Margaret Thatcher's Impact on Northern Ireland

She saw the world in terms of conflict and this was a conflict more than a source of agreement. It obviously conditioned her attitude to the IRA but also to the Irish government as well, who in a sense she perceived as the enemy. Ireland was one solution that is out. I think she didn't like the Irish, it's probably true. She played a role, I think that's the important and I wouldn't let. Articles establishing a new intergovernmental conference concerned both with Northern Ireland and with relations between the two parts of Ireland. It was a deliberate, massive betrayal of the Unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's policy could be described in one word, war. Watching the television news in the embassy, Hohe turning to us and saying immediately, the thing was like, she's gone. During 11 years in power, Margaret Thatcher polarised and inspired in equal measure, not only in Britain, but around the world. She helped end the Cold War and was victorious in the Falklands, but she will be forever associated with the violence of the miners' strike and the poll tax riots. Here, it is the conflict in Northern Ireland, the hunger strikes, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement that define Margaret Thatcher's legacy. Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country. She saved our country. The United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. She was, I think, far more interested in her world position, dealing with Ronald Reagan and dealing with the bigger issues of the day, as opposed to dealing with Northern Ireland. Which I suspect she considered to be a security problem, and if it was contained, well then she wasn't going to lose too much sleep over the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland fighting with one another. In November 1985, Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle in County Down to herald a new era in Anglo-Irish relationships. An agreement that could provide the security solution she was seeking. Over the previous two years of negotiations, she'd been convinced that it would isolate the terrorists and reduce the violence. Dr Fitzgerald and I have today signed a serious and solemn agreement. She wasn't the hard-faced, intransigent, inflexible woman who was portrayed in the caricatures and so on. If you knew your staff, you had a reasonable chance of persuading her, and this was true on several subjects of great importance, including Ireland. And our recognition of the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland. I think she had an expectation that signing the agreement would be like waving a magic wand, that the security situation would immediately improve, that the provisioners would be sidelined. It is obvious that the British Prime Minister and I have come to these negotiations. with different historical perspectives and as it were with different title deeds. I think she felt that not only would there be gains in terms of security and in terms of Northern Ireland itself, but there would be gains in Washington. The Speaker and I are very pleased this morning to be able to tell you that we have each issued a statement about what has taken place today between the Taoiseach of Ireland and... the Prime Minister of England regarding Northern Ireland. Years later, when she was dismissing the agreement, she said to her friends, it was the Americans who made me do it. We shall give the strongest possible support to the security forces in combating terrorism, and there will be no amnesty for convicted terrorists. The long road The road to Hillsborough began during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power over a decade earlier when she defeated Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The MP who helped organise her campaign was also her spokesman in Northern Ireland and the prism through which she viewed the situation there. Heath had to go and we had to have a new leader and it was then Airy Neve who came to me and said look the one that could do it is Margaret. So I joined Airy Neve's team to win the election for her to become leader of the party. We do want to see the government show determination to defeat terrorism. We don't want any more dealings with terrorists and we do want the security forces to have adequate powers, especially legal powers, to get on top of the leaders of the terrorists. The first time I met her, she was leader of the opposition and it was fairly evident that Airene Eve, who accompanied her, was a close confidant and advisor. Harry took the view that there had to be a military solution to the problem before there could be a political solution. In his own words to me, an army that's winning needs no recruiting sergeant. As a teenager growing up in the north of England during World War II, Margaret Thatcher had seen her hometown being bombed over 20 times by the Germans. The war would shape her political outlook and thinking on Ireland. One of the sort of analogies that she kept quite frequently mentioned was the Sudetenland. When Czechoslovakia was carved out of the Treaty of Versailles, a very large and industrially prosperous chunk of it was the Sudetenland. When she brought Garrett up short on one occasion, he was saying, well, you know, the nationalist community, they're a permanent minority, they have no access to power because in the first past... post sister and so on and so forth. And she said, I see, it's like the Sudetenland, which certainly halted Gareth and stopped him in his tracks. She mentioned the Sudeten Germans, where a group of people from a certain tribe find themselves as a minority in a country where another larger tribe is dominant. And her attitude to that was, well, tough luck. That's, you know, what do you expect me to do? Margaret Thatcher tended to think of the Republic's claim on Northern Ireland rather as Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland, because you had the same situation, mutatis mutandis. I think that's actually quite revealing. I think that analogy was in her mind. Just weeks before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Airy Neve died in a Republican bomb attack at the House of Commons. Not only had she lost a close friend and confidant, but her chief advisor on Northern Ireland. She lost her right and manners, it were, before she started the terrorism. His murder had helped to make, to give Margaret this almost antipathy to the Republic and to the Irish. Some devil's got him. They must never, never, never be allowed to try. They must never prevail. In World War II, Airy Neve had escaped from Caldwell's. He believed the only way to solve the problems of Northern Ireland was to integrate it fully into the United Kingdom and to defeat terrorism militarily. On Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher would disregard his integrationist policy but would continually pursue Airy Neve's vision for a military victory. Margaret thought that basically this was a security problem. She, really the essential question in her mind was can we actually checkmate, stop the IRA making progress in any way? Is there a military solution? Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Despite having been in Parliament for 20 years, she had failed to create any relationship with the leaders of Unionism. She was basically a unionist in principle, but she found discussing Irish matters with the unionists uphill work. They didn't have the same mindset, and we all knew that. I suppose they were sent to try us, weren't they? She was a great affection for some, Ken McGuinness in particular. She had a great respect and admiration for his difficult position down there in Fermanagh. She sat down at the communal table on one evening and said, Oh yes, I've heard of you. You served with the UDR. And from that, we were really quite good friends. We got on very well. And she would call me, the only person besides my mother who would do so, would call me Kenneth. And Kenneth, could I see you about this? The loss of Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers in separate IRA attacks in August 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to Northern Ireland for the first time as Prime Minister. The death of... Lord Mountbatten made her see the Northern Ireland problem basically in security terms. This was a problem of trying to bring security to the province, to try to deal with terrorism. It was a problem for the military to be involved in dealing with, as well as the police. It conditioned her whole outlook. During a tense walkabout in Belfast city centre... Another woman made her voice heard, raising a prisoner dispute in the Longcash prison, an issue that would later come to dominate Margaret Thatcher's role in Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was only getting worse. Taoiseach Jack Lynch travelled to London for Lord Mountbatten's funeral and later to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she demanded greater security cooperation. Downing Street minutes of the meeting highlight her priorities. Maggie entered the room, I recall it fairly vividly, there dressed in black, morning black from head to toe. We had already received intimations from the British that they were going to have a shopping list of what they wish for new security cooperation measures, most notably, I suppose, in respect of later events that came out, the question of helicopter overflights into a certain distance into the Republic. And, of course, we... We already had going on for a number of years the arguments about extradition. So it was quite a contentious meeting, I think it's fair to say. Somebody made the suggestion that, you know, Prime Minister, there may be a certain amount of sympathy with what the IRA are at, with their aims, not necessarily with their methods, with their aims. She became furious. Jumped up from her chair, she thumped the table and was almost about to leap over the table. Are you condoning murder? And, you know, if this is the way you're going to, if this is your attitude, we finish. And Jack Lynch kind of put his hand out and said, look, Prime Minister, we both have the same objective. Don't continue with this sort of attitude. So she quietened down. Jack Lynch was utterly and totally useless, as wet as a whistle, would never do anything. I mean, the man was a prisoner. Well, he seemed to be. She concluded there was nothing to him. At a very early meeting with him, there never was. Reports that Jack Lynch had agreed to Margaret Thatcher's demands for new security cooperation fatally wounded him, and he resigned in December 1979. His successor, Charles Hawhey... would take a very different approach to the British Prime Minister. But I would have to say, yes, there was a little glint in his eye which he found actually quite attractive. He set out to charm her and I suppose at the beginning she was slightly susceptible to the charm and relations developed reasonably well. When Charles Hawhey and Margaret Thatcher met for the first time in Downing Street, she was delighted when the Taoiseach came bearing a gift. It has become called sometimes the teapot summit and I tried to persuade our foreign minister Brian Lenehan to try to persuade Mr. Haye not to go ahead with this gift. I talked to him and said please don't let him go ahead with this because she'll be embarrassed and the thing will go sour for that reason. I was quite wrong because in fact she thought it very nice and very good gift and she accepted it and it seemed to in fact give her some sort of a... positive view of Mr. High. Because he thought he could twist around his little finger. He learned, no way. She said to me that we had all been making a great mistake about Charles Hockey, that he was a romantic idealist, and that wasn't entirely consistent. with the view which I had learned to have of Charlie Hawhey. By the time they met again in Dublin in December 1980, during a European summit, the Thatcher-Hawhey relationship was already under pressure. IRA inmates at the Longcash prison, who'd been on the so-called blanket protest for four years, had begun a hunger strike in protest-hit conditions. As Margaret Thatcher arrived in Dublin, two hunger strikers were close to death. The older prisoners wanted to bring the issue to a head, wanted to bring it to the point where there could be talking and where there could be a resolution. And that almost happened, but didn't. We were all... Concerned about the hunger strikers and about the possible consequences, not just in Northern Ireland itself and in Ireland, but in the United States and internationally. But she was quite clear that you couldn't give in to that blackmail. I genuinely believe that the reason Thatcher came... with a very high-ranking delegation, it was Carrington, Howe, so on, to Dublin Castle in 1980. And during that summit, the hunger strike was still on. It was to try and defuse that situation. So I think that the first hunger strike contributed to pushing her into the direction of agreeing what was called at the time an Anglo-Irish framework. I emphasise that there are joint studies between us, which will then be considered, especially at a meeting in London. I regard that as very, very considerable progress. I think it's historic progress. Out of it came a new concept in Anglo-Irish relations, or at least new emphasis. On building the Dublin-London relationship as a way of easing the tension in Northern Ireland, the phrase used was the totality of relationships. But Margaret Thatcher's dalliance with Charles Hoagy came to a bitter end during a European summit meeting in Maastricht in March 1981. A few days earlier, Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Lenehan had told a newspaper that the new Anglo-Irish framework could lead to a united Ireland within ten years. Thatcher tore into Jorge, who remained silent effectively, for about half an hour, and there was no briefings and no records of the meeting. But, you know, you could say that the bilateral relationship that he had been carefully building up, I mean, that was the point at which it was shattered. I think Charlie Hockey hoodwinked her quite a bit and she fell for it a bit and regretted it bitterly afterwards. She wanted to throw the teapot away, I think. The Republican prisoners ended their first hunger strike in the belief that Margaret Thatcher had given in to their demands. She hadn't, and within weeks a second hunger strike began, which led to the death of Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status. It was the IRA high command which killed those men, not Margaret Thatcher. They weren't starved to death by her, they were starved to death by their high command. Was she aware that it could be resolved? Yes, I would say yes. Clearly, she would have known, and if she didn't, she should have, that the hunger strike could have been ended without anyone dying. And she decided I wasn't going to be the case. The government got itself to a position where once the hunger strike had started, it was very difficult for them to find a way out. And so they just had to let it take its course. I think her impact in Ireland in that respect was second only to that of General Sir John Maxwell in 1916 in that it led to a huge surge of support for the Republican movement. But now, as it happens, that did translate into... ..the growth of their political wing. But, I mean, this is what one might call unintended, unintended consequences. In public, Margaret Thatcher was intransigent. Yet we now know that secretly she negotiated. Her own handwriting can be seen on a message sent to the prisoners. Years later, she would reopen communications with the Republican leadership. Communications that would ultimately lead to the IRA ceasefire. There was more going on in the background. Mrs Thatcher, too, was prepared to deal with it. There were offers and compromises being floated around. So I don't think she was... I think she contributed to the caricature herself, you know, and to the stereotype. And she was probably more flexible behind it all than she allowed people to believe. Because of her handling of the hunger strike, neither the Hawhey nor Fitzgerald governments of 1981 could build any relationship with Margaret Thatcher. And more trouble loomed on the horizon. This time, in the South Atlantic. Ireland had a seat on the UN Security Council for the years 1981 and 82, and I sat in the Irish seat. Of course when the General Belgrano was sunk then, Charlie took this line that we were going to depart from the agreed EU sanctions. And of course that drove Maggie mad altogether. On the 4th of May, the Irish government in Dublin, under Mr. Haughey's thesis, issued a statement saying that Ireland would raise the issue again in the UN Security Council with a view to achieving a peaceful settlement. That caused considerable criticism from the British side. I think she had begun to wonder before that, but that... That really confirmed her in the feeling that Hockey was not to be trusted, was not a friend of Britain. Our concern at the United Nations and my concern as Irish Ambassador was to try to handle the instructions we got from home in the best possible way not to aggravate or add to the difficulties which had inevitably arisen from that action in Anglo-Irish relations. He did not like this sort of subordinate position that he found himself placed in. So you could say that in 1982, in kicking over the traces, which I suppose was most emphatically done in relation to the Falklands, He was re-establishing his freedom of reaction, re-establishing his freedom to be a Republican Taoiseach. That ended any possibility of any dialogue of any sort. The Battle of the Falklands was a remarkable military operation, boldly planned, bravely executed. and brilliantly accomplished. In the aftermath of the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher was in an unassailable position in British politics, but Anglo-Irish relations had broken down. At a Downing Street dinner to toast her victory, her mind was turned to her personal connection to Ireland. I said to her, it seems to me a scandal, that the only place in the world now where British lives are being lost in anger... is actually in the United Kingdom, in Northern Ireland. And that got us launched on a discussion of Ireland. And I said in the course of this conversation, relations between Ireland and Britain are complicated by the fact that so many of us in this country are of Irish descent, and although they don't like to say so, so many people. on the island of Ireland are actually of British descent. She said, she listened to that, and then she said, I am completely English. So I said, well, I'm not. I mean, one of my grandfathers was born in Ireland, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country like me. And she said, now you mention it, my great-great-grandmother was a Sullivan, so perhaps I'm one-sixteenth Irish or something. At the end of this conversation, she said reflectively, if we get back again, I think I'd like to do something about Ireland. Whether she meant it or not, after winning a landslide victory in 1983, her advisers began the push for progress with Dublin. Mrs Thatcher won a three-figure majority in the House of Commons in the wake of the Falklands victory. And in Dublin, Gerard Fitzgerald had succeeded Charles Hockey with a majority which suggested that he would be around for quite a reasonable period of time. But opening talks would take time, while in Northern Ireland the killing continued, and the IRA now had Margaret Thatcher firmly in its sights. I felt then, and I said then, that I thought that was an entirely legitimate action, and that's still my position. Margaret Thatcher was swept back into Downing Street in a landslide victory in June 1983. In her second term, she would change Britain. Northern Ireland, she had no idea how to end the violence. Security for her was the main issue in Ireland. After the hunger strikes, Thatcher's own security was an issue. She was now the IRA's number one target. And she knew it. I remember her saying, they'll probably get me in the end, but I don't like to hand myself to them on a plate. The ever-present threat of nuclear war dominated global politics and helped form a close bond between Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan, bringing new meaning to the so-called special relationship between their countries. We see so many things in the same way, and you can speak of a real meeting of minds. We discussed the situation in Northern Ireland, and I told the Prime Minister that the United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald, and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. The United States government was under pressure from its own Irish lobby in Washington, and I think Mrs. Thatcher understood that the President and his colleagues needed help in dealing with that, just as she needed. The president's help in dealing with the Irish government. Reagan's interest in Northern Ireland was largely the result of behind the scenes diplomacy and contacts made by Ireland's then ambassador to the US. Bill Clark was Reagan's Deputy Secretary of State, then went on to become National Security Advisor. And Bill Clark was very interested in, involved in Irish affairs. In fact, he was so involved in Ireland, he had bought a house in Malahide. He kept a horse in Ireland, and at one stage he even had an aircraft, which he kept at Dublin Airport. We also touched on a number of other issues, perhaps the most important of which was the Northern Irish and Republic of Ireland talks always to try to secure an agreement which will respect both communities in Northern Ireland. She was pressed by Reagan to achieve a situation where the Irish government would have an involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland. With Bill Clark inside the White House, the pressure on Reagan to keep Ireland on the agenda came from Tip O'Neill, the Irish-American Speaker of the House of Representatives and the third most important politician in the country. Clearly the relationship between Reagan and O'Neill was an excellent one. And O'Neill used it, in my view, to the full to ensure that Reagan acted on Irish affairs when we needed somebody to act. After his election in 1982, Gareth Fitzgerald wrote to Margaret Thatcher inviting her to open discussions on the future of Northern Ireland. He was deeply worried about developments in Northern Ireland, particularly about the term we used a lot of the time was the alienation of the minority, particularly following the hunger strikes, a belief that there was no hope in politics and that violence apparently was the only way forward. She didn't like the word alienation, I don't know, perhaps because she thought it was Marxist. So, and of course she never lived in Ireland or Northern Ireland, so she didn't really, I don't think she fully grasped why the nationalists were as resentful as they were. The buzzword was alienation. That was the buzzword. And what that meant was the growth and support for Sinn Féin. So that's what that was. It was nothing more or less than that. It was exclusive. It wasn't inclusive. Garrett Fitzgerald had decided that the only way to make talks attractive to Margaret Thatcher was to appeal to her number one priority, security. Michael Lillis began the process when his London counterpart was on a trip to Dublin. Michael, whom I had never met before, or indeed never heard of before, said, would I come for a walk with him along the canal? So what I suggested was that we should try working together in the interest of security, right? Not for an Irish political agenda, but in the interest of improving the security and stability on the ground. So that's how the thing began. Margaret Thatcher agreed to progress the talks, but made a strategic decision not to involve the Northern Ireland office. Instead, she gave the job to David Goodall and his boss Robert Armstrong, Downing Street's security and intelligence specialists. We were very conscious of the fact that they both were at the absolute heart of the whole British power system, including security and intelligence. One of them at one stage stage told us that the communications codes that we had at that time were, I think the phrase was used, were easy to penetrate. In other words, they were able to read our messages. Despite concerns on both sides, the officials made progress. But to get an agreement, there had to be a meeting of minds between Gareth Fitzgerald and Margaret Thatcher. who was suspicious of the Taoiseach's real motives. She liked Gerard Fitzgerald and she trusted him, but she thought... He came from a bad school. I don't mean literally, but she thought that he was brought up in a bad tradition. And so a great deal of re-education was necessary from her point of view. And of course he listened very patiently to her. She always called him Gareth and not Garrett and it worried us more than it worried him I think really. He didn't want, didn't like it particularly but he stopped, he stopped worrying about him. In the early hours of October 12th, 1984, the IRA's anger with Margaret Thatcher exploded under a bath in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, killing five people and injuring 31. I was peaceably abed when we heard the sound of the explosion and then the room began to collapse about us and then it was quite a long time waiting to be dug out. We had figures of about 10, 15 people killed, and then the figures altered all through the day as the situation changed. This government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail. I wasn't at all sure that the Prime Minister would allow the Anglo-Harris talks to continue. In some ways I think that almost hardened her resolve. It's very regrettable that other people there were killed or seriously injured. But I felt then and I said then that I thought that was an entirely legitimate action and that's still my position. The bomb hadn't wrecked the negotiations, but Margaret Thatcher almost brought them down herself. The New Ireland Forum had made three proposals on all Ireland relationships. Just a month after Brighton, she met with the Taoiseach at Chequers. The meeting appeared to have been a success. to have gone well until Margaret Thatcher was later questioned at a press conference about the forum's three options. The most realistic bilateral meeting I've ever had. It was embarrassing because, you know, my role was to be a yes man, you know, that clearly. And I was prepared. I was prepared to be a Yes Man. I wasn't wanting a quarrel with her. The quarrels would have to be done behind the scenes when we got to the actual agreement. I wasn't looking for a fight with the Prime Minister at all. I gave the impression of being a hopeless Yes Man, which I wasn't either. that a unified Ireland was one solution. that is out. A second solution was a confederation of two states, that is out. A third solution was joint authority, that is out, that is a derogation from sovereignty. It was an outrageous thing to have done, it was typical Thatcher. public opinion here was incensed. I was afraid at the time that the whole process was going to break down. In an attempt to get the talks back on track, Garrett Fitzgerald looked to the White House for help. Luckily, as it happened, Margaret Thatcher had planned two visits to Washington, one in December 84 and one in February 85. And obviously we had briefed both Tip O'Neill's people and President Reagan's people. White House documents from the time show that Tip O'Neill wrote to President Reagan, putting pressure on him to raise the breakdown in the talks with the British Prime Minister. Reagan, under pressure from O'Neill, several times, asked Thatcher to go ahead with the agreement. Because the general view of the army was that this was not a winnable war, that it was possibly possible to hold the field, roughly, to hold the field, but it was not possible to drive the IRA to defeat, realizing that that was their view, sunk into her mind, she became more inclined to negotiate. In November 1985, Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle to sign the agreement. But as soon as she touched down, she was met with opposition from within her own ranks. The first thing that happened, Margaret Thatcher, the moment she arrived, disappeared upstairs, to telephone Ian Gow, who was resigning as a minister. The Conservative MP, Ian Gow, who later died in an IRA bomb attack, was a staunch Unionist and following the death of Airy Neve had been one of Margaret Thatcher's most trusted advisers on Northern Ireland. He was particularly close to her, she trusted his judgement and she was very unhappy that he resigned from the government when she did sign it. That any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of a majority of people of Northern Ireland. It was very obvious that this was something that... she was doing, perhaps on the advice of those around her, but certainly I think if it was her own volition, I think that it probably wouldn't have been done. Margaret Thatcher regretted signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement almost immediately. Unionists reacted with fury, calling her a traitor. And yet Mrs Thatcher tells us that that Republic must have some say in our province. We say never! Never! Our initial reaction. was certainly a betrayal. Why didn't she discuss this with us? Why didn't we get a hint? It was an appalling betrayal of the assumptions. which were well founded, of unionists, that they could always trust, A, the Tory party, but even more than that, the talisman of the Tory party in terms of unionism, which is Margaret Thatcher. And they were left in the dark. So this was a deliberate policy. I mean, let me speak as an Irish nationalist here. I'm not speaking as a British formal official. They would have more polite terms, but I will tell you what the reality was. It was a deliberate, massive... betrayal of the unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Following Hillsborough, Margaret Thatcher never held another Anglo-Irish summit. The agreement wasn't the magic wand and for that she blamed Garrett Fitzgerald. Do you think she would have felt let down by him? No, no, I think she felt led down by me and people like me, that we didn't somehow thule the insult and that we took her head on. No, I think she was more led down by us than by Garrett. In the years after the agreement, the conflict only got worse, and the death toll, which had been at its lowest level since the outbreak of the Troubles, rose dramatically. The IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries were re-armed and more sophisticated, but Margaret Thatcher's government was also more ready to use lethal force. As at Loch Gole in 1987, when the SAS killed eight IRA members as they attempted to attack a police station. Once The British and Irish governments have concluded an agreement which obviously is sort of sold in America as an initiative of major importance and so on and that they're in tandem working together on the problem. Then that leaves Britain. much less exposed to criticism in terms of what it does, and therefore, if you like, gives a somewhat freer hand to its security forces. When eight soldiers died in an IRA attack on their bus near Ballygauley in County Tyrone in August 1988, Ken McGuinness was invited to meet Margaret Thatcher, who was seeking information on those behind the attack. She said, and thank you. very much for coming to see me. Now tell me who did this? " So I told her, because I couldn't tell her 100%, but I was able to name names. And she said, right, she said, thank you very much. Subsequently, believe it or not, there was an SAS operation when the same team tried to kill a coal man. And they were ambushed and that was the end of that particular team. It looked like the Anglo-Irish agreement was having no effect on the bigger problem. It began to move again, I think, towards the late 80s, when there were secret channels and people began to realise we must do something here again and try and make progress. During the hunger strikes, Margaret Thatcher had opened up secret channels to negotiate with the IRA leadership. Up until now, it was thought that she hadn't reopened the secret channel to the IRA. until October 1990. At the time, the British government made a public statement that it had no selfish, strategic or economic interest in the future of Northern Ireland. But Margaret Thatcher's Secretary of State says that he began communicating with Republicans three years earlier, in 1987. Were you aware at that point that actually things were occurring in the undergrowth that could ultimately lead to progress? Yes, yes I was. You were aware? Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us what you were worried about? I remember one particular phrase that lived on and got embroidered. It was whether there was any strategic or economic interest that could override the democratic wishes of the people of Northern Ireland. And how did you sense that? That, I forget, I mean, it came through, you know, somebody speaking quietly to me and him speaking quietly to somebody else, but it was very much sort of back-channel discussion, but nothing disruptive about that. All the people involved in it, at some considerable personal risk of even... getting involved in any of this, but undoubtedly the start of, as I maintain, the Anglo-Irish agreement, the start of, actually, gradual evolution of what became the peace process. Do you have any memory of that? No, none at all. And I would say authoritatively that there was no clarification sought by Republicans. The first engagement face to face between us and the British was Mark McGuinness meeting the British contact in October 1990. Margaret Thatcher may have started the talking in Northern Ireland, but her time in power was running out. Her Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, had resigned in protest at her handling of European affairs, sparking a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine. Mrs Thatcher, could I ask you to comment? It was a combination of the economy going wrong, 11 and a half years of handbagging, a very wearing way of governing. and then Europe, which finally sunk her. It's not quite enough to win on the first ballot. It was clear it was going to be a hopeless battle, that her own side were deficting whatever they said. They were frightened of her. They had no more stomach for fight. The final exchanges between Margaret Thatcher and an Irish Taoiseach came at a summit in Paris in November 1990. She was in her room at the British Embassy when the result of the Conservative Party vote came in from London. I got the call first and she could see my face in the dressing room mirror and she knew what the outcome was, even as Peter Morrison broke the official version to her 30 seconds or so later. I thought at that moment it was the end. She was a few votes short and I remember we were watching the television news in the embassy, Hohe turning to us and saying immediately the thing was like, she's gone. We're leaving Downing Street for the last time and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here. She had military successes against the terrorists, but Margaret Thatcher never found a security solution to the troubles in Northern Ireland. During her 11 years in office, over a thousand people died as a result of the conflict. She had seen ten prisoners die on hunger strike and signed an agreement she resented, but she had opened up the channel to the IRA that began a process that would eventually bring peace. She never fully understood Ireland. north or south. If anything she was more puzzled by the Unionists than she was of the Nationalists. She expected more of them but she never in my view came to the understanding of Irish affairs. One of these people, a lot of the time you think, gosh, she's awful. I was very put off by her in some ways. But you can't, you can't not, you can't not admire her. She probably did what she thought was right, and none of us are one-dimensional, so I'm sure she wasn't one-dimensional. But she was in the job and she couldn't have done it differently. She would have welcomed peace in Northern Ireland because it was better, better than war. But she was never quite comfortable with the price that was paid for it. Do you think either of you actually understood the Irish anymore in 1919 than you did in 1979? Well, probably not. No, I don't make any claims about that. But they sure didn't understand us. For those of you interested in history or just a trip down memory lane, why not check out our website rte.ie forward slash archive for some footage of JFK's visit to Ireland 50 years ago and much more. Stay with us for detective drama with a twist in The Mentalist next year on one. Maggie entered the room, I recall it fairly vividly. They're dressed in black, morning black from head to toe. We had already received intimations from the British that they were going to have a shopping list of what they wish for new security cooperation measures. Most notably, I suppose, in respect of later events that came out, the question of helicopter overflights into a certain distance into the Republic. And of course, we already had going on for a number of years the arguments about extradition. So it was quite a contentious meeting, I think it's fair to say. Somebody made the suggestion that, you know, Prime Minister, there may be a certain amount of sympathy with what the IRA are at, with their aims, not necessarily with their methods, with their aims. She became furious. She jumped up from her chair, she thumped the table and was almost about to leap over the table. Are you condoning murder? And, you know, if this is the way you're going to, if this is your attitude, we've finished. And Jack Lynch kind of put his hand out and said, look, Prime Minister, we both have the same objective. Don't continue with this sort of attitude. So she quietened down. Jack. Jack Lynch, who was utterly and totally useless, as wet as a whistle, would never do anything. I mean, the man was a prisoner. Well, he seemed to be. She concluded there was nothing to him. There was a very early meeting with him, and there never was. Reports that Jack Lynch had agreed to Margaret Thatcher's demands for new security cooperation fatally wounded him, and he resigned in December 1979. His successor, Charles Haughey, would take a very different approach to the British Prime Minister. But I would have to say, yes, there was a sort of glint in his eye which he found actually quite attractive. He set out to charm her and I suppose at the beginning she was slightly susceptible to the charm and relations developed reasonably well. When Charles Haughey and Margaret Thatcher met for the first time in Downing Street... She was delighted when the teacher came bearing a gift. It has become called sometimes the teapot summit and I tried to persuade our Foreign Minister Brian Lenehan to try to persuade Mr. Haye not to go ahead with this gift. I talked to him and said please don't don't let him go ahead with this because she'll be embarrassed and the thing will go sour for that reason. I was quite wrong because in fact she thought it very nice and very good gift and she accepted it and it seemed to in fact give her some sort of positive view of Mr. High. Because he thought he could twist around his little finger. He learned no way. She said to me that we had all been making a great mistake about Charles Hockey, that he was a romantic idealist. And that wasn't entirely consistent with the view which I had learned to have of Charlie Hockey. By the time they met again in Dublin in December 1980, during a European summit, the Thatcher-Hawkey relationship was already under pressure. IRA inmates at the Longcash prison who'd been on the so-called blanket protest for four years, had begun a hunger strike in protest-hit conditions. As Margaret Thatcher arrived in Dublin, two hunger strikers were close to death. Some of the older prisoners wanted to bring the issue to a head, wanted to bring it to the point where there could be talking and where there could be a resolution, and that almost happened, but didn't. We were all concerned about the hunger strikers and about the possible consequences, not just in Northern Ireland itself and in Ireland, but in the United States and internationally. But she was quite clear that you couldn't give in to that blackmail. I genuinely believe that the reason Thatcher came with a very... She saw the world in terms of conflict and this was a conflict more than a source of agreement. It obviously conditioned her attitude to the IRA but also to the Irish government as well, who in a sense she perceived as the enemy. Unified Ireland was one solution that is out. I think she didn't like the Irish, it's probably true. She played her own. I think that's the important, and I wouldn't deny her that. Articles establishing a new intergovernmental conference, concerned both with Northern Ireland and with relations between the two parts of Ireland. It was a deliberate, massive betrayal. Of the Unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's policy could be described in one word. War. Watching the television news in the embassy, Hohi turning to us and saying immediately the thing was that she's gone. During 11 years in power, Margaret Thatcher polarised and inspired in equal measure, not only in Britain, but around the world. She helped end the Cold War and was victorious in the Falklands, but she will be forever associated with the violence of the miners' strike and the poll tax riots. Here, it is the conflict in Northern Ireland, the hunger strikes, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement that define Margaret Thatcher's legacy. Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country. She saved our country. The Prime Minister of the United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. She was, I think, far more interested in her world position, dealing with Ronald Reagan and dealing with the bigger issues of the day, as opposed to dealing with Northern Ireland. Which I suspect she considered to be a security problem, and if it was contained, well then she wasn't going to lose too much sleep over the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland fighting with one another. In November 1985, Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle in County Down to herald a new era in Anglo-Irish relationships. An agreement that could provide the security solution she was seeking. Over the previous two years of negotiations, she'd been convinced... that it would isolate the terrorists and reduce the violence. Dr Fitzgerald and I have today signed a serious and solemn agreement. She wasn't the hard-faced, intransigent, inflexible woman who was portrayed in the caricatures and so on. If you knew your staff, you had a reasonable chance of persuading her. And this was true on several subjects of great importance, including Ireland. And our recognition of the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland. I think she had an expectation that signing the agreement would be like waving a magic wand, that the security situation would immediately improve, that the provisioners would be sidelined. It is obvious that the British Prime Minister and I have come to these negotiations with different historical perspectives and, as it were, with different title deeds. I think she felt that not only would there be gains in terms of security and in terms of Northern Ireland itself, but there would be gains in Washington. The Speaker and I are very pleased this morning to be able to tell you that we have each issued a statement about... ...as it were before she started, to terrorism. His murder had helped to make, to give Margaret this almost antipathy to the Republic and to the Irish. Some devil's got him. He will never, never, never be allowed to... They must never prevail. In World War II, Airy Neve had escaped from Caldwell's. He believed the only way to solve the problems of Northern Ireland was to integrate it fully into the United Kingdom and to defeat terrorism militarily. On Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher would disregard his integrationist policy but would continually pursue Airy Neve's vision for a military victory. Margaret thought that basically this was a security problem. She, really the essential question in her mind was can we actually checkmate, stop the IRA making progress in any way? Is there a military solution? Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Despite having been in Parliament for 20 years, she had failed to create any relationship with the leaders of Unionism. She was basically a unionist in principle, but she found discussing Irish matters with the unionists uphill work. They didn't have the same mindset, and we all knew that. I suppose they were sent to try us, weren't they? She was a great affectionate for some, Ken McGuinness in particular. She had a great respect and admiration for his difficult position down there in Fermanagh. She sat down at the communal table on one evening and said, Oh yes, I've heard of you. You served with the UDR. And from that, we were really quite good friends. We got on very well. And she would call me, the only person besides my mother who would do so, would call me Kenneth. And Kenneth, could I see you about this? The loss of Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers in separate IRA attacks in August 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to Northern Ireland for the first time as Prime Minister. The death of... Lord Mountbatten made her see the Northern Ireland problem basically in security terms. This was a problem of trying to bring security to the province, to try to deal with terrorism. It was a problem for the military to be involved in dealing with, as well as the police. It conditioned her whole outlook. During a tense walkabout in Belfast city centre... Another woman made her voice heard, raising a prisoner dispute in the Long Keshe prison, an issue that would later come to dominate Margaret Thatcher's role in Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was only getting worse. Taoiseach Jack Lynch travelled to London for Lord Mountbatten's funeral and later to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she demanded greater security cooperation. Downing Street minutes of the meeting highlight her priorities. ...taken place today between the Taoiseach of Ireland and the Prime Minister of England with regard to the Northern Ireland. Years later, when she was dismissing the agreement, she said to her friends it was the American... who made me do it. We shall give the strongest possible support to the security forces in combating terrorism and there will be no amnesty for convicted terrorists. The long road to Hillsborough began during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power over a decade earlier when she defeated Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The MP who helped organise her campaign... was also her spokesman in Northern Ireland and the prison through which she viewed the situation there. Heath had to go and we had to have a new leader and it was then Airy Neve who came to me and said, look, the one that could do it is Margaret. So I joined Erin Eves' team to win the election for her to become leader of the party. We do want to see the government show determination to defeat terrorism. We don't want any more dealings with terrorists, and we do want the security forces to have adequate powers, especially legal powers, to get on top of the leaders of the terrorists. The first time I met her, she was leader of the opposition, and it was fairly evident that Airene Eve, who accompanied her, was a close confidant and advisor. Harry took the view that there had to be a military solution to the problem before there could be a political solution. In his own words to me, an army that's winning needs no recruiting sergeant. As a teenager growing up in the north of England during World War II, Margaret Thatcher had seen her hometown being bombed over 20 times by the Germans. The war would shape her political outlook and thinking on Ireland. One of the sort of analogies that she kept quite frequently mentioned was the Sudetenland. When Czechoslovakia was carved out of the Treaty of Versailles, a very large and industrially prosperous chunk of it was the Sudetenland. When she brought Garrett up short on one occasion, he was saying, well, you know, the nationalist community, they're a permanent minority, they have no access to power because they never first passed the test. post system and so on and so forth. And she said, I see, it's like the Sudetenland, which certainly halted Gareth and stopped him in his tracks. She mentioned the Sudeten Germans, where a group of people from a certain tribe find themselves as a minority in a country where another larger tribe is dominant. And her attitude to that was, well, tough luck. That's, you know, what do you expect me to do? Margaret Thatcher tended to think of the Republic's claim on Northern Ireland rather as Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland, because you had the same situation, mutatis mutandis. I think that's actually quite revealing. I think that analogy was in her mind. Just weeks before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Airy Neve died in a Republican bomb attack at the House of Commons. Not only had she lost a close friend and confidante, but her chief adviser on Northern Ireland. She lost her right and manner. A very high-ranking delegation, it was Carrington, Howe, so on, to Dublin Castle in 1980. And during that summit, the hunger strike... strike was still on was it was to try and defuse that situation so I think that the first hunger strike contributed to pushing her into the direction of agreeing what was called at the time an Anglo-Irish framework. I emphasize that there are joint studies between us which will then be considered especially at a meeting in London. I regard that as very very considerable progress, I think it's historic progress. Out of it came a new concept in Anglo-Irish relations, or at least new emphasis, on building the Dublin-London relationship as a way of easing the tension in Northern Ireland. It was a phrase used was the totality of relationships. But Margaret Thatcher's dalliance with Charles Hoagy came to a bitter end during a European summit meeting in Maastricht in March 1981. A few days earlier, Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Lenehan... ...had told a newspaper that the new Anglo-Irish framework could lead to a united Ireland within ten years. Thatcher. tore into Jorge, who remained silent, effectively, for about half an hour, and there was no briefings and no records of the meeting. But, you know, you could say that the bilateral relationship that he had been carefully building up, I mean, that was the point at which it was shattered. I think Charlie Hockey hoodwinked her quite a bit and she fell for it a bit and regretted it bitterly afterwards. She wanted to throw the teapot away, I think. The Republican prisoners ended their first hunger strike in the belief that Margaret Thatcher had given in to their demands. She hadn't, and within weeks a second hunger strike began, which led to the death of Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status. It was the IRA high command which killed those men, not Margaret Thatcher. They weren't starved to death by her, they were starved to death by their high command. Was she aware that it could be resolved? Yes, I would say yes. Clearly, she would have known, and if she didn't, she should have, that the hunger strike could have been ended without anyone dying. And she decided I wasn't going to be the case. The government got itself to a position where once the hunger strike had started, it was very difficult for them to find a way out. And so they just had to let it take its course. I think her impact in Ireland in that respect was second only to that of General Sir John Maxwell in 1916 in that it led to a huge surge of support for the Republican movement. But now, as it happens, that did translate into... the growth of their political wing. But, I mean, this is what one might call unintended, unintended consequences. In public, Margaret Thatcher was intransigent. Yet we now know that secretly she negotiated. Her own handwriting can be seen on a message sent to the prisoners. Years later, she would reopen communications with the Republican leadership. Communications that would ultimately lead to the IRA ceasefire. There was more going on in the background. Mrs Thatcher too was prepared to deal with it. I think that's actually quite revealing. I think that analogy was in her mind. Just weeks before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Airy Neve died in a Republican bomb attack at the House of Commons. Not only had she lost a close friend and confidante, but her chief adviser on Northern Ireland. She lost her right and manners, as it were, before she started the terrorism. His murder had helped to make, to give Margaret this almost antipathy to the Republic and to the Irish. They must never prevail. In World War II, Airy Neve had escaped from Caldwell's. He believed the only way to solve the problems of Northern Ireland was to integrate it fully into the United Kingdom and to defeat terrorism militarily. On Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher would disregard his integrationist policy but would continually pursue Airy Neve's vision for a military victory. Margaret thought that basically this was a security problem. Really the essential question in her mind was can we actually checkmate, stop the IRA making progress in any way? Is there a military solution? Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Despite having been in Parliament for 20 years, she had failed to create any relationship with the leaders of Unionism. She was basically a Unionist in principle, but she was also a very conservative. She was very conservative, but she was also very conservative. She was very conservative, but she was also very conservative. She found discussing Irish matters with the unionists uphill work. They didn't have the same mindset, and we all knew that. I suppose they were sent to try us, weren't they? She was a great affectionate for some, Ken McGuinness in particular. She had a great respect and admiration for him, his difficult position down there in Fermanagh. she sat down at the communal table on one evening and said, oh, yes, I've heard of you. You served with the UDR. And from that, we were really quite good friends. We got on very well. And she would call me, the only person besides my mother who would do so would call me Kenneth. And Kenneth, could I see you about this? The loss of Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers in separate IRA attacks in August 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to Northern Ireland for the first time as Prime Minister. The death of Lord Mountbatten made her see the Northern Ireland problem basically in security terms. This was a problem of trying to bring security to the province, to try to deal with terrorism. It was a problem for the military to be involved in dealing with, as well as the police. It conditioned her whole outlook. During a tense walkabout in Belfast city centre, another woman made her voice heard, raising a prisoner dispute in the Longkesh prison, an issue that would later come to dominate Margaret Thatcher's role in Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was only getting worse. Taoiseach Jack Lynch travelled to London for Lord Mountbatten's funeral and later to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she demanded greater security cooperation. Downing Street minutes of the meeting highlight her priorities. Maggie entered the room, I recall it fairly vividly, they're dressed in black, morning black from head to toe. We had already received intimations from the British that they were going to have a shopping list of what they wish for new security cooperation measures, most notably, I suppose, in respect of later events that came out, the question of helicopter overflights into a certain distance into the Republic. And of course, we already had going on for a number of years... Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland fighting with one another. In November 1985... Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle in County Down to herald a new era in Anglo-Irish relationships, an agreement that could provide the security solution she was seeking. Over the previous two years of negotiations, she'd been convinced that it would isolate the terrorists and reduce the violence. Dr Fitzgerald and I have today signed a serious and solemn agreement. She wasn't the hard-faced, intransigent. inflexible woman who was portrayed in the in the caricatures and so on. If you knew your staff you had a reasonable chance of persuading her and this was true on several subjects of great importance including Ireland. Our recognition of the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland. I think she had an expectation that signing the agreement would be like waving a magic wand. That the security situation would immediately improve, that the provisioners would be sidelined. It is obvious that the British Prime Minister and I have come to these negotiations with different historical perspectives and, as it were, with different title deeds. I think she felt that not only would there be gains in terms of security and in terms of Northern Ireland itself, but there would be gains in Washington. The Speaker and I are very pleased this morning to be able to tell you that we have each issued a statement about what has taken place today between the Tichak of Ireland and the Prime Minister of England with regard to Northern Ireland. Nine years later when she was dismissing the agreement, she said to her friends, it was the Americans who made me do it. We shall give the strongest possible support to the security forces in combating terrorism and there will be no amnesty for convicted terrorists. The Long Road The road to Hillsborough began during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power over a decade earlier, when she defeated Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The MP who helped organise her campaign was also her spokesman in Northern Ireland, and the prism through which she viewed the situation there. Heath had to go, and we had to have a new leader. And it was then Airy Neve who came to me and said, Look, the one that could do it. It's Margaret. She saw the world in terms of conflict, and this was a conflict more than a source of agreement. It obviously conditioned her attitude to the IRA, but also to the Irish government as well, who in a sense she perceived as the enemy. Unified Ireland was one solution that is out. I think she didn't like the Irish, it's probably true. She played her role. I think that's the important and I wouldn't have that. The particles establishing a new intergovernmental conference concerned both with Northern Ireland and with relations between the two parts of Ireland. It was a deliberate, massive betrayal of the Unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's policy could be described in one word, war. Watching the television news in the embassy, Hohe turning to us and saying immediately the thing was that she's gone. During 11 years in power, Margaret Thatcher polarised and inspired in equal measure, not only in Britain, but around the world. She helped end the Cold War and was victorious in the Falklands, but she will be forever associated with the violence of the miners' strike and the poll tax riots. It is the conflict in Northern Ireland, the hunger strikes and the Anglo-Irish Agreement that define Margaret Thatcher's legacy. Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country. She saved our country. Minister that the United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. She was, I think, far more interested in her world position, dealing with Ronald Reagan and dealing with the bigger issues of the day, as opposed to dealing with Northern Ireland. Which I suspect she considered to be a security problem, and if it was contained, well then she wasn't going to lose too much sleep over the... So I joined Eri Neve's team to win the election for her to become leader of the party. We do want to see the government show determination to defeat terrorism. We don't want any more dealings with terrorists. And we do want the security forces to have adequate powers, especially legal powers, to get on top of the leaders of the terrorists. The first time I met her, she was leader of the opposition. And it was fairly evident that Airene Eve, who accompanied her, was close confidant. and advisor. Here he took the view that there had to be a military solution to the problem before there could be a political solution. In his own words to me, an army that's winning needs no recruiting sergeant. As a teenager growing up in the north of England during World War II, Margaret Thatcher had seen her hometown being bombed over 20 times by the Germans. The war would shape her political outlook and thinking on Ireland. One of the sort of analogies that she kept quite frequently mentioned was the Sudetenland when Czechoslovakia was carved out of the Treaty of Welsk. a very large and industrially prosperous chunk of it was the Sudetenland. When she brought Garrett up short on one occasion, he was saying, well, you know, the... nationalist community, they're a permanent minority, they have no access to power because they're not first past the post system and so on and so forth. And she said, I see, it's like the Sudetenland, which certainly halted Gareth and stopped him in his tracks. She mentioned the Sudeten Germans, where a group of people from a certain tribe find themselves as a minority in a country where another larger tribe is dominant. And her attitude to that was, well, tough luck. That's, you know, what do you expect me to do? Margaret Thatcher tended to think of the Republic's claim on Northern Ireland rather as Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland, because you had the same situation, mutatis mutandis.

I think she didn't like the Irish, it's probably true. She played a role, I think that's the important and I wouldn't let. Articles establishing a new intergovernmental conference concerned both with Northern Ireland and with relations between the two parts of Ireland.

It was a deliberate, massive betrayal of the Unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's policy could be described in one word, war. Watching the television news in the embassy, Hohe turning to us and saying immediately, the thing was like, she's gone.

During 11 years in power, Margaret Thatcher polarised and inspired in equal measure, not only in Britain, but around the world. She helped end the Cold War and was victorious in the Falklands, but she will be forever associated with the violence of the miners' strike and the poll tax riots. Here, it is the conflict in Northern Ireland, the hunger strikes, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement that define Margaret Thatcher's legacy.

Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country. She saved our country. The United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. She was, I think, far more interested in her world position, dealing with Ronald Reagan and dealing with the bigger issues of the day, as opposed to dealing with Northern Ireland.

Which I suspect she considered to be a security problem, and if it was contained, well then she wasn't going to lose too much sleep over the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland fighting with one another. In November 1985, Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle in County Down to herald a new era in Anglo-Irish relationships. An agreement that could provide the security solution she was seeking. Over the previous two years of negotiations, she'd been convinced that it would isolate the terrorists and reduce the violence.

Dr Fitzgerald and I have today signed a serious and solemn agreement. She wasn't the hard-faced, intransigent, inflexible woman who was portrayed in the caricatures and so on. If you knew your staff, you had a reasonable chance of persuading her, and this was true on several subjects of great importance, including Ireland.

And our recognition of the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland. I think she had an expectation that signing the agreement would be like waving a magic wand, that the security situation would immediately improve, that the provisioners would be sidelined. It is obvious that the British Prime Minister and I have come to these negotiations.

with different historical perspectives and as it were with different title deeds. I think she felt that not only would there be gains in terms of security and in terms of Northern Ireland itself, but there would be gains in Washington. The Speaker and I are very pleased this morning to be able to tell you that we have each issued a statement about what has taken place today between the Taoiseach of Ireland and...

the Prime Minister of England regarding Northern Ireland. Years later, when she was dismissing the agreement, she said to her friends, it was the Americans who made me do it. We shall give the strongest possible support to the security forces in combating terrorism, and there will be no amnesty for convicted terrorists.

The long road The road to Hillsborough began during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power over a decade earlier when she defeated Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The MP who helped organise her campaign was also her spokesman in Northern Ireland and the prism through which she viewed the situation there. Heath had to go and we had to have a new leader and it was then Airy Neve who came to me and said look the one that could do it is Margaret. So I joined Airy Neve's team to win the election for her to become leader of the party.

We do want to see the government show determination to defeat terrorism. We don't want any more dealings with terrorists and we do want the security forces to have adequate powers, especially legal powers, to get on top of the leaders of the terrorists. The first time I met her, she was leader of the opposition and it was fairly evident that Airene Eve, who accompanied her, was a close confidant and advisor. Harry took the view that there had to be a military solution to the problem before there could be a political solution. In his own words to me, an army that's winning needs no recruiting sergeant.

As a teenager growing up in the north of England during World War II, Margaret Thatcher had seen her hometown being bombed over 20 times by the Germans. The war would shape her political outlook and thinking on Ireland. One of the sort of analogies that she kept quite frequently mentioned was the Sudetenland.

When Czechoslovakia was carved out of the Treaty of Versailles, a very large and industrially prosperous chunk of it was the Sudetenland. When she brought Garrett up short on one occasion, he was saying, well, you know, the nationalist community, they're a permanent minority, they have no access to power because in the first past... post sister and so on and so forth. And she said, I see, it's like the Sudetenland, which certainly halted Gareth and stopped him in his tracks.

She mentioned the Sudeten Germans, where a group of people from a certain tribe find themselves as a minority in a country where another larger tribe is dominant. And her attitude to that was, well, tough luck. That's, you know, what do you expect me to do?

Margaret Thatcher tended to think of the Republic's claim on Northern Ireland rather as Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland, because you had the same situation, mutatis mutandis. I think that's actually quite revealing. I think that analogy was in her mind.

Just weeks before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Airy Neve died in a Republican bomb attack at the House of Commons. Not only had she lost a close friend and confidant, but her chief advisor on Northern Ireland. She lost her right and manners, it were, before she started the terrorism.

His murder had helped to make, to give Margaret this almost antipathy to the Republic and to the Irish. Some devil's got him. They must never, never, never be allowed to try. They must never prevail. In World War II, Airy Neve had escaped from Caldwell's.

He believed the only way to solve the problems of Northern Ireland was to integrate it fully into the United Kingdom and to defeat terrorism militarily. On Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher would disregard his integrationist policy but would continually pursue Airy Neve's vision for a military victory. Margaret thought that basically this was a security problem.

She, really the essential question in her mind was can we actually checkmate, stop the IRA making progress in any way? Is there a military solution? Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Despite having been in Parliament for 20 years, she had failed to create any relationship with the leaders of Unionism. She was basically a unionist in principle, but she found discussing Irish matters with the unionists uphill work. They didn't have the same mindset, and we all knew that.

I suppose they were sent to try us, weren't they? She was a great affection for some, Ken McGuinness in particular. She had a great respect and admiration for his difficult position down there in Fermanagh. She sat down at the communal table on one evening and said, Oh yes, I've heard of you. You served with the UDR.

And from that, we were really quite good friends. We got on very well. And she would call me, the only person besides my mother who would do so, would call me Kenneth.

And Kenneth, could I see you about this? The loss of Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers in separate IRA attacks in August 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to Northern Ireland for the first time as Prime Minister. The death of... Lord Mountbatten made her see the Northern Ireland problem basically in security terms. This was a problem of trying to bring security to the province, to try to deal with terrorism.

It was a problem for the military to be involved in dealing with, as well as the police. It conditioned her whole outlook. During a tense walkabout in Belfast city centre... Another woman made her voice heard, raising a prisoner dispute in the Longcash prison, an issue that would later come to dominate Margaret Thatcher's role in Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was only getting worse.

Taoiseach Jack Lynch travelled to London for Lord Mountbatten's funeral and later to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she demanded greater security cooperation. Downing Street minutes of the meeting highlight her priorities. Maggie entered the room, I recall it fairly vividly, there dressed in black, morning black from head to toe. We had already received intimations from the British that they were going to have a shopping list of what they wish for new security cooperation measures, most notably, I suppose, in respect of later events that came out, the question of helicopter overflights into a certain distance into the Republic.

And, of course, we... We already had going on for a number of years the arguments about extradition. So it was quite a contentious meeting, I think it's fair to say. Somebody made the suggestion that, you know, Prime Minister, there may be a certain amount of sympathy with what the IRA are at, with their aims, not necessarily with their methods, with their aims.

She became furious. Jumped up from her chair, she thumped the table and was almost about to leap over the table. Are you condoning murder? And, you know, if this is the way you're going to, if this is your attitude, we finish.

And Jack Lynch kind of put his hand out and said, look, Prime Minister, we both have the same objective. Don't continue with this sort of attitude. So she quietened down.

Jack Lynch was utterly and totally useless, as wet as a whistle, would never do anything. I mean, the man was a prisoner. Well, he seemed to be.

She concluded there was nothing to him. At a very early meeting with him, there never was. Reports that Jack Lynch had agreed to Margaret Thatcher's demands for new security cooperation fatally wounded him, and he resigned in December 1979. His successor, Charles Hawhey...

would take a very different approach to the British Prime Minister. But I would have to say, yes, there was a little glint in his eye which he found actually quite attractive. He set out to charm her and I suppose at the beginning she was slightly susceptible to the charm and relations developed reasonably well. When Charles Hawhey and Margaret Thatcher met for the first time in Downing Street, she was delighted when the Taoiseach came bearing a gift.

It has become called sometimes the teapot summit and I tried to persuade our foreign minister Brian Lenehan to try to persuade Mr. Haye not to go ahead with this gift. I talked to him and said please don't let him go ahead with this because she'll be embarrassed and the thing will go sour for that reason. I was quite wrong because in fact she thought it very nice and very good gift and she accepted it and it seemed to in fact give her some sort of a...

positive view of Mr. High. Because he thought he could twist around his little finger. He learned, no way. She said to me that we had all been making a great mistake about Charles Hockey, that he was a romantic idealist, and that wasn't entirely consistent. with the view which I had learned to have of Charlie Hawhey.

By the time they met again in Dublin in December 1980, during a European summit, the Thatcher-Hawhey relationship was already under pressure. IRA inmates at the Longcash prison, who'd been on the so-called blanket protest for four years, had begun a hunger strike in protest-hit conditions. As Margaret Thatcher arrived in Dublin, two hunger strikers were close to death. The older prisoners wanted to bring the issue to a head, wanted to bring it to the point where there could be talking and where there could be a resolution.

And that almost happened, but didn't. We were all... Concerned about the hunger strikers and about the possible consequences, not just in Northern Ireland itself and in Ireland, but in the United States and internationally. But she was quite clear that you couldn't give in to that blackmail.

I genuinely believe that the reason Thatcher came... with a very high-ranking delegation, it was Carrington, Howe, so on, to Dublin Castle in 1980. And during that summit, the hunger strike was still on. It was to try and defuse that situation. So I think that the first hunger strike contributed to pushing her into the direction of agreeing what was called at the time an Anglo-Irish framework.

I emphasise that there are joint studies between us, which will then be considered, especially at a meeting in London. I regard that as very, very considerable progress. I think it's historic progress.

Out of it came a new concept in Anglo-Irish relations, or at least new emphasis. On building the Dublin-London relationship as a way of easing the tension in Northern Ireland, the phrase used was the totality of relationships. But Margaret Thatcher's dalliance with Charles Hoagy came to a bitter end during a European summit meeting in Maastricht in March 1981. A few days earlier, Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Lenehan had told a newspaper that the new Anglo-Irish framework could lead to a united Ireland within ten years.

Thatcher tore into Jorge, who remained silent effectively, for about half an hour, and there was no briefings and no records of the meeting. But, you know, you could say that the bilateral relationship that he had been carefully building up, I mean, that was the point at which it was shattered. I think Charlie Hockey hoodwinked her quite a bit and she fell for it a bit and regretted it bitterly afterwards.

She wanted to throw the teapot away, I think. The Republican prisoners ended their first hunger strike in the belief that Margaret Thatcher had given in to their demands. She hadn't, and within weeks a second hunger strike began, which led to the death of Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners. We will not compromise on this.

There will be no political status. It was the IRA high command which killed those men, not Margaret Thatcher. They weren't starved to death by her, they were starved to death by their high command.

Was she aware that it could be resolved? Yes, I would say yes. Clearly, she would have known, and if she didn't, she should have, that the hunger strike could have been ended without anyone dying. And she decided I wasn't going to be the case.

The government got itself to a position where once the hunger strike had started, it was very difficult for them to find a way out. And so they just had to let it take its course. I think her impact in Ireland in that respect was second only to that of General Sir John Maxwell in 1916 in that it led to a huge surge of support for the Republican movement.

But now, as it happens, that did translate into... ..the growth of their political wing. But, I mean, this is what one might call unintended, unintended consequences.

In public, Margaret Thatcher was intransigent. Yet we now know that secretly she negotiated. Her own handwriting can be seen on a message sent to the prisoners.

Years later, she would reopen communications with the Republican leadership. Communications that would ultimately lead to the IRA ceasefire. There was more going on in the background. Mrs Thatcher, too, was prepared to deal with it.

There were offers and compromises being floated around. So I don't think she was... I think she contributed to the caricature herself, you know, and to the stereotype.

And she was probably more flexible behind it all than she allowed people to believe. Because of her handling of the hunger strike, neither the Hawhey nor Fitzgerald governments of 1981 could build any relationship with Margaret Thatcher. And more trouble loomed on the horizon.

This time, in the South Atlantic. Ireland had a seat on the UN Security Council for the years 1981 and 82, and I sat in the Irish seat. Of course when the General Belgrano was sunk then, Charlie took this line that we were going to depart from the agreed EU sanctions. And of course that drove Maggie mad altogether. On the 4th of May, the Irish government in Dublin, under Mr. Haughey's thesis, issued a statement saying that Ireland would raise the issue again in the UN Security Council with a view to achieving a peaceful settlement.

That caused considerable criticism from the British side. I think she had begun to wonder before that, but that... That really confirmed her in the feeling that Hockey was not to be trusted, was not a friend of Britain.

Our concern at the United Nations and my concern as Irish Ambassador was to try to handle the instructions we got from home in the best possible way not to aggravate or add to the difficulties which had inevitably arisen from that action in Anglo-Irish relations. He did not like this sort of subordinate position that he found himself placed in. So you could say that in 1982, in kicking over the traces, which I suppose was most emphatically done in relation to the Falklands, He was re-establishing his freedom of reaction, re-establishing his freedom to be a Republican Taoiseach.

That ended any possibility of any dialogue of any sort. The Battle of the Falklands was a remarkable military operation, boldly planned, bravely executed. and brilliantly accomplished.

In the aftermath of the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher was in an unassailable position in British politics, but Anglo-Irish relations had broken down. At a Downing Street dinner to toast her victory, her mind was turned to her personal connection to Ireland. I said to her, it seems to me a scandal, that the only place in the world now where British lives are being lost in anger... is actually in the United Kingdom, in Northern Ireland. And that got us launched on a discussion of Ireland.

And I said in the course of this conversation, relations between Ireland and Britain are complicated by the fact that so many of us in this country are of Irish descent, and although they don't like to say so, so many people. on the island of Ireland are actually of British descent. She said, she listened to that, and then she said, I am completely English.

So I said, well, I'm not. I mean, one of my grandfathers was born in Ireland, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country like me. And she said, now you mention it, my great-great-grandmother was a Sullivan, so perhaps I'm one-sixteenth Irish or something. At the end of this conversation, she said reflectively, if we get back again, I think I'd like to do something about Ireland. Whether she meant it or not, after winning a landslide victory in 1983, her advisers began the push for progress with Dublin.

Mrs Thatcher won a three-figure majority in the House of Commons in the wake of the Falklands victory. And in Dublin, Gerard Fitzgerald had succeeded Charles Hockey with a majority which suggested that he would be around for quite a reasonable period of time. But opening talks would take time, while in Northern Ireland the killing continued, and the IRA now had Margaret Thatcher firmly in its sights. I felt then, and I said then, that I thought that was an entirely legitimate action, and that's still my position. Margaret Thatcher was swept back into Downing Street in a landslide victory in June 1983. In her second term, she would change Britain.

Northern Ireland, she had no idea how to end the violence. Security for her was the main issue in Ireland. After the hunger strikes, Thatcher's own security was an issue.

She was now the IRA's number one target. And she knew it. I remember her saying, they'll probably get me in the end, but I don't like to hand myself to them on a plate.

The ever-present threat of nuclear war dominated global politics and helped form a close bond between Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan, bringing new meaning to the so-called special relationship between their countries. We see so many things in the same way, and you can speak of a real meeting of minds. We discussed the situation in Northern Ireland, and I told the Prime Minister that the United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald, and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation.

The United States government was under pressure from its own Irish lobby in Washington, and I think Mrs. Thatcher understood that the President and his colleagues needed help in dealing with that, just as she needed. The president's help in dealing with the Irish government. Reagan's interest in Northern Ireland was largely the result of behind the scenes diplomacy and contacts made by Ireland's then ambassador to the US.

Bill Clark was Reagan's Deputy Secretary of State, then went on to become National Security Advisor. And Bill Clark was very interested in, involved in Irish affairs. In fact, he was so involved in Ireland, he had bought a house in Malahide.

He kept a horse in Ireland, and at one stage he even had an aircraft, which he kept at Dublin Airport. We also touched on a number of other issues, perhaps the most important of which was the Northern Irish and Republic of Ireland talks always to try to secure an agreement which will respect both communities in Northern Ireland. She was pressed by Reagan to achieve a situation where the Irish government would have an involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland. With Bill Clark inside the White House, the pressure on Reagan to keep Ireland on the agenda came from Tip O'Neill, the Irish-American Speaker of the House of Representatives and the third most important politician in the country.

Clearly the relationship between Reagan and O'Neill was an excellent one. And O'Neill used it, in my view, to the full to ensure that Reagan acted on Irish affairs when we needed somebody to act. After his election in 1982, Gareth Fitzgerald wrote to Margaret Thatcher inviting her to open discussions on the future of Northern Ireland.

He was deeply worried about developments in Northern Ireland, particularly about the term we used a lot of the time was the alienation of the minority, particularly following the hunger strikes, a belief that there was no hope in politics and that violence apparently was the only way forward. She didn't like the word alienation, I don't know, perhaps because she thought it was Marxist. So, and of course she never lived in Ireland or Northern Ireland, so she didn't really, I don't think she fully grasped why the nationalists were as resentful as they were. The buzzword was alienation. That was the buzzword.

And what that meant was the growth and support for Sinn Féin. So that's what that was. It was nothing more or less than that. It was exclusive. It wasn't inclusive.

Garrett Fitzgerald had decided that the only way to make talks attractive to Margaret Thatcher was to appeal to her number one priority, security. Michael Lillis began the process when his London counterpart was on a trip to Dublin. Michael, whom I had never met before, or indeed never heard of before, said, would I come for a walk with him along the canal?

So what I suggested was that we should try working together in the interest of security, right? Not for an Irish political agenda, but in the interest of improving the security and stability on the ground. So that's how the thing began. Margaret Thatcher agreed to progress the talks, but made a strategic decision not to involve the Northern Ireland office. Instead, she gave the job to David Goodall and his boss Robert Armstrong, Downing Street's security and intelligence specialists.

We were very conscious of the fact that they both were at the absolute heart of the whole British power system, including security and intelligence. One of them at one stage stage told us that the communications codes that we had at that time were, I think the phrase was used, were easy to penetrate. In other words, they were able to read our messages.

Despite concerns on both sides, the officials made progress. But to get an agreement, there had to be a meeting of minds between Gareth Fitzgerald and Margaret Thatcher. who was suspicious of the Taoiseach's real motives. She liked Gerard Fitzgerald and she trusted him, but she thought...

He came from a bad school. I don't mean literally, but she thought that he was brought up in a bad tradition. And so a great deal of re-education was necessary from her point of view.

And of course he listened very patiently to her. She always called him Gareth and not Garrett and it worried us more than it worried him I think really. He didn't want, didn't like it particularly but he stopped, he stopped worrying about him.

In the early hours of October 12th, 1984, the IRA's anger with Margaret Thatcher exploded under a bath in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, killing five people and injuring 31. I was peaceably abed when we heard the sound of the explosion and then the room began to collapse about us and then it was quite a long time waiting to be dug out. We had figures of about 10, 15 people killed, and then the figures altered all through the day as the situation changed. This government will not weaken.

This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail. I wasn't at all sure that the Prime Minister would allow the Anglo-Harris talks to continue.

In some ways I think that almost hardened her resolve. It's very regrettable that other people there were killed or seriously injured. But I felt then and I said then that I thought that was an entirely legitimate action and that's still my position.

The bomb hadn't wrecked the negotiations, but Margaret Thatcher almost brought them down herself. The New Ireland Forum had made three proposals on all Ireland relationships. Just a month after Brighton, she met with the Taoiseach at Chequers.

The meeting appeared to have been a success. to have gone well until Margaret Thatcher was later questioned at a press conference about the forum's three options. The most realistic bilateral meeting I've ever had. It was embarrassing because, you know, my role was to be a yes man, you know, that clearly.

And I was prepared. I was prepared to be a Yes Man. I wasn't wanting a quarrel with her.

The quarrels would have to be done behind the scenes when we got to the actual agreement. I wasn't looking for a fight with the Prime Minister at all. I gave the impression of being a hopeless Yes Man, which I wasn't either.

that a unified Ireland was one solution. that is out. A second solution was a confederation of two states, that is out.

A third solution was joint authority, that is out, that is a derogation from sovereignty. It was an outrageous thing to have done, it was typical Thatcher. public opinion here was incensed.

I was afraid at the time that the whole process was going to break down. In an attempt to get the talks back on track, Garrett Fitzgerald looked to the White House for help. Luckily, as it happened, Margaret Thatcher had planned two visits to Washington, one in December 84 and one in February 85. And obviously we had briefed both Tip O'Neill's people and President Reagan's people.

White House documents from the time show that Tip O'Neill wrote to President Reagan, putting pressure on him to raise the breakdown in the talks with the British Prime Minister. Reagan, under pressure from O'Neill, several times, asked Thatcher to go ahead with the agreement. Because the general view of the army was that this was not a winnable war, that it was possibly possible to hold the field, roughly, to hold the field, but it was not possible to drive the IRA to defeat, realizing that that was their view, sunk into her mind, she became more inclined to negotiate.

In November 1985, Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle to sign the agreement. But as soon as she touched down, she was met with opposition from within her own ranks. The first thing that happened, Margaret Thatcher, the moment she arrived, disappeared upstairs, to telephone Ian Gow, who was resigning as a minister. The Conservative MP, Ian Gow, who later died in an IRA bomb attack, was a staunch Unionist and following the death of Airy Neve had been one of Margaret Thatcher's most trusted advisers on Northern Ireland.

He was particularly close to her, she trusted his judgement and she was very unhappy that he resigned from the government when she did sign it. That any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of a majority of people of Northern Ireland. It was very obvious that this was something that... she was doing, perhaps on the advice of those around her, but certainly I think if it was her own volition, I think that it probably wouldn't have been done.

Margaret Thatcher regretted signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement almost immediately. Unionists reacted with fury, calling her a traitor. And yet Mrs Thatcher tells us that that Republic must have some say in our province.

We say never! Never! Our initial reaction.

was certainly a betrayal. Why didn't she discuss this with us? Why didn't we get a hint? It was an appalling betrayal of the assumptions. which were well founded, of unionists, that they could always trust, A, the Tory party, but even more than that, the talisman of the Tory party in terms of unionism, which is Margaret Thatcher.

And they were left in the dark. So this was a deliberate policy. I mean, let me speak as an Irish nationalist here.

I'm not speaking as a British formal official. They would have more polite terms, but I will tell you what the reality was. It was a deliberate, massive... betrayal of the unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Following Hillsborough, Margaret Thatcher never held another Anglo-Irish summit.

The agreement wasn't the magic wand and for that she blamed Garrett Fitzgerald. Do you think she would have felt let down by him? No, no, I think she felt led down by me and people like me, that we didn't somehow thule the insult and that we took her head on.

No, I think she was more led down by us than by Garrett. In the years after the agreement, the conflict only got worse, and the death toll, which had been at its lowest level since the outbreak of the Troubles, rose dramatically. The IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries were re-armed and more sophisticated, but Margaret Thatcher's government was also more ready to use lethal force. As at Loch Gole in 1987, when the SAS killed eight IRA members as they attempted to attack a police station. Once The British and Irish governments have concluded an agreement which obviously is sort of sold in America as an initiative of major importance and so on and that they're in tandem working together on the problem.

Then that leaves Britain. much less exposed to criticism in terms of what it does, and therefore, if you like, gives a somewhat freer hand to its security forces. When eight soldiers died in an IRA attack on their bus near Ballygauley in County Tyrone in August 1988, Ken McGuinness was invited to meet Margaret Thatcher, who was seeking information on those behind the attack.

She said, and thank you. very much for coming to see me. Now tell me who did this?

" So I told her, because I couldn't tell her 100%, but I was able to name names. And she said, right, she said, thank you very much. Subsequently, believe it or not, there was an SAS operation when the same team tried to kill a coal man. And they were ambushed and that was the end of that particular team. It looked like the Anglo-Irish agreement was having no effect on the bigger problem. It began to move again, I think, towards the late 80s, when there were secret channels and people began to realise we must do something here again and try and make progress. During the hunger strikes, Margaret Thatcher had opened up secret channels to negotiate with the IRA leadership. Up until now, it was thought that she hadn't reopened the secret channel to the IRA. until October 1990. At the time, the British government made a public statement that it had no selfish, strategic or economic interest in the future of Northern Ireland. But Margaret Thatcher's Secretary of State says that he began communicating with Republicans three years earlier, in 1987. Were you aware at that point that actually things were occurring in the undergrowth that could ultimately lead to progress? Yes, yes I was. You were aware? Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us what you were worried about? I remember one particular phrase that lived on and got embroidered. It was whether there was any strategic or economic interest that could override the democratic wishes of the people of Northern Ireland. And how did you sense that? That, I forget, I mean, it came through, you know, somebody speaking quietly to me and him speaking quietly to somebody else, but it was very much sort of back-channel discussion, but nothing disruptive about that. All the people involved in it, at some considerable personal risk of even... getting involved in any of this, but undoubtedly the start of, as I maintain, the Anglo-Irish agreement, the start of, actually, gradual evolution of what became the peace process. Do you have any memory of that? No, none at all. And I would say authoritatively that there was no clarification sought by Republicans. The first engagement face to face between us and the British was Mark McGuinness meeting the British contact in October 1990. Margaret Thatcher may have started the talking in Northern Ireland, but her time in power was running out. Her Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, had resigned in protest at her handling of European affairs, sparking a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine. Mrs Thatcher, could I ask you to comment? It was a combination of the economy going wrong, 11 and a half years of handbagging, a very wearing way of governing. and then Europe, which finally sunk her. It's not quite enough to win on the first ballot. It was clear it was going to be a hopeless battle, that her own side were deficting whatever they said. They were frightened of her. They had no more stomach for fight. The final exchanges between Margaret Thatcher and an Irish Taoiseach came at a summit in Paris in November 1990. She was in her room at the British Embassy when the result of the Conservative Party vote came in from London. I got the call first and she could see my face in the dressing room mirror and she knew what the outcome was, even as Peter Morrison broke the official version to her 30 seconds or so later. I thought at that moment it was the end. She was a few votes short and I remember we were watching the television news in the embassy, Hohe turning to us and saying immediately the thing was like, she's gone. We're leaving Downing Street for the last time and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here. She had military successes against the terrorists, but Margaret Thatcher never found a security solution to the troubles in Northern Ireland. During her 11 years in office, over a thousand people died as a result of the conflict. She had seen ten prisoners die on hunger strike and signed an agreement she resented, but she had opened up the channel to the IRA that began a process that would eventually bring peace. She never fully understood Ireland. north or south. If anything she was more puzzled by the Unionists than she was of the Nationalists. She expected more of them but she never in my view came to the understanding of Irish affairs. One of these people, a lot of the time you think, gosh, she's awful. I was very put off by her in some ways. But you can't, you can't not, you can't not admire her. She probably did what she thought was right, and none of us are one-dimensional, so I'm sure she wasn't one-dimensional. But she was in the job and she couldn't have done it differently. She would have welcomed peace in Northern Ireland because it was better, better than war. But she was never quite comfortable with the price that was paid for it. Do you think either of you actually understood the Irish anymore in 1919 than you did in 1979? Well, probably not. No, I don't make any claims about that. But they sure didn't understand us. For those of you interested in history or just a trip down memory lane, why not check out our website rte.ie forward slash archive for some footage of JFK's visit to Ireland 50 years ago and much more. Stay with us for detective drama with a twist in The Mentalist next year on one. Maggie entered the room, I recall it fairly vividly. They're dressed in black, morning black from head to toe. We had already received intimations from the British that they were going to have a shopping list of what they wish for new security cooperation measures. Most notably, I suppose, in respect of later events that came out, the question of helicopter overflights into a certain distance into the Republic. And of course, we already had going on for a number of years the arguments about extradition. So it was quite a contentious meeting, I think it's fair to say. Somebody made the suggestion that, you know, Prime Minister, there may be a certain amount of sympathy with what the IRA are at, with their aims, not necessarily with their methods, with their aims. She became furious. She jumped up from her chair, she thumped the table and was almost about to leap over the table. Are you condoning murder? And, you know, if this is the way you're going to, if this is your attitude, we've finished. And Jack Lynch kind of put his hand out and said, look, Prime Minister, we both have the same objective. Don't continue with this sort of attitude. So she quietened down. Jack. Jack Lynch, who was utterly and totally useless, as wet as a whistle, would never do anything. I mean, the man was a prisoner. Well, he seemed to be. She concluded there was nothing to him. There was a very early meeting with him, and there never was. Reports that Jack Lynch had agreed to Margaret Thatcher's demands for new security cooperation fatally wounded him, and he resigned in December 1979. His successor, Charles Haughey, would take a very different approach to the British Prime Minister. But I would have to say, yes, there was a sort of glint in his eye which he found actually quite attractive. He set out to charm her and I suppose at the beginning she was slightly susceptible to the charm and relations developed reasonably well. When Charles Haughey and Margaret Thatcher met for the first time in Downing Street... She was delighted when the teacher came bearing a gift. It has become called sometimes the teapot summit and I tried to persuade our Foreign Minister Brian Lenehan to try to persuade Mr. Haye not to go ahead with this gift. I talked to him and said please don't don't let him go ahead with this because she'll be embarrassed and the thing will go sour for that reason. I was quite wrong because in fact she thought it very nice and very good gift and she accepted it and it seemed to in fact give her some sort of positive view of Mr. High. Because he thought he could twist around his little finger. He learned no way. She said to me that we had all been making a great mistake about Charles Hockey, that he was a romantic idealist. And that wasn't entirely consistent with the view which I had learned to have of Charlie Hockey. By the time they met again in Dublin in December 1980, during a European summit, the Thatcher-Hawkey relationship was already under pressure. IRA inmates at the Longcash prison who'd been on the so-called blanket protest for four years, had begun a hunger strike in protest-hit conditions. As Margaret Thatcher arrived in Dublin, two hunger strikers were close to death. Some of the older prisoners wanted to bring the issue to a head, wanted to bring it to the point where there could be talking and where there could be a resolution, and that almost happened, but didn't. We were all concerned about the hunger strikers and about the possible consequences, not just in Northern Ireland itself and in Ireland, but in the United States and internationally. But she was quite clear that you couldn't give in to that blackmail. I genuinely believe that the reason Thatcher came with a very... She saw the world in terms of conflict and this was a conflict more than a source of agreement. It obviously conditioned her attitude to the IRA but also to the Irish government as well, who in a sense she perceived as the enemy. Unified Ireland was one solution that is out. I think she didn't like the Irish, it's probably true. She played her own. I think that's the important, and I wouldn't deny her that. Articles establishing a new intergovernmental conference, concerned both with Northern Ireland and with relations between the two parts of Ireland. It was a deliberate, massive betrayal. Of the Unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's policy could be described in one word. War. Watching the television news in the embassy, Hohi turning to us and saying immediately the thing was that she's gone. During 11 years in power, Margaret Thatcher polarised and inspired in equal measure, not only in Britain, but around the world. She helped end the Cold War and was victorious in the Falklands, but she will be forever associated with the violence of the miners' strike and the poll tax riots. Here, it is the conflict in Northern Ireland, the hunger strikes, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement that define Margaret Thatcher's legacy. Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country. She saved our country. The Prime Minister of the United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. She was, I think, far more interested in her world position, dealing with Ronald Reagan and dealing with the bigger issues of the day, as opposed to dealing with Northern Ireland. Which I suspect she considered to be a security problem, and if it was contained, well then she wasn't going to lose too much sleep over the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland fighting with one another. In November 1985, Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle in County Down to herald a new era in Anglo-Irish relationships. An agreement that could provide the security solution she was seeking. Over the previous two years of negotiations, she'd been convinced... that it would isolate the terrorists and reduce the violence. Dr Fitzgerald and I have today signed a serious and solemn agreement. She wasn't the hard-faced, intransigent, inflexible woman who was portrayed in the caricatures and so on. If you knew your staff, you had a reasonable chance of persuading her. And this was true on several subjects of great importance, including Ireland. And our recognition of the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland. I think she had an expectation that signing the agreement would be like waving a magic wand, that the security situation would immediately improve, that the provisioners would be sidelined. It is obvious that the British Prime Minister and I have come to these negotiations with different historical perspectives and, as it were, with different title deeds. I think she felt that not only would there be gains in terms of security and in terms of Northern Ireland itself, but there would be gains in Washington. The Speaker and I are very pleased this morning to be able to tell you that we have each issued a statement about... ...as it were before she started, to terrorism. His murder had helped to make, to give Margaret this almost antipathy to the Republic and to the Irish. Some devil's got him. He will never, never, never be allowed to... They must never prevail. In World War II, Airy Neve had escaped from Caldwell's. He believed the only way to solve the problems of Northern Ireland was to integrate it fully into the United Kingdom and to defeat terrorism militarily. On Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher would disregard his integrationist policy but would continually pursue Airy Neve's vision for a military victory. Margaret thought that basically this was a security problem. She, really the essential question in her mind was can we actually checkmate, stop the IRA making progress in any way? Is there a military solution? Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Despite having been in Parliament for 20 years, she had failed to create any relationship with the leaders of Unionism. She was basically a unionist in principle, but she found discussing Irish matters with the unionists uphill work. They didn't have the same mindset, and we all knew that. I suppose they were sent to try us, weren't they? She was a great affectionate for some, Ken McGuinness in particular. She had a great respect and admiration for his difficult position down there in Fermanagh. She sat down at the communal table on one evening and said, Oh yes, I've heard of you. You served with the UDR. And from that, we were really quite good friends. We got on very well. And she would call me, the only person besides my mother who would do so, would call me Kenneth. And Kenneth, could I see you about this? The loss of Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers in separate IRA attacks in August 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to Northern Ireland for the first time as Prime Minister. The death of... Lord Mountbatten made her see the Northern Ireland problem basically in security terms. This was a problem of trying to bring security to the province, to try to deal with terrorism. It was a problem for the military to be involved in dealing with, as well as the police. It conditioned her whole outlook. During a tense walkabout in Belfast city centre... Another woman made her voice heard, raising a prisoner dispute in the Long Keshe prison, an issue that would later come to dominate Margaret Thatcher's role in Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was only getting worse. Taoiseach Jack Lynch travelled to London for Lord Mountbatten's funeral and later to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she demanded greater security cooperation. Downing Street minutes of the meeting highlight her priorities. ...taken place today between the Taoiseach of Ireland and the Prime Minister of England with regard to the Northern Ireland. Years later, when she was dismissing the agreement, she said to her friends it was the American... who made me do it. We shall give the strongest possible support to the security forces in combating terrorism and there will be no amnesty for convicted terrorists. The long road to Hillsborough began during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power over a decade earlier when she defeated Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The MP who helped organise her campaign... was also her spokesman in Northern Ireland and the prison through which she viewed the situation there. Heath had to go and we had to have a new leader and it was then Airy Neve who came to me and said, look, the one that could do it is Margaret. So I joined Erin Eves' team to win the election for her to become leader of the party. We do want to see the government show determination to defeat terrorism. We don't want any more dealings with terrorists, and we do want the security forces to have adequate powers, especially legal powers, to get on top of the leaders of the terrorists. The first time I met her, she was leader of the opposition, and it was fairly evident that Airene Eve, who accompanied her, was a close confidant and advisor. Harry took the view that there had to be a military solution to the problem before there could be a political solution. In his own words to me, an army that's winning needs no recruiting sergeant. As a teenager growing up in the north of England during World War II, Margaret Thatcher had seen her hometown being bombed over 20 times by the Germans. The war would shape her political outlook and thinking on Ireland. One of the sort of analogies that she kept quite frequently mentioned was the Sudetenland. When Czechoslovakia was carved out of the Treaty of Versailles, a very large and industrially prosperous chunk of it was the Sudetenland. When she brought Garrett up short on one occasion, he was saying, well, you know, the nationalist community, they're a permanent minority, they have no access to power because they never first passed the test. post system and so on and so forth. And she said, I see, it's like the Sudetenland, which certainly halted Gareth and stopped him in his tracks. She mentioned the Sudeten Germans, where a group of people from a certain tribe find themselves as a minority in a country where another larger tribe is dominant. And her attitude to that was, well, tough luck. That's, you know, what do you expect me to do? Margaret Thatcher tended to think of the Republic's claim on Northern Ireland rather as Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland, because you had the same situation, mutatis mutandis. I think that's actually quite revealing. I think that analogy was in her mind. Just weeks before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Airy Neve died in a Republican bomb attack at the House of Commons. Not only had she lost a close friend and confidante, but her chief adviser on Northern Ireland. She lost her right and manner. A very high-ranking delegation, it was Carrington, Howe, so on, to Dublin Castle in 1980. And during that summit, the hunger strike... strike was still on was it was to try and defuse that situation so I think that the first hunger strike contributed to pushing her into the direction of agreeing what was called at the time an Anglo-Irish framework. I emphasize that there are joint studies between us which will then be considered especially at a meeting in London. I regard that as very very considerable progress, I think it's historic progress. Out of it came a new concept in Anglo-Irish relations, or at least new emphasis, on building the Dublin-London relationship as a way of easing the tension in Northern Ireland. It was a phrase used was the totality of relationships. But Margaret Thatcher's dalliance with Charles Hoagy came to a bitter end during a European summit meeting in Maastricht in March 1981. A few days earlier, Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Lenehan... ...had told a newspaper that the new Anglo-Irish framework could lead to a united Ireland within ten years. Thatcher. tore into Jorge, who remained silent, effectively, for about half an hour, and there was no briefings and no records of the meeting. But, you know, you could say that the bilateral relationship that he had been carefully building up, I mean, that was the point at which it was shattered. I think Charlie Hockey hoodwinked her quite a bit and she fell for it a bit and regretted it bitterly afterwards. She wanted to throw the teapot away, I think. The Republican prisoners ended their first hunger strike in the belief that Margaret Thatcher had given in to their demands. She hadn't, and within weeks a second hunger strike began, which led to the death of Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status. It was the IRA high command which killed those men, not Margaret Thatcher. They weren't starved to death by her, they were starved to death by their high command. Was she aware that it could be resolved? Yes, I would say yes. Clearly, she would have known, and if she didn't, she should have, that the hunger strike could have been ended without anyone dying. And she decided I wasn't going to be the case. The government got itself to a position where once the hunger strike had started, it was very difficult for them to find a way out. And so they just had to let it take its course. I think her impact in Ireland in that respect was second only to that of General Sir John Maxwell in 1916 in that it led to a huge surge of support for the Republican movement. But now, as it happens, that did translate into... the growth of their political wing. But, I mean, this is what one might call unintended, unintended consequences. In public, Margaret Thatcher was intransigent. Yet we now know that secretly she negotiated. Her own handwriting can be seen on a message sent to the prisoners. Years later, she would reopen communications with the Republican leadership. Communications that would ultimately lead to the IRA ceasefire. There was more going on in the background. Mrs Thatcher too was prepared to deal with it. I think that's actually quite revealing. I think that analogy was in her mind. Just weeks before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, Airy Neve died in a Republican bomb attack at the House of Commons. Not only had she lost a close friend and confidante, but her chief adviser on Northern Ireland. She lost her right and manners, as it were, before she started the terrorism. His murder had helped to make, to give Margaret this almost antipathy to the Republic and to the Irish. They must never prevail. In World War II, Airy Neve had escaped from Caldwell's. He believed the only way to solve the problems of Northern Ireland was to integrate it fully into the United Kingdom and to defeat terrorism militarily. On Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher would disregard his integrationist policy but would continually pursue Airy Neve's vision for a military victory. Margaret thought that basically this was a security problem. Really the essential question in her mind was can we actually checkmate, stop the IRA making progress in any way? Is there a military solution? Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Despite having been in Parliament for 20 years, she had failed to create any relationship with the leaders of Unionism. She was basically a Unionist in principle, but she was also a very conservative. She was very conservative, but she was also very conservative. She was very conservative, but she was also very conservative. She found discussing Irish matters with the unionists uphill work. They didn't have the same mindset, and we all knew that. I suppose they were sent to try us, weren't they? She was a great affectionate for some, Ken McGuinness in particular. She had a great respect and admiration for him, his difficult position down there in Fermanagh. she sat down at the communal table on one evening and said, oh, yes, I've heard of you. You served with the UDR. And from that, we were really quite good friends. We got on very well. And she would call me, the only person besides my mother who would do so would call me Kenneth. And Kenneth, could I see you about this? The loss of Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers in separate IRA attacks in August 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to Northern Ireland for the first time as Prime Minister. The death of Lord Mountbatten made her see the Northern Ireland problem basically in security terms. This was a problem of trying to bring security to the province, to try to deal with terrorism. It was a problem for the military to be involved in dealing with, as well as the police. It conditioned her whole outlook. During a tense walkabout in Belfast city centre, another woman made her voice heard, raising a prisoner dispute in the Longkesh prison, an issue that would later come to dominate Margaret Thatcher's role in Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was only getting worse. Taoiseach Jack Lynch travelled to London for Lord Mountbatten's funeral and later to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she demanded greater security cooperation. Downing Street minutes of the meeting highlight her priorities. Maggie entered the room, I recall it fairly vividly, they're dressed in black, morning black from head to toe. We had already received intimations from the British that they were going to have a shopping list of what they wish for new security cooperation measures, most notably, I suppose, in respect of later events that came out, the question of helicopter overflights into a certain distance into the Republic. And of course, we already had going on for a number of years... Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland fighting with one another. In November 1985... Margaret Thatcher flew into Hillsborough Castle in County Down to herald a new era in Anglo-Irish relationships, an agreement that could provide the security solution she was seeking. Over the previous two years of negotiations, she'd been convinced that it would isolate the terrorists and reduce the violence. Dr Fitzgerald and I have today signed a serious and solemn agreement. She wasn't the hard-faced, intransigent. inflexible woman who was portrayed in the in the caricatures and so on. If you knew your staff you had a reasonable chance of persuading her and this was true on several subjects of great importance including Ireland. Our recognition of the validity of both traditions in Northern Ireland. I think she had an expectation that signing the agreement would be like waving a magic wand. That the security situation would immediately improve, that the provisioners would be sidelined. It is obvious that the British Prime Minister and I have come to these negotiations with different historical perspectives and, as it were, with different title deeds. I think she felt that not only would there be gains in terms of security and in terms of Northern Ireland itself, but there would be gains in Washington. The Speaker and I are very pleased this morning to be able to tell you that we have each issued a statement about what has taken place today between the Tichak of Ireland and the Prime Minister of England with regard to Northern Ireland. Nine years later when she was dismissing the agreement, she said to her friends, it was the Americans who made me do it. We shall give the strongest possible support to the security forces in combating terrorism and there will be no amnesty for convicted terrorists. The Long Road The road to Hillsborough began during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power over a decade earlier, when she defeated Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The MP who helped organise her campaign was also her spokesman in Northern Ireland, and the prism through which she viewed the situation there. Heath had to go, and we had to have a new leader. And it was then Airy Neve who came to me and said, Look, the one that could do it. It's Margaret. She saw the world in terms of conflict, and this was a conflict more than a source of agreement. It obviously conditioned her attitude to the IRA, but also to the Irish government as well, who in a sense she perceived as the enemy. Unified Ireland was one solution that is out. I think she didn't like the Irish, it's probably true. She played her role. I think that's the important and I wouldn't have that. The particles establishing a new intergovernmental conference concerned both with Northern Ireland and with relations between the two parts of Ireland. It was a deliberate, massive betrayal of the Unionists by Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's policy could be described in one word, war. Watching the television news in the embassy, Hohe turning to us and saying immediately the thing was that she's gone. During 11 years in power, Margaret Thatcher polarised and inspired in equal measure, not only in Britain, but around the world. She helped end the Cold War and was victorious in the Falklands, but she will be forever associated with the violence of the miners' strike and the poll tax riots. It is the conflict in Northern Ireland, the hunger strikes and the Anglo-Irish Agreement that define Margaret Thatcher's legacy. Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country. She saved our country. Minister that the United States applauds the continuation of her dialogue with Irish Prime Minister Fitzgerald and assured her of our support of all those working for peaceful solutions and reconciliation. She was, I think, far more interested in her world position, dealing with Ronald Reagan and dealing with the bigger issues of the day, as opposed to dealing with Northern Ireland. Which I suspect she considered to be a security problem, and if it was contained, well then she wasn't going to lose too much sleep over the... So I joined Eri Neve's team to win the election for her to become leader of the party. We do want to see the government show determination to defeat terrorism. We don't want any more dealings with terrorists. And we do want the security forces to have adequate powers, especially legal powers, to get on top of the leaders of the terrorists. The first time I met her, she was leader of the opposition. And it was fairly evident that Airene Eve, who accompanied her, was close confidant. and advisor. Here he took the view that there had to be a military solution to the problem before there could be a political solution. In his own words to me, an army that's winning needs no recruiting sergeant. As a teenager growing up in the north of England during World War II, Margaret Thatcher had seen her hometown being bombed over 20 times by the Germans. The war would shape her political outlook and thinking on Ireland. One of the sort of analogies that she kept quite frequently mentioned was the Sudetenland when Czechoslovakia was carved out of the Treaty of Welsk. a very large and industrially prosperous chunk of it was the Sudetenland. When she brought Garrett up short on one occasion, he was saying, well, you know, the... nationalist community, they're a permanent minority, they have no access to power because they're not first past the post system and so on and so forth. And she said, I see, it's like the Sudetenland, which certainly halted Gareth and stopped him in his tracks. She mentioned the Sudeten Germans, where a group of people from a certain tribe find themselves as a minority in a country where another larger tribe is dominant. And her attitude to that was, well, tough luck. That's, you know, what do you expect me to do? Margaret Thatcher tended to think of the Republic's claim on Northern Ireland rather as Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland, because you had the same situation, mutatis mutandis.

Transcript for:Margaret Thatcher's Impact on Northern Ireland

Transcript for:
Margaret Thatcher's Impact on Northern Ireland