On 24 and 25 September two hunger strikers gave up their fast. The mother of one of them, Liam McCloskey, had written personally to Mrs Thatcher asking her to see her and to intervene to save her son’s life. Although Mrs Thatcher refused this meeting, referring Mrs McCloskey, in a highly sympathetic letter, to officials, this unpolitical and sincere approach from a mother showed the way things were going. At this time one of the prison chaplains, Father Denis Faul, stepped up his efforts to bring the strike to an end by meeting the relatives. In public, the prison leadership were critical of this and Faul was attacked by the prisoners’ spokesman as ‘a treacherous, conniving man’. It is probable that he privately agreed to be scapegoated in this way by the IRA, who were looking for a way out but could not say so, in order to prevent further deaths.117
Jim Prior himself believed that ‘The hunger strike was beginning to lose its impact’ before he took up his post, but he still saw ending it as ‘of absolute paramount importance’.118 He agreed to have meetings with the Catholic primate, Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich (who had crossed swords with Mrs Thatcher at a meeting in early July), and Father Faul: ‘The quid pro quo for ending the hunger strike was to allow prisoners to wear their own dress and I thought on balance this was a small price to pay, particularly as some of the prisoners did not wear anything [a reference to the blanket protest]. The Cardinal and Father Faul came to see me and they said that if you are prepared to do something about dress then I think we can bring it to an end.’119 The minutes of their meeting on 30 September show that Father Faul also told Prior that the prisoners should be allowed to retain their ‘military structure’ (that is, freedom of association) and that they should have their lost remission restored. Such concessions, Faul believed, would help ‘take the sting out of defeat’ for the prisoners.120
An understanding was at hand. On 2 October, Prior promised a statement on ‘the development of the prison system’. The next day, the hunger strike ended. A statement from the prisoners complaining that they had been ‘robbed of the hunger strike as an effective protest weapon’ by the ‘successful campaign waged against our distressed relatives by the Irish Catholic hierarchy’ showed the anger of the IRA, but was also a cover for their own capitulation. Prior’s statement on 6 October made clear that prisoners would now have more freedom of association, in choice of work and in what clothes they wore, and better recovery of remission. These changes were similar to those which had been recommended by Father Faul. They went slightly further than the concessions which had been the subject of negotiation in July, but they did not differ in principle from the terms that Mrs Thatcher had been prepared to offer. No changes were implemented before the hunger strike had ended.
Talk of concessions, even post hoc concessions, did worry Ian Gow, who was probably unaware of the secret attempts to bring an end to the strike earlier in the summer. Realizing what Prior was about to do, Gow belatedly wrote to Mrs Thatcher commending to her ‘the advice which you received from a Privy Councillor [he probably meant Enoch Powell] … that there should be a decent interval over the hunger strikers and what some will perceive to be their partial victory over “the authorities” ’.121 Writing later in the day, on the same note, Gow added: ‘It is clear that Jim’s proposed Statement has been leaked already … This may mean, whatever reservations you may have about Jim’s Statement, it is too late to alter it.’122 It was. The private secretary added: ‘The Prime Minister agreed that this statement could be issued on the understanding that what was being done about clothing was no more than was already the practice in women’s prisons in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’123 What had happened, in essence, was that Mrs Thatcher had allowed Prior to make his own decisions. Asked in retirement whether she had been aware of what he was doing, Prior replied: ‘To be honest, I am not sure whether she was or not. I think she probably was … aware, but she didn’t raise any objections.’124
Who won the hunger strike? Mrs Thatcher certainly emerged from it with her reputation for determination and courage enhanced. This helped her greatly with Unionist opinion, and made her politically much more formidable. If she had capitulated to the strikers, her Iron Lady reputation might never have recovered. The IRA had expected that Mrs Thatcher would be forced to make concessions, perhaps because she was a woman,125 but they had been proved wrong. Moreover, the ‘1916 syndrome’ for which they had hoped – a tide of unstoppable anger rising with each death – failed to materialize from the sixth death onwards. Their discipline over their prisoners, terrifyingly strong though it was, did not prove absolute.
On the other hand, the temporary electoral success that accrued to Sinn Fein because of the strike led to their strategy, articulated by Danny Morrison at their Ard Fheis (annual conference) at the end of October, of ‘a ballot box in one hand and an Armalite in the other’. It can also be argued that the prisoners did, in fact, succeed, in substance though not in form, in gaining a more favourable prison regime which ensured that the IRA could do more or less what they liked within the Maze. It is also true that, as a sort of trade-off for her toughness, Mrs Thatcher came under even greater pressure to move towards political developments which she would have preferred to avoid. Most damaging to her reputation, had it been known, and to her own conscience was that she did, in effect, negotiate with terrorists. She never quite admitted this, even privately, but it was so.
Mrs Thatcher herself felt sad about the hunger strike. She admired the strikers’ courage – ‘You have to hand it to some of these IRA boys’ – and described them as ‘poor devils’ who knew that ‘if they didn’t go on strike they’d be shot … What a waste! What a terrible waste of human life!’ And, she added, to emphasize the pointlessness of it all, ‘I don’t even remember their names.’126 She also, of course, noted the effect on herself. As a result of the hunger strike, though she did not immediately know this, she went to the top of the IRA’s death list: ‘This is why I will forever have to be protected.’127 In public, she never complained about the inevitable fear, but she did feel it, both for herself and for her family. In private, she said: ‘After that [the death threat], you walk into a crowd – it’s always absolutely terrifying. Or if someone hands you something – look at Rajiv Gandhi – hidden in flowers.’128
Despite all the difficulties caused by the hunger strike, contacts between London and Dublin had been maintained, with Nally and Armstrong working quietly together. A summit between Mrs Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald went ahead in London on 6 November 1981, the ground for it laid by Armstrong, who took the procedurally unusual step of seeing FitzGerald alone to plan it. In the run-up to the meeting, Mrs Thatcher had continued to make difficulties. She still protested about the name of an Anglo-Irish Council, which the Joint Studies had proposed, and conceded it only if it were to be called the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council. She was alert to anything which might imply any jurisdiction by the Republic in the affairs of Northern Ireland, and particularly resisted FitzGerald’s desire for a rephrasing of the British guarantee to Northern Ireland in what he called a ‘more positive’ – by which he meant a more Nationalist – form. Armstrong wrote to the Prime Minister to try to win her over on this point. He made the mistake of invoking the Sunningdale Communiqué which had pledged Britain ‘To support any future wish by the majority in Northern Ireland to become part of a united Ireland’. ‘We have never withdrawn that pledge,’ he added.129 Mrs Thatcher, seldom impressed by any action of Ted Heath, scribbled: ‘It never had any lasting status.’ Rather desperate, Michael Alexander felt the need to remind her that friendly Anglo-Irish summitry was supposed to be something she was keen on: ‘The improved relationship between London and Dublin is an achievement of yours which you want to preserve and build upon.’130 In fact, she never internalized this thought, and constantly resented what she had herself agreed. At a meeting with FitzGerald in 1983, she read out the phrase ‘the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council’ ‘in tones of contempt’. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Margaret, yo
u invented it,’ said FitzGerald.131
The summit itself, however, laid the foundations for a good working relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. Although she was rather sour about FitzGerald in her memoirs, possibly retaliating for his criticisms of her in his, she did, at this time, like him, inclining to Nigel Lawson’s view that he was ‘the only completely honest Taoiseach the Republic have ever had’.132 At the top of the draft communiqué, she wrote out the adjectives she would use to describe the meeting: ‘Friendly, constructive, practical’. But, after her experience at Dublin, she was extremely anxious about the precise wording of the communiqué, and asked for the advice of Ian Gow (Gow reminded her: ‘We both remember what the Foreign Office did to us last time!’).133 Gow’s wholly Unionist suggestions, many contributed by Enoch Powell, did not carry the day, but Mrs Thatcher did succeed in rejecting a draft which said that the British government would ‘support’ movement to a United Ireland if the majority in the North so wished, and replaced it with the word ‘accept’.134 In the House of Commons, defending the communiqué, she made much of the fact that FitzGerald had publicly accepted the principle of consent in relation to the North. But she was assailed by Unionists who feared the implications of the new Council and the Joint Studies. One asked her if she still stood ‘rock firm’ for the Union, as she had said in Belfast three years previously. ‘Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,’ she replied, ‘as much as my constituency is.’135 This was altered, in mythology, to a claim that Ulster was ‘as British as Finchley’, but this was not quite what she was saying. She was not asserting, and did not believe, that Northern Ireland and north London were culturally the same. Rather, she was defending the constitutional position, and the rights of the people protected by it.
On 11 November 1981, four of the five Joint Studies were published, the report on security matters being excluded. The first report on the ‘possible new institutional structures’ proposed the formation of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council. Although the precise nature and powers of the Council remained vague, the two countries agreed to set up a secretariat to run the Council. It was this idea of a permanent secretariat which made Unionists uneasy, then and later. Events quickly distracted attention from the Joint Studies. Three days later, an Official Unionist MP, the Revd Robert Bradford, was assassinated by the IRA. Gow reported to Mrs Thatcher the view of leading Unionists that ‘The whole place is a tinderbox’136 and that, to the majority, talk of a ‘political solution’ sounded like incorporation in the Irish Republic. At Bradford’s funeral, Jim Prior was jostled by angry mourners. His remedy for the situation was to pursue devolution once more, and he tried to sell the idea to Mrs Thatcher. She remained unconvinced, and read across from Northern Ireland to the mainland: ‘My main worry about devolved government is the effect it would have on Scotland. Further I see little prospect of sufficient agreement to secure an effective devolution.’137 Although Prior devised what he called ‘rolling devolution’ by which powers would be devolved by agreed stages, the problems were very much the same as they had been with Atkins – that the Nationalists insisted on power-sharing and the Unionists on the rights of the majority. He presented his ideas to OD in February 1982. Mrs Thatcher covered his draft with wiggly lines, and Gow wrote to her in passionate terms, reminding her of the government’s manifesto pledge and the legacy of Airey Neave. He ridiculed power-sharing: ‘To seek to combine Republicans and Unionists in the same power-sharing Executive is as absurd as asking Petain and De Gaulle to sit in the same Cabinet in 1940.’ Prior’s plans were ‘moving in fundamentally the wrong direction’ and were ‘doomed to failure’. With a frankness which showed that he knew his boss would not be horrified at the idea of undermining the proposals, Gow wrote: ‘I fear that the Government, which is on the whole disinterested in Northern Ireland, will back Jim’s proposals. It may be that the best way of preventing this initiative is the absence of Parliamentary time this Session …’138
The Prior proposals were much disputed within the government, and OD Committee failed to reach agreement on them. When they came back, revised, towards the end of March, the White Paper proposed, under the heading of ‘Bilateral Arrangements’, a role for the Republic, via the Council and its inter-parliamentary arm, in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Gow then told Mrs Thatcher, in effect, that he would have to resign if Prior’s plans were to become law: ‘I well understand what the consequences would be, but I do not see how I can vote for the Second Reading of a Bill which I consider would be gravely damaging to Northern Ireland and to the unity of this Kingdom.’139 Mrs Thatcher was in a quandary. She more or less agreed with Gow, and was worried about dissension within her party. Equally, she had put Prior in Northern Ireland so that each could leave the other alone; and she was warned by Armstrong, probably correctly, that Prior’s ‘personal position’ would be ‘very difficult’ if his proposals were rejected.140* She knew, too, that the majority of the Cabinet tended to side with Prior. Even after further revisions, the White Paper alarmed her, and in Cabinet on 1 April 1982 she continued to tone down phrases, which she called ‘devastating’, about the co-operation of the British and Irish Parliaments.141 But she felt she had to let the Bill go ahead. Somehow, perhaps by a few kind words, perhaps by quietly authorizing him to foment rebellion, she had squared Ian Gow. On 2 April, he wrote to her: ‘The die is now cast, but you understand, and thank you for understanding, how difficult my position is. I cannot forget Airey.’142
The day after the Cabinet had agreed the Prior Bill, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.† The crisis enabled Mrs Thatcher to order the postponement of the Bill, though not the publication of the White Paper, until after Easter. The delay helped Gow, now more essential than ever to Mrs Thatcher because of his skill at shoring up her position in the House of Commons. But there was a sense in which it helped Prior too. Faced with a battle for the very survival of her government, of national honour, of her whole career, she had little time for anything else. True, Gow had Mrs Thatcher’s licence to cause trouble for Prior. Leading Unionist Tories such as Nick Budgen,‡ who resigned as a whip, and Lord Cranborne,§ who resigned as a PPS, protested against the Bill. To quell revolt, the whips decided to guillotine the Bill. Jim Prior recalled his chief’s reaction: ‘I always remember when I told the Cabinet that we were going to have to guillotine it. She turned to me and said, “Thank God I am going to be in the United States and am not going to have to vote for it.” I mean, she didn’t make my life easy.’143 In the event, twenty-six Conservative backbenchers voted against the guillotine motion. Mrs Thatcher probably had it in her power to prevent the passage of the Bill, but she chose not to do so. It was enough for her purposes to indicate her displeasure, and then let it pass.
The Falklands also had the effect of freezing Anglo-Irish relations. Charles Haughey, who continued to believe that Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour during the hunger strikes had lost him the election in the summer of 1981, had returned to power on 9 March 1982. He saw the Falklands as the chance for revenge. In the EEC and at the United Nations, Ireland became by far the most awkward Western European country, voting against sanctions on Argentina and for UN resolutions advancing an Argentine agenda.* Already opposed to the Prior proposals because his government had had no involvement in them, Haughey did what he could to throw a spanner in the works. Sean Aylward, his private secretary at the time, explained: ‘Now I don’t think it was his finest hour … but it did pose policy difficulties … because quite simply the Falklands/Malvinas was a classic piece of colonial history [and therefore problematic in Irish politics] … it was a combination of substantial sympathy in Ireland for the Argentinian position and the smouldering resentment of the way in which the Thatcher government had influenced the hunger strikes that influenced our foreign policy at the time. Retrospectively, there is no question that it was a mistake because it simply wasn’t understood in England and we lost a lot of friends too.’144 At the end of May, Figg, the British Ambassador
in Dublin, had an uncomfortable meeting with Haughey. The Taoiseach told him that the ‘spirit of the Anglo-Irish Initiative’ was ‘quite dead’ because of the failure to consult Dublin.145
Unlike her officials, Mrs Thatcher did not mind that the Irish government had withdrawn from political partnership. In answer to a question from Enoch Powell, she told the House of Commons, almost with glee, that ‘no commitment exists for Her Majesty’s Government to consult the Irish Government on matters affecting Northern Ireland. That has always been our position. We reiterate and emphasise it, so that everyone is clear about it.’146† But she minded very much indeed that the Irish had tried to impede British victory in the Falklands. In a discussion about improving reciprocal voting rights that had been rumbling on for some time, Armstrong wrote to her, implicitly rebuking her for her reluctance to press forward and reminding her that reform was a British commitment. Mrs Thatcher’s pen scribbled back: ‘I am aware of this – but events have changed matters since then. Certainly I have no intention of having further bilateral meetings with the Taoiseach.’147 Her patience with the whole subject of Ireland, and particularly with the Republic, was temporarily exhausted. When the elections for Prior’s Assembly were held on 20 October 1982, her fears about the process were confirmed. Sinn Fein shot up to 10 per cent of the first-preference votes, a third, in other words, of the votes on the Nationalist side.
Ian Gow hoped to turn Mrs Thatcher’s frustration with Northern Ireland to the advantage of his Unionist allies. Writing to the Prime Minister in mid-November, he told her, ‘After the next General Election, I hope that you might find it possible to make a really fresh start with our policy in the Province.’ The ‘present combination of Prior and Gowrie’, he continued, ‘is doing great damage to Ulster’.148 Mrs Thatcher, however, was soon exposed to other influences. Early in December 1982 she gave a dinner for Lord Shackleton, to thank him for his work on restoring the economy of the Falkland Islands. Afterwards, she invited a couple of officials up for a drink. One of them, David Goodall,* Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, and a Roman Catholic of Irish descent with a long-standing commitment to Anglo-Irish rapprochement, turned the conversation to Ireland. Rather boldly, he told her that it was a ‘scandal’ that British troops, though triumphant in the Falklands, were still being lost in anger within the United Kingdom, in Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister and he talked about Irishness. ‘I am completely English,’ said Mrs Thatcher, stoutly. ‘I’m not,’ said Goodall; ‘both my grandfathers were Irish.’ ‘Actually,’ said the Prime Minister, reflectively, ‘my great-grandmother was a Sullivan,† so I’m one-sixteenth Irish.’ She mused a little. ‘If we get back [after the next general election],’ she said, ‘I should like to do something about Ireland.’149
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