Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (80 page)

Bobby Sands died on Tuesday 5 May. From this time forward I became the IRA’s top target for assassination.

Sands’s death provoked rioting and violence, mainly in Londonderry and Belfast, and the security forces came under increasing strain. It was possible to admire the courage of Sands and the other hunger strikers who died, but not to sympathize with their murderous cause. We had done everything in our power to persuade them to give up their fast.

So had the Catholic Church. I went as far as I could to involve an organization connected with the Catholic hierarchy, the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP), hoping that the strikers would listen to them – though our reward was to be denounced by the ICJP for going back on undertakings we had allegedly made in the talks we had with them. This false allegation was supported by Garret FitzGerald who became Taoiseach at the beginning of July 1981.

In striving to end the crisis, I had stopped short of force-feeding, a degrading and dangerous practice which I could not support. At all times hunger strikers were offered three meals a day, had constant medical attention and, of course, took water. When the hunger strikers fell into unconsciousness it became possible for their next of kin to instruct the doctors to feed them through a drip. My hope was that the families would use this power to bring an end to the strike. Eventually, after ten prisoners had died, a group of families announced that they would intervene to prevent the deaths of their relatives and the IRA called off the strike on Saturday 3 October. With the strike now over, I authorized some further concessions on clothing, association and loss of remission. But the outcome was a significant defeat for the IRA.

However, the IRA now turned to violence on a larger scale, especially on the mainland. The worst incident was caused by an IRA bomb outside Chelsea Barracks on Monday 10 October. A coach carrying Irish Guardsmen was blown up, killing one bystander and injuring many soldiers. The bomb was filled with six-inch nails, intended to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible.

After Garret FitzGerald had overcome his initial inclination to play up to Irish opinion at the British Government’s expense I had quite friendly dealings with him – all too friendly, to judge by Unionist reaction to our agreement after a summit in November 1981 to set up the rather grand
sounding ‘Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council’, which really continued the existing ministerial and official contacts under a new name. How Garret FitzGerald would have reacted to the new proposals we made in the spring of 1982 for ‘rolling devolution’ of powers to a Northern Ireland Assembly it is difficult to know. But in fact by now the whirligig of Irish politics had brought Charles Haughey back as Taoiseach and Anglo-Irish relations cooled to freezing. The new Taoiseach denounced our proposals for devolution as an ‘unworkable mistake’ in which he was also joined by the SDLP. But what angered me most was the thoroughly unhelpful stance taken by the Irish Government during the Falklands War, which I have mentioned earlier.

Jim Prior, who succeeded Humphrey Atkins as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland shortly before the end of the second hunger strike, was a good deal more optimistic about the proposals in our White Paper than I was. Ian Gow, my PPS, was against the whole idea and I shared a number of his reservations. Before publication, I had the text of the White Paper substantially changed in order to cut out a chapter dealing with relations with the Irish Republic and, I hoped, minimize Unionist objections: although Ian Paisley’s DUP went along with the proposals, many integrationists in the Official Unionist Party were critical. Twenty Conservative MPs voted against the Bill when it came forward in May and three junior members of the Government resigned.

In the elections that October to the Northern Ireland Assembly Sinn Fein won 10 per cent of the total, over half of the vote won by the SDLP. For this, of course, the SDLP’s own tactics and negative attitudes were heavily to blame: but they continued them by refusing to take their seats in the assembly when it opened the following month. The campaign itself had been marked by a sharp increase in sectarian murders.

The IRA were still at work on the mainland too. I was chairing a meeting of ‘E’ Committee in the Cabinet Room on the morning of Tuesday 20 July 1982 when I heard (and felt) the unmistakable sound of a bomb exploding in the middle distance. I immediately asked that enquiries be made, but continued the meeting. When the news finally came through it was even worse than I feared. Two bombs had exploded, one two hours after the other, in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, the intended victims being in the first case the Household Cavalry and in the second the band of the Royal Green Jackets. Eight people were killed and 53 injured. The carnage was truly terrible. I heard about it first hand from some of the victims when I went to the hospital the next day.

The return of Garret FitzGerald as Taoiseach in December 1982 provided us with an opportunity to improve the climate of Anglo-Irish relations with a view to pressing the South for more action on security. I had a meeting with Dr FitzGerald at the European Council at Stuttgart in June 1983. I shared the worry he expressed about the erosion of SDLP support by Sinn Fein. However uninspiring SDLP politicians might be – at least since the departure of the courageous Gerry Fitt – they were the minority’s main representatives and an alternative to the IRA. They had to be wooed. But Dr FitzGerald had no suggestions to make about how to get the SDLP to take part in the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was pointless without their participation. He pressed me to agree talks between officials on future co-operation.

I did not think there was much to talk about, but I accepted the proposal. Robert Armstrong, head of the civil service and Cabinet Secretary, and his opposite number in the Republic, Dermot Nally, became the main channels of communication. Over the summer and autumn of 1983 we received a number of informal approaches from the Irish, by no means consistent or clear in content.

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

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

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

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

By the end of the year the prospects for some kind of negotiation seemed reasonable, but the acid test for me would be the question of security.

In January and February 1984 I held meetings to run through the options. The Irish were keen to pursue possibilities of joint policing and even mixed courts (with British and Irish judges sitting on the same bench). The idea, favoured by Dr FitzGerald, of the Garda policing nationalist areas like West Belfast seemed quite impractical: not only would the Unionists have been outraged, the Garda officers would probably have been shot on sight by the IRA. As for joint Anglo-Irish courts – majority decisions in terrorist cases by a mixed court would have been disastrous.

There was an important development over the summer: the Irish for the first time explicitly put forward the idea of amending Articles 2 and 3 of their constitution to make Irish unity an aspiration rather than a legal claim. This was attractive to me, in that I thought it should reassure the Unionists. But it was clear that the Irish would expect a good deal in return, and I still doubted their capacity to deliver the referendum vote. So the net effect of their proposal was actually to make me more pessimistic and suspicious. Also they were trying to go too far too fast. The Irish still hankered after joint authority (indeed this lay behind the subsequent contrary interpretations we and they placed on the provisions of the Anglo-Irish Agreement).

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

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

We toughened our negotiating position.

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

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

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

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