The IRA are the core of the terrorist problem; their counterparts on the Protestant side would probably disappear if the IRA could be beaten. But the best chance of beating them is if three conditions are met. First, the IRA have to be rejected by the nationalist minority on whom they depend for shelter and support.* This requires that the minority should be led to support or at least acquiesce in the constitutional framework of the state in which they live. Second, the IRA have to be deprived of international support, whether from well-meaning but naive Irish Americans, or from Arab revolutionary regimes like that of Colonel Gaddafi. This requires constant attention to foreign policy aimed at explaining the facts to the misinformed and cutting off the weapons from the mischievous. Third, relations between Britain and the Republic of Ireland have to be carefully managed. Although the IRA have plenty of support in areas like West Belfast within Northern Ireland, very often it is to the South that they go to be trained, to receive money and arms and to escape capture after crimes committed within the United Kingdom. The border, long and difficult to patrol, is of crucial significance to the security problem. Much depends on the willingness and ability of the political leaders of the Republic to cooperate effectively with our intelligence, security forces and courts.
My own instincts are profoundly Unionist and our Party has always, throughout its history, been committed to the defence of the Union: indeed, on the eve of the First World War, the Conservatives were not far short of provoking civil disorder to support it. That is why I could never understand why leading Unionists – apparently sincerely – suggested that in my dealings with the South and above all in the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which I shall discuss shortly, I was contemplating selling them out to the Republic.
But what British politician will ever fully understand Northern Ireland? In the history of Ireland – both North and South – which I tried to read up when I could, reality and myth from the seventeenth century to the 1920s take on an almost Balkan immediacy. Distrust mounting to hatred and revenge is never far beneath the political surface. And those who step onto it must do so gingerly.
I started from the need for greater security, which was imperative. If this meant making limited political concessions to the South, I had to contemplate it. But the results in terms of security must come through. In Northern Ireland itself my first choice would have been a system of majority rule with strong guarantees for the human rights of the minority, and indeed everyone else. That is broadly the approach which Airey Neave and I had in mind when the 1979 manifesto was drafted. But it was not long before it became clear to me that this model was not going to work, at least for the present. The nationalist minority were not prepared to believe that majority rule would secure their rights – whether it took the form of an assembly in Belfast, or more powerful local government. They insisted on some kind of ‘power sharing’ as well as demanding a role for the Republic in Northern Ireland, both of which proposals were anathema to the Unionists.
I had always had a good deal of respect for the old Stormont system.* When I was Education Secretary I was impressed by the efficiency of the Northern Ireland education service. The province has kept its grammar schools and so has consistently achieved some of the best academic results in the United Kingdom. But majority rule meant permanent power for the Protestants, and there was no getting away from the fact that, with some justice, the long years of Unionist rule were associated with discrimination against the Catholics. I believe the defects were exaggerated, but Catholic resentment gave rise to the civil rights movement at the end of the 1960s, which the IRA was able to exploit. By early 1972 civil disorder existed on such a scale that Stormont was suspended and replaced by direct rule from London. At the same time the British Government gave a guarantee that Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom so long as the majority of its people wished, and this has remained the cornerstone of policy under governments of both parties.
The political realities of Northern Ireland prevented a return to majority rule. This was something that many Unionists refused to accept, but since 1974 they had been joined in the House of Commons by Enoch Powell, who helped to convert some of them to an altogether different approach. His aim was that of ‘integration’. Essentially, this would have meant eliminating any difference between the government of Northern Ireland and that of the rest of the UK, ruling out a return to devolution (whether majority rule or power sharing) and any special role for the Republic. Enoch’s view was that the terrorists thrived on uncertainty about Ulster’s constitutional position: that uncertainty would, he argued, be ended by full integration combined with a tough security policy. I disagreed with this for two reasons. First, I did not believe that security could be disentangled from other wider political issues. Second, I never saw devolved government and an assembly for Northern Ireland as weakening, but rather strengthening the Union. Like Stormont before it, it would provide a clear alternative focus to Dublin – without undermining the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament.
Such were my views about Northern Ireland’s future on entering office. My conviction that further efforts must be made on both the political and security fronts had been strengthened by the events of the second half of 1979. In the course of that October we discussed in government the need for an initiative designed to achieve devolution in Northern Ireland. I was not very optimistic about the prospects but I agreed to the issue of a discussion document setting out the options. A conference would be called of the main political parties in Northern Ireland to see what agreement could be reached.
On Monday 7 January 1980 the conference opened in Belfast. On this occasion the largest Unionist group, the Official Unionist Party (OUP), refused to attend. Dr Paisley’s more militant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the mainly Catholic nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the moderate middle-class Alliance Party did attend, but there was no real common ground.
We adjourned the conference later in March and began to consider putting forward more specific proposals ourselves in the form of a White Paper. Ministers discussed a draft paper from Northern Ireland Secretary Humphrey Atkins in June. I had various changes made in the text in order to take account of Unionist sensitivities. I was no more optimistic than earlier that the initiative would succeed, but I agreed that the White Paper should be published in early July. It described areas – not including security – in which powers might be transferred to an executive chosen by an assembly in the province. It also spelt out two ways of choosing that executive, one inclining towards majority rule and the other towards power sharing. By November it was clear that there would not be sufficient agreement among the Northern Irish parties to go ahead with the assembly.
In any case, by now Republican prisoners inside the Maze Prison had begun the first of their two hunger strikes. I decided that no major political initiative should be made while the hunger strike was continuing: we must not appear to be bowing to terrorist demands. I was also cautious about any high-profile contacts with the Irish Government at such a time for the same reason.
Charles Haughey had been elected leader of his Fianna Fáil Party and Taoiseach in mid-December 1979. Mr Haughey had throughout his career been associated with the most Republican strand in respectable Irish politics. How ‘respectable’ was a subject of some controversy: in a famous case in 1970 he had been acquitted of involvement while an Irish minister in the importing of arms for the IRA. I found him easy to get on with, less talkative and more realistic than Garret FitzGerald, the leader of Fine Gael. He had come to see me in May at No. 10 and we had had a general and friendly discussion of the scene in Northern Ireland. He left me a gift of a beautiful Georgian silver teapot, which was kind of him. (It was worth more than the limit allowed for official gifts and I had to leave it behind at No. 10 when I left office.) By the time that I had my next talk with Mr Haughey when we were attending the European Council in Luxemburg on Monday 1 December 1980 it was the hunger strike which was the Irish
main concern.
To understand the background to the hunger strikes it is necessary to refer back to the ‘special category’ status for convicted terrorist prisoners in Northern Ireland which had been introduced, as a concession to the IRA, in 1972.* This was a bad mistake. It was ended in 1976. Prisoners convicted of such offences after that date were treated as ordinary prisoners – with no greater privileges than anyone else. But the policy was not retrospective. So some ‘special category’ prisoners continued being held apart and under a different regime from other terrorists. Within the so-called ‘H blocks’ of the Maze Prison where the terrorist prisoners were housed, protests had been more or less constant, including the revolting ‘dirty protest’. On 10 October a number of prisoners announced their intention of beginning a hunger strike on Monday 27 October unless certain demands were met. The most significant were that they should be able to wear their own clothes, associate freely with other ‘political’ prisoners and refrain from prison work.
All my instincts were against bending to such pressure, and certainly there could be no changes in the prison regime once the strike had begun. There was never any question of conceding political status. But the RUC Chief Constable believed that some concessions before the strike would be helpful in dealing with the threatened public disorder which such a strike might lead to and, though we did not believe that they could prevent the hunger strike, we were anxious to win the battle for public opinion. Accordingly, we agreed that all prisoners – not just those who had committed terrorist crimes – might be permitted to wear ‘civilian type’ clothing – but not their own clothes – as long as they obeyed the prison rules. As I had foreseen, these concessions did not prevent the hunger strike.
As the hunger strike continued and the prospect approached of one or more of the prisoners dying we came under a good deal of pressure. When I met Mr Haughey in the margins of the Luxemburg European Council on Monday 1 December 1980 he urged me to find some facesaving device which would allow the strikers to end their fast, though he said that he fully accepted that political status was out of the question. I replied that there was nothing left to give. Nor was I convinced, then or later, that the hunger strikers were able to abandon the strike, even if they had wanted to, against the wishes of the IRA leadership.
We met again exactly a week later for our second Anglo-Irish summit in Dublin. This meeting did more harm than good because, unusually, I did not involve myself closely enough in the drafting of the communiqué and, as a result, allowed through the statement that Mr Haughey and I would devote our next meeting in London ‘to special consideration of the totality of relationships within these islands’. Mr Haughey then gave a press briefing which led journalists to write of a breakthrough on the constitutional question. There had of course been no such thing. But the damage had been done and it was a red rag to the Unionist bull.
The Catholic Church was also a factor in dealing with the hunger strike. I explained the circumstances personally to the Pope on a visit to Rome on 24 November. He had as little sympathy for terrorists as I did, as he had made very clear on his visit to the Republic the previous year. After the Vatican brought pressure on the Irish Catholic hierarchy, they issued a statement calling on the prisoners to end their fast, though urging the Government to show ‘flexibility’.
Talk of concessions and compromises continued and intensified and then, on Thursday 18 December, one of the prisoners began to lose consciousness and the strike was abruptly called off. The IRA claimed later that they had done this because we had made concessions, but this was wholly false.
I had hoped that this would see the end of the hunger strike tactic, and indeed of all the prison protests. But it was not to be so. Another hunger strike was begun on 1 March 1981 by the IRA leader in the Maze, Bobby Sands, and he was joined at intervals by others. Simultaneously the ‘dirty protest’ was finally ended, ostensibly to concentrate attention on the hunger strike.
This was the beginning of a time of troubles. The IRA were on the advance politically: Sands himself, in absentia, won the parliamentary seat of Fermanagh and South Tyrone at a by-election caused by the death of an Independent Republican MP. More generally, the SDLP was losing ground to the Republicans. There was some suggestion, to which even some of my advisers gave credence, that the IRA were contemplating ending their terrorist compaign and seeking power through the ballot box. I never believed this. But it indicated how successful their propaganda could be.
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 vo
ted 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.
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 61
