The Iron Lady

had more reason than most to loathe the IRA.

Her instinctive political response was resolutely Unionist. Northern Ireland was British; the majority of its people professed their loyalty to the British Crown and flag: they were therefore entitled to the same unquestioning support as the people of the Falklands, Gibraltar or Hong Kong. Moreover, she always set her face against any cause – anywhere in the world, let alone in her own country – which sought to advance itself by violence. Insofar as she thought about it at all she saw the Northern Ireland situation primarily as a security matter.

She regularly repeated the promise that Northern Ireland was British and would remain British so long as the majority of its population wished it. Every autumn her party conference speech included an emotionally worded tribute to the courage and endurance of the people of Ulster. Yet in truth she had no deep concern for the province or its people. Ministers and officials who worked with her on Northern Ireland agree that she regarded it as a place apart whose customs and grievances she did not begin to understand.¹

The more she saw of Unionist politicians over the years the less she liked them. Increasingly she saw Ulster as a drain on British resources and a diversion of her hard-pressed defence budget. What really moved her was the steady toll of young British lives – ‘our boys’ – lost in the province. From thirty-eight in 1979 the figure dwindled over the next decade to an average of nine a year. But there was no year in which at least two soldiers were not killed. She made a point of writing a personal letter to the family of each one. She also made several unannounced visits to the troops to demonstrate her support for them. She was strongly in favour of the policy of ‘Ulsterisation’ by which the army was withdrawn as far as possible to a reserve role and replaced on the streets with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In fact she was as keen as any nationalist to get the troops out of Northern Ireland if only it had been possible. Yet the irreducible fact, as she acknowledged in a lecture dedicated to the memory of Airey Neave in 1980, was that ‘No democratic country can voluntarily abandon its responsibilities in a part of its territories against the will of the majority of the population there.’² Like every other Prime Minister since Gladstone, Mrs Thatcher found herself with an insoluble problem. But the longer she lived with it, the more she too eventually moved towards making an effort to resolve it.

Her first Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, was a natural conciliator whose approach was to try to bring the two communities together. He immediately started talks about talks which, with no political impetus behind them, swiftly foundered.

Meanwhile, the republicans greeted the new government with an upsurge of violence. In August 1979 the IRA killed eighteen soldiers at Warrenpoint in County Down and blew up Lord Mountbatten – the Queen’s cousin and Prince Charles’ godfather – with two other members of his family on holiday in the Republic. Mrs Thatcher responded with typical defiance by flying immediately to visit the troops at Crossmaglen near the border in South Armagh: ignoring official advice she insisted on being photographed wearing a combat jacket and beret of the Ulster Defence Regiment. She also went on a courageous forty-five-minute walkabout in central Belfast. This visible demonstration of her support made a powerful impact in Northern Ireland. She went again on Christmas Eve, when a member of the Parachute Regiment kissed her under the mistletoe. Thereafter she made a similar morale-boosting visit nearly every year.

She found no rapport with the Irish Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, when he came to Downing Street in September. But at the end of 1979 Lynch handed over to the flamboyant Charles Haughey, a different style of leader altogether, with whom she initially got on surprisingly well. Despite his reputation as an unreconstructed nationalist – Haughey came to office determined to find a solution to what he provocatively termed the ‘failure’ of Northern Ireland. He bounced into Downing Street in May 1980 with a terrific charm offensive and came out claiming to have inaugurated an era of‘new and closer cooperation’ between Dublin and London based on increasing security cooperation on both sides of the border and an apparent willingness on the Irish side to consider almost anything – short of joining the Commonwealth – to woo the north to throw in its lot with a united Ireland. He even hinted at ending Ireland’s cherished neutrality by joining NATO.³ Mrs Thatcher was tempted, but remained cautious.

In December 1980 they met again in Dublin, under the shadow of the first republican hunger strike. Mrs Thatcher took with her an unprecedentedly high-powered team, including Lord Carrington and Geoffrey Howe as well as Atkins. Again Haughey exerted all his charm to create a sense of momentum, and succeeded in slipping past her guard an optimistic communique which recognised that Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic were ‘inextricably linked’ and called for joint studies of ‘possible new institutional structures’ giving ‘special consideration of the totality of relationships within these islands’. Though he later denied the words, the spin was that the two leaders had achieved ‘an historic breakthrough’.⁴ Mrs Thatcher was plainly embarrassed. On her return to London she gave two television interviews repeating that Northern Ireland was an integral part of the UK and stating firmly that ‘there is no possibility of confederation’. She subsequently blamed the Foreign Office for stitching her up; but her discomfort was due to the fact that she had let herself be carried along by Haughey’s blarney.

In fact Haughey’s boldness outraged his own hardliners in Fianna Fail as much as it did the Unionists. He quickly retreated back into old-style nationalism, and his relationship with Mrs Thatcher never recovered. But Unionist alarm was not so easily assuaged. Opinion polls in Britain showed a swell of public support for being rid of Northern Ireland altogether. Mrs Thatcher’s strenuous denials that Ulster had anything to fear from the ‘new institutional structures’ discussed at Dublin did not reassure them that Carrington and the Foreign Office were not in the process of talking her round as they had done successfully in relation to Rhodesia.

At the same time tension and violence in the province were stretched to breaking point by republican prisoners in the Maze prison going on hunger strike in pursuit of their demand for ‘political’ status. The first hunger strike began in October 1980 when seven men started a ‘fast to death’. They were later joined by thirty more, but this action was called off in December. The real propaganda battle was joined at the beginning of March 1981 when Bobby Sands began a second fast, followed at staggered intervals over the spring and summer by several others.

Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the hunger strikes was uncompromising. Just as she would not submit to terrorism, she vowed that she would never give in to moral blackmail by convicted murderers. She repudiated absolutely the suggestion that the offences for which the IRA prisoners were imprisoned were ‘political’. ‘There can be no political justification for murder or any other crime,’ she told the Commons on 20 November 1980.⁵

Conditions in the H-Blocks were actually far better than in prisons on the mainland, with single cells, regularly cleaned when the prisoners messed them, and excellent facilities for exercise and study. The Government had implemented all the recommendations of the European Commission on Human Rights, and Mrs Thatcher was entitled to claim that the Maze was now ‘one of the most liberal and humane regimes anywhere’.⁶ The new demands made by Sands and his colleagues in the second hunger strike would have given the prisoners almost complete internal control of the prison – something no government could have conceded. All this was widely recognised. Yet the hunger strikers won enormous public sympathy in the nationalist community, both north and south, and the prospect of a succession of young men starving themselves to death disturbed liberal consciences in Britain too.

The strike gained a fortuitous boost just after it started with the death of Frank McGuire, the independent republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sinn Fein immediately nominated Sands as an ‘anti-H-Block’ candidate. On 9 April 1981 he was elected by a majority of 1,400 votes over the former Unionist leader Harry West, a result which resounded powerfully in the United States and around the world. Four weeks later Sands died: ‘murdered’ – so the republicans charged – in a British ‘death camp’.⁷ In vain did Mrs Thatcher insist that Sands had died by his own volition and was himself – ‘let us not mince our words’ – a convicted murderer.⁸ The ‘true martyrs’, she declared, were the victims, not the perpetrators of terrorism.⁹ On 21 May two more strikers died. Courageously visiting Northern Ireland one week later, Mrs Thatcher was determined to stick the responsibility where it belonged.

‘It is a tragedy,’ she declared in a speech at Stormont Castle, ‘that young men should be persuaded, coerced or ordered to starve themselves to death in a futile cause. Neither I nor any of my colleagues want to see a single person die of violence in Northern Ireland – policeman, soldier, civilian or prisoner on hunger strike… The PIRA [provisional IRA] take a different view. It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members. Such is their calculated cynicism. This Government is not prepared to legitimise their cause by word or by deed.’¹⁰