionists because some of their local councils had allegedly refused to empty Roman Catholic dustbins.
However crossly Mrs Thatcher felt towards the Unionists, however, she did not feel correspondingly closer to the Nationalists. She had no desire at all to bring about any further constitutional shift in favour of the Republic. So she found herself effectively without allies on the ground in moving matters forward in Northern Ireland. She had persuaded herself that the Agreement might promote devolution. In her mind, it was ‘a very important clause’202 in the Agreement that once devolution returned to Northern Ireland, the powers the Republic had gained under it would return to a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland. But this was not a convincing defence of the Agreement, especially as Mrs Thatcher had not pushed for a devolution settlement while the negotiations were going on. Th
e SDLP, in whose name so much of the Agreement had been negotiated, did not, after all, agree to take part in devolution or to urge its supporters to join the police or the UDR. A key premise of the Agreement fell away. Far from boosting the SDLP, the gradual effect of the Agreement was to strengthen the more extreme parties on both sides of the sectarian divide. In the summer of the following year, the Cabinet decided that the existing Northern Ireland Assembly was serving no useful purpose, and so no further elections were held. The Anglo-Irish Agreement did not regenerate the political life of the province, but produced, for quite a long period, complete stasis.
Worse, from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view, was the failure of the Republic to deliver the security improvements which had been held up to her by British officials as the great prize of the Agreement. As she wrote in her memoirs, the Agreement’s concessions ‘alienated the Unionists without gaining the level of security co-operation we had a right to expect’.203 Even Robert Armstrong accepted that the security results were ‘disappointing’.204 The trade-off between mixed courts and accession to the ECST fell to the ground, although the Republic did eventually ratify its accession after FitzGerald had lost office and eleven people had been killed in the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing of November 1987. The cross-border links between the RUC and the Garda Síochána (the Irish police) did not markedly improve, and Mrs Thatcher was particularly disappointed that greater intelligence co-operation did not result either: ‘We received far better intelligence co-operation from virtually all other European countries than with the Republic.’205 Speaking in 2012, Michael Lillis admitted that the Irish side did not do enough to tackle the security problem: ‘I think we should have tried harder.’ FitzGerald tried ‘very hard’, but he was faced with internal resistance particularly from the Garda Commissioner Larry Wren to some of Chief Constable Hermon’s proposals.206 Mrs Thatcher was naturally inclined to ask whether the game was worth the candle. The rather scratchy chapter about the Agreement in her memoirs concluded with the words: ‘In the light of this [negative] experience, it is surely time to consider an alternative approach.’207 She felt unease about what she had herself conceded. She knew, before she signed the Agreement, that the Irish might not deliver on the original promise of better security co-operation.*
Was Mrs Thatcher too harsh in her retrospective judgment? Many of those who worked with her on the subject thought so. People like Armstrong and Goodall, who had invested so much in the negotiations, felt proud of their work, and admired Mrs Thatcher for the way in which, as they thought of it, she had swallowed her prejudices to get the Agreement. They counted it a success. They saw the Anglo-Irish Agreement as the forerunner of the ‘peace process’ (the phrase was not in use at the time of the Agreement) which reached its climax in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. ‘Indeed, from some Irish diplomats’ point of view, the later Agreement may have been seen as something of a comedown.’208* This, though it may be true, did not comfort Mrs Thatcher much.
As she considered the Anglo-Irish Agreement in later years, she came to look upon it more and more unfavourably.† This attitude found its final expression in her review of Simon Heffer’s biography of Enoch Powell which appeared in 1998. ‘On the matter of his [Powell’s] objections to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement,’ she wrote, ‘I now believe that his assessment was right, though I wish … he had been less inclined to impugn the motives of those who disagreed with him.’209 She meant that Powell’s criticisms of the Agreement for its encroachment on British sovereignty were well founded. Unionists welcomed these words of repentance. After her death, they spoke of their admiration for Mrs Thatcher’s willingness to confront terrorism and to stand up for the British nation.210 But it was she, more than any other prime minister, who succeeded in overriding what pro-Nationalists called the Unionist ‘veto’. She was not proud of this achievement. Political change had been imposed on Northern Ireland from outside. In this sense, Mrs Thatcher began something which she did not want and went against principles which she held dear. Speaking after her death, Charles Powell said that Mrs Thatcher’s regret at signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement was comparable to Queen Mary I of England’s terrible sadness at the loss of Calais. ‘Queen Mary spoke of having “Calais” inscribed on her heart. Mrs Thatcher will have “Anglo-Irish Agreement” inscribed on her heart.’211
Where she did achieve something more positive, however, was in changing the attitudes of Irish and British governments to one another. The experience of the Thatcher–FitzGerald encounters was often bruising, but Mrs Thatcher did succeed in bringing the Irish government to a more realistic assessment of what it was possible for it to achieve. The old assumption of Irish politics, that it was always a good idea to be seen to be attacking Britain, was consigned to history. Not for nothing was the Agreement called the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It was a deal between governments, negotiated in good faith. It did not, in itself, greatly help the object of all its labours – the people of Northern Ireland. Even the Irish government recognized this. ‘For the average person living in West Belfast or Derry nothing changed, and the war continued.’212 From a Unionist point of view, the Agreement established the bad precedent that the future of a part of the United Kingdom could be a matter of international negotiation. But it did permanently improve the relationship between the two nations whose leaders signed it. In her somewhat ungenerous writings about Garret FitzGerald – a man whom she did, in fact, respect and like – Mrs Thatcher did not do justice to his patience, decency and lack of sectarian bitterness. She also did an injustice to herself. FitzGerald had been right when he told her that only he and she between them could strike a deal. She saw this and acted on it bravely. The Agreement was not the breakthrough of which FitzGerald dreamed, but it was a remarkable moment in the history of Britain and Ireland.
There is another way of looking at the story of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Ignore, for a moment, the content of the whole process, and instead study its methods. If one does this, one is bound to conclude that the essential aim of both the British and Irish official machines was to persuade Mrs Thatcher into doing what she did not want to do. As Garret FitzGerald recalled in retirement, the whole process was ‘extraordinary’: ‘Ultimately it was not a negotiation. Ultimately everybody was convinced that something should be done. “How do you persuade the Prime Minister?” was the question.’213 ‘Armstrong–Nally’ was not symmetrical between the two countries. The sympathies of Armstrong were with FitzGerald in a way that those of Nally – or indeed of Armstrong himself – were never with Mrs Thatcher. The same applies to David Goodall. The pattern of business was that senior British officials were always received at the highest levels in Dublin. The same thing did not happen the other way round in London. Although the British members of Armstrong–Nally faithfully represented the points of view of the British government in negotiation, they were on extremely close terms with their Irish counterparts, whom they regarded as ‘civilized’. They were desperate for an agreement in a way that Mrs Thatcher never was: ‘We did have our hearts in this thing.’214 Between them, Armstrong–Nally created a structure which was bound to frustrate the beliefs with which Mrs Thatcher instinctively approached the subject.
Geoffrey Howe, too, saw the issue from FitzGerald’s point of view and ‘kept an eye on things throughout’.215 Hence, presumably, Richard Ryan’s suggestion that he be ‘worked on’. In his memoirs, Howe speaks of the Taoiseach’s ‘statesmanship’ in contrast to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘intemperance’.216 She was seen as the problem: ‘It took a gigantic effort by many far-sighted people to persuade her.’217 Robert Armstrong, one of those ‘far-sighted’ people, credited FitzGerald’s ‘extraordinary patience in dealing with her outbursts’,218 rather than praising his own Prime Minister for standing her ground. David Goodall, who, of all the participants, probably gave the greatest intellectual attention to the entire subject and recorded it most fully, conceded that ‘It is very fair to say that we were all trying to persuade her … We did a bit co
nspire … We did have moments when she was being terribly difficult and unreasonable.’219
There is something tragi-comic about this image of the massed ranks of the British state behaving towards the Prime Minister almost as if she were a slightly mad, rich old lady who might cut them out of her will at any moment. As with many subjects – Rhodesia, Hong Kong, some aspects of the Cold War, the EEC – some of the cleverest men in the realm had real difficulty in understanding that they faced a Prime Minister who truly did not share their beliefs about the virtues of internationalism and consensus or their instinctive aversion to asserting the claims of Britishness. They went to great lengths to oppose what they saw as her mistaken will. More often than not, their version of raison d’état prevailed over her instincts. It would be absurd, however, to argue that Mrs Thatcher was their prisoner, and paranoid to suggest that they cheated her. She was too formidable for that. She was reluctant, but not deluded. As Charles Powell put it, ‘They were all plotting to persuade her. She was tugged along. But she knew what it was about.’220 Why, then, did she do it? Surely because, although she never liked what was being proposed, she did not have enough knowledge and backing to frame an alternative. She felt she had to do something and she allowed herself to be persuaded of the likely benefits of most of it. The subject did not matter to her so much that she was prepared to fight to what would certainly have been a bitter end.
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