She was brave and she was right. The IRA’s claim to be treated as political prisoners or prisoners of war was entirely spurious. Had they confined their attacks to military targets they might have claimed to be an ‘army’ conducting a dirty but defensible guerrilla war against an occupying power, but by cold-bloodedly targeting random civilians, as they regularly did, in defiance of the accepted norms of warfare as formulated in the Geneva Convention, they forfeited any right to be treated as soldiers. To this day Sinn Fein accuses the British Government of ‘criminalising the Irish struggle’.11 But it was they themselves who did that by espousing methods that were purely criminal. No government could have conceded the legitimacy of terrorism.
Nevertheless, her ruthlessness was breathtaking. Over that summer – this was the same summer when Brixton and Toxteth were torn by riots and her personal popularity touched its lowest level – seven more martyrs went, one by one, to their slow deaths inside the Maze, while outside another seventy-three civilians, RUC men and soldiers were killed in the accompanying violence, before the IRA finally bowed to pressure from the Church and some of the remaining strikers’ families and called a halt at the beginning of October. In a sense Mrs Thatcher had won. She had stood firm in the face of all the allegations of heartlessness and inflexibility that could be thrown at her, and it was the IRA which eventually blinked. This was perhaps the first time the world realised what she was made of. Her resolution certainly impressed the Americans. When six months later General Galtieri tried to tell Alexander Haig’s envoy that ‘that woman wouldn’t dare’ try to retake the Falklands, General Vernon Walters told him: ‘Mr President, “that woman” has let a number of hunger strikers of her own basic ethnic origin starve themselves to death without flickering an eyelash. I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.’12
But in another sense the gunmen had won a huge propaganda victory. Not only did Jim Prior, newly appointed Secretary of State in September, immediately concede many of the strikers’ demands as soon as they ended their action, but the undeniable courage of the strikers, the depth and selflessness of their devotion to their cause, however cruelly they had pursued it when at large, made a deep impression both in Ireland and around the world. Within Ireland, Bobby Sands’ face displayed on posters made him as potent a recruiting sergeant for the IRA as Lord Kitchener for the British army seventy years before; while from America a fresh stream of dollars flowed into its coffers, giving it the funds to buy more sophisticated weaponry and sufficient Semtex to supply the bombers for the next ten years. For most of the world, knowing little of the details of the situation, the deaths of the hunger strikers brutally dramatised the impression that Britain was indeed a colonial power occupying Northern Ireland against the will of its oppressed population. The IRA’s manipulation of the hunger strikes was as cynical as Mrs Thatcher said; but it was highly successful. It even had an effect on Mrs Thatcher herself.
In the short run Prior’s latest scheme for restoring a power-sharing Executive was stillborn. Meanwhile, continuing shootings and bombings in Northern Ireland were dramatically supplemented by several more spectacular atrocities in London. In October 1981 a nail bomb at Chelsea Barracks killed two passers-by and horrifically injured another forty, mainly soldiers.The same month a bomb disposal expert lost his life defusing a device in Oxford Street. In July 1982 bombs in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park killed eight military bandsmen – the softest of military targets – along with a number of their horses; and in December 1983 a bomb outside Harrods killed five Christmas shoppers and wounded another ninety-one. Each time Mrs Thatcher dropped whatever she was doing to hurry to the scene and visit the survivors in hospital, solemnly renewing her pledge to defeat the bombers.
But in fact she did not attempt to confront the IRA head on. Military intelligence told her that it could not be done. There were allegations that the army operated an unofficial ‘shoot to kill’ policy in Northern Ireland, eliminating rather than attempting to arrest suspected terrorists; and continued nationalist protests against heavy-handed interrogation and the use of plastic bullets against demonstrators. But the number of troops deployed actually fell slightly over the decade, from 13,000 in 1979 to 11,500 in 1990. Rather, as she faced up to the prospect of unending carnage, Mrs Thatcher began to look seriously at the possibility of promoting a political solution.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement
Several factors pushed her in this direction. First was the return of Garret FitzGerald as Taoiseach in December 1982, soon followed by her own re-election in June 1983. FitzGerald recognised that Ireland could only be united by consent. He had spoken in 1981 of a ‘republican crusade’ to reform those aspects of the Irish constitution which antagonised Protestants, and specifically of scrapping clauses 2 and 3 which laid territorial claim to the Six Counties.13 But instead of grand gestures, he was anxious to proceed incrementally by rebuilding the confidence of northern nationalists and diminishing support for Sinn Fein and the IRA. Though she found him at times tiresomely verbose and academic, Mrs Thatcher ‘trusted and liked and perhaps even admired Garret FitzGerald’, in the words of one of her junior ministers in the Northern Ireland Office. ‘She thought he was straight and that he wasn’t trying to pull a fast one on her.’14 Geoffrey Howe has spoken of ‘an extraordinary chemistry’ between the two leaders which he compares to her relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev.15
Second, despite her Unionist sympathies Mrs Thatcher did actually come to a partial appreciation of the nationalist case. When she was persuaded that the IRA and their Sinn Fein apologists were not Irish infiltrators but predominantly British citizens, an indigenous northern movement poorly supported in the Republic, and that the legitimate nationalist party, the SDLP, won a lot of impeccably democratic votes – 18 per cent in 1983, compared with 13 per cent for Sinn Fein – she became convinced that the law-abiding Catholic community had somehow to be reconciled to the British state. She could never accept the idea of dual allegiance – she resented the anomalous right of the Irish to vote in British elections, and thought that they should be treated logically as foreign – but she came to see that the legacy of history gave the Republic an interest in the equitable government of the north.16 In other words she recognised that there was not just a security problem in Northern Ireland, which might be solved by stronger policing, but a real political problem which required a political solution.
Third, she was influenced – as on Rhodesia, Hong Kong and other comparable issues – by the Foreign Office. The Anglo-Irish Agreement which eventually emerged in 1985 was the fruit of painstaking spadework by the Foreign Office and the Irish foreign ministry with minimal involvement of the Northern Ireland Office and behind the backs of the Unionists.
Most important of all, she was significantly influenced by American pressure. The Irish lobby in Washington, led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, and Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan, was very powerful – second only to the Jewish lobby – and very partisan, continually issuing violent denunciations of British colonial oppression and the alleged denial of human rights in Northern Ireland. Ronald Reagan, with his own Irish background, was susceptible to this line; while Mrs Thatcher, faced with hostile demonstrators every time she visited America, was uncomfortably aware that Northern Ireland strained her special relationship with the US. At the time of the hunger strikes in 1981 the President refused to become involved in Britain’s internal affairs, though the White House delicately warned London that it was in danger of ‘losing the media campaign here in the United States’.17 But following his sentimental visit to the land of his fathers in the summer of 1984 – at a time when Washington horsetrading additionally required him to buy O’Neill’s acquiescence in American aid to the Nicaraguan Contras – Reagan became increasingly anxious to encourage his favourite ally to be more constructive.
For all these reasons, then, from the moment she was re-elected in June 1983, Mrs Thatcher began to look more favourably on the idea of recognising an ‘Irish dimension’ in tackling the Ulster problem. The catalyst was provided by the New Ireland Forum, established in May 1983 by the new leader of the SDLP, John Hume, with the encouragement of Garret FitzGerald, to bring together all the constitutional nationalist parties on both sides of the border to seek a peaceful way forward to undercut Sinn Fein and the IRA. Mrs Thatcher was slow to grasp the opportunity it offered. At the same time she and FitzGerald – meeting in the margin of the European summit at Stuttgart in June 1983 – agreed to revive the Anglo-Irish Council, under whose aegis officials of both countries were able to meet without fanfare sixteen times between November 1983 and March 1985. Then, in September 1984, when Prior left the Government (more or less at his own wish), she signalled a fresh start by appointing Douglas Hurd to the Northern Ireland Office, telling him she wanted ‘someone of intellect and toughness’ there.18
