Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (107 page)

This is the most alarming set of papers on the UK/Irish situation I have read. They reveal starkly a total difference of approach. We are trying to achieve increasing cooperation and reconciliation between our
two countries
… They are using every study as a step towards takeover. If these papers go ahead to publication even on an agree to differ basis, I am
not
prepared to go along with the studies. The Irish view would incur such mistrust, hostility and downright anger in the North that it would set Anglo-Irish relations back for years and do untold harm to many innocent people if the Protestant paramilitary groups reacted. It is no longer a question of changing the wording of a few sentences. We are at the heart of the matter.

All over the studies, sometimes as often as four times on the same page, she wrote ‘NO’, and,
in extremis
, ‘NO!’ When British officials suggested that the word ‘Council’ should be conceded in order to keep Irish goodwill, she wrote, ‘What about
our
good will?’ To the Irish suggestion that their citizens should sit on juries and hold elected office in the North, she wrote: ‘This is
monstrous
.’
⁸⁰
Her argument and her indignation were classic encapsulations of Mrs Thatcher’s approach to the project. She strongly disliked the whole vision while not having any very clear idea of what she wanted to do instead. The consequence of her fury, assisted by the calling of another general election in the Republic for June, was a pause for reflection and redrafting.

It is remarkable, given everything else that was happening, that Mrs Thatcher devoted such close attention to this large and often tedious bundle of documents. The Joint Studies process coincided with the economic and political crisis which followed the 1981 Budget and the Brixton riots
in April.
*
And in Northern Ireland itself a second and much more formidable hunger strike was by now in progress. On the day Mrs Thatcher wrote her angry note on the Joint Studies, she knew that the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands, was on the point of death.

Early in January 1981, Mrs Thatcher had been informed that the hard men in the Maze were trying to engineer a second hunger strike. Allegations were made that the British had failed to implement the concessions offered via the earlier contact, but it seems likely that these grievances, though genuinely felt, were a pretext. From the point of view of the IRA prisoners, the fact that the first strike had failed meant that, for reasons of pride, there had to be a second one which would succeed. Atkins informed Mrs Thatcher that the strike was essentially about political status and that the prisoners sought at least one death.
⁸¹
Sands, who was leader of the IRA prisoners in the Maze until he went on hunger strike, was a romantic, violent, poetry-loving young man, in prison for trying to blow up a furniture showroom. His wife had left him because he beat her up.
⁸²
He felt he had little to lose by dying. On 1 March, Sands began the strike himself. On 5 March, speaking in Belfast, Mrs Thatcher reiterated her simple position: ‘There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status.’
⁸³
On the same day, Frank Maguire, the Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died. Sands, from his prison bed, became a candidate for his seat. It was thought by Republicans that if Sands were elected to Parliament the case for political status would become unanswerable. A decision by the SDLP not to contest the election made Sands the only candidate of the Nationalist side and, on 9 April, he was elected. Riots ensued. Until then, Provisional Sinn Fein–IRA had shunned the electoral process, but now the fact that an IRA man could win a popular contest in the United Kingdom gave them a huge propaganda boost.

Mrs Thatcher came under immense pressure. At home on mainland Britain, and among Unionists in the province, there was almost complete support for resistance to the hunger strike; she was much more aware than most of her colleagues that it was essential not to break this trust with the majority. In the rest of the world, the opposite was the case. In the Republic, the United States and the EEC, calls for a way out grew louder.
^†
On
22 April, Armstrong wrote to Mrs Thatcher about the Republic’s attitude. With an almost guilty punctiliousness, he explained the exact reason why Dermot Nally had telephoned him that morning: ‘The first purpose of the call was to discuss the date for the next meeting of the steering Group of the Anglo-Irish joint studies.’
⁸⁴
But the real purport of the call, and of Armstrong’s note, was to convey Haughey’s anxiety about the hunger strike. The Taoiseach was worried, said Nally, as reported by Armstrong, that, if Sands died soon, ‘The whole areas [sic] would go up in flames.’
⁸⁵
How about getting the European Commission for Human Rights involved in some solution, Haughey suggested? He wanted the Commissioners to go into the Maze as, in effect, mediators, which would then allow him to call for the strikers to give up. Mrs Thatcher resisted mediation, though not absolutely, by the Human Rights Commission. A record of a telephone conversation with Humphrey Atkins at this time shows that she was prepared for Sands’s death and that of the others who had followed him into a hunger strike:

The situation was not, in Atkins’s inadequate phrase, very attractive to either side. On 5 May 1981, Sands died. Thirty thousand people – 100,000 in the estimation of the organizers – attended his funeral in Belfast. In death, Sands became a world figure. Streets were named after him in Paris and Teheran. Haughey urged Mrs Thatcher to give ground, fearing the political rise of Sinn Fein in the Republic as well as in the province. John Hume of the SDLP called on her at No. 10 and begged her to make concessions on clothing and free association, lest he be ‘swept away’ politically by the disturbances. Mrs Thatcher dismissed his anxieties: ‘The people who had been killed by the PIRA had had no choice. The hunger strikers had a choice … Any wavering on the issue of political status would be a licence
to kill.’
⁸⁷
Michael Foot came to see her later the same day, asking for an ‘escape-route’ over the hunger strike. Mrs Thatcher rebuked him: ‘The Prime Minister said that Mr Foot’s message had been exactly the same as that of Mr Hume. Her answer was “No”. Foot was giving notice that he was “a push-over”.’
⁸⁸

On 12 May, the second hunger striker, Francis Hughes, had died. On 19 May Mrs Thatcher was given chilling evidence of the attitude of some of those involved. Raymond McCreesh, a hunger striker who had given some indications that he wanted to end his fast, was visited by his brother Brian, a Catholic priest. Father McCreesh was overheard telling Raymond: ‘Your brother and I were proud to carry the coffins of Bobby Sands and Frank Hughes. They are in heaven waiting for you.’
⁸⁹
*

Throughout this tense time, Robert Armstrong was firm against concessions to the prisoners. Disagreeing with Robert Wade-Gery, who was more anxious to appease, he had held to a line similar to Mrs Thatcher’s.
⁹⁰
But he continued to push his belief that there had to be ‘long-term political development’,
⁹¹
and he warned the Prime Minister of the dangers of another Bloody Sunday (the rioting in Londonderry in 1972 when thirteen people were killed by British soldiers). His anxieties about the Catholic reaction were shared by what the IRA liked to call the ‘securocrats’. At Chequers on 27 May the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland, General Sir Richard Lawson, and the Chief Constable of the RUC, Jack Hermon, joined Kenneth Stowe to tell Mrs Thatcher that the alienation of the Catholic population was now a greater challenge than the security problem. The government should ‘dispel the impression of inflexibility’ and make a gesture towards Catholics by setting up an inquiry into prison conditions.
⁹²
A clearly windy Humphrey Atkins warned Mrs Thatcher that ‘I now feel strongly that a continuing, apparently endless, series of deaths from hunger strikes will cumulatively lose us both the Catholic population of Northern Ireland and the sympathy of world opinion,’ and recommended more ‘political development in the North’ to match the policy of ‘continuing to pursue – as we are committed to doing – the development of relations with Dublin’.
⁹³
Armstrong, however, was silkily dismissive of any Atkins initiative as he prepared his chief for the OD meeting to discuss these matters: ‘You will also wish to have at the back of your mind the possibility that you may wish to appoint a new Secretary of State before long.’
⁹⁴
He knew that a Cabinet reshuffle was imminent.

The international clamour intensified. Tip O’Neill, always vocal on behalf of the Irish lobby, called on President Reagan to intervene with Mrs Thatcher privately to help break the impasse. Reagan studiously avoided any commitment and went on holiday. At the beginning of June, the members of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP), a body set up by the Irish Catholic hierarchy primarily concerned with aid to Third World countries, suggested that they might be able to play a role in bringing the hunger strike to an end. Beginning on 23 June, Michael Alison,
*
the Minister of State at the NIO responsible for prisons, had a series of meetings with the members of the ICJP. On 29 June, Humphrey Atkins released a statement which the ICJP took to be positive but which emphasized the government’s ‘bottom line’ – that there could be no concessions or reforms until the hunger strike had ended. In their secret communications, smuggled out of the prison by mouth, the IRA leader in the Maze, Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, told Gerry Adams that he was worried by the opinion of the strikers’ families: ‘If Brits don’t meet with Commission and forward a very watery offer, can we cope with the families i.e. prevent their disintegration if we refuse … It appears that they [the British] are not interested in simply undermining us, but completely annihilating us … They are insane – at least Maggie is anyway.’
⁹⁵
But ‘Maggie’ was not insane, nor bent on annihilation. She was perplexed, even confused, about tactics.

What happened next is a story so tangled with the needs of the different parties to justify themselves that no wholly accurate account seems possible, and even after the release of state papers under the thirty-year rule the actions and motivations of those involved are greatly disputed.
⁹⁶

From Mrs Thatcher’s point of view the aim was to make no concessions ‘in any way’, and yet to entertain the suggestion of the new Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald,
^†
who had come into office on 30 June 1981, that the ICJP should be allowed to play a greater role. The Commissioners, it was suggested, would be allowed into the Maze to repeat the government’s message to the prisoners and, without negotiating, would return with the prisoners’ reply.
⁹⁷
Mrs Thatcher discussed this idea with Alison and senior colleagues. Although she thought that it was ‘unlikely’ to work, she was persuaded by colleagues such as Carrington and Whitelaw to allow it to
go ahead. At least there might be some value in the scheme, she believed, if it could ‘demonstrate that the blame for the hunger strikers lay with the strikers themselves’.
⁹⁸
In his meetings with the ICJP, Alison referred to ‘the lady behind the veil’ as the final, exacting arbiter of his position. The Commission understood him to be referring to Mrs Thatcher in person, but Alison later claimed that this was only a symbolic way of telling the Commission that he was not the ultimate authority.
⁹⁹
On 4 July, Mrs Thatcher spoke to Alison twice on the telephone about his discussions with the ICJP, indicating the seriousness with which she considered the proposals. She instructed him that the ICJP could go into the prison so long as they accepted that ‘control and security remain with HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]’. She agreed with Alison that the Commission would tell the prisoners that they must end the strike unconditionally, but in the knowledge that the government was under a moral ‘obligation to move forward’ on the areas of clothing, free association and prison work.
¹⁰⁰
The ICJP thought this was an ‘about-face’ on clothing which might bring a result.

On 4 and 5 July 1981, as the death of the next hunger striker, Joe McDonnell, seemed imminent, the ICJP went into the Maze. The proposals which they brought appeared that they might satisfy the strikers. It was clear to the ICJP that the prisoners’ families were at odds with Brendan McFarlane, making it more difficult to obtain a settlement.
¹⁰¹
At this point, however, the ICJP’s efforts crossed wires with the once-more active British secret contact with the IRA. Through this contact, it was made clear to the government that the IRA were concerned about the role of the ICJP. From this point the secret channel became the primary means of communication. An associate of the IRA, codenamed Soon, was the interlocutor. Many years later, Brendan Duddy confirmed
¹⁰²
that he had once again been involved in discussions at this time. The contact asked the British to allow a Provisional Sinn Fein representative secretly into the prison. They refused to permit Adams or McGuinness, whom the IRA suggested, but allowed Danny Morrison.
*
In the course of conversations with the contact, some of them probably with McGuinness in the room,
^†
the PIRA requirements were set out. As well as the substantive concessions about clothing and so on (which fell short of the prisoners’ five demands, but which they were inclined to accept), the IRA were very concerned about the danger of what they called ‘panic’, by which they meant the fear within their own ranks
of the appearance of sell-out or of double-crossing by the British. They therefore wanted parcels of clothes to be ready for wear immediately after the end of the strike and for the statement which the British would make after the end to be agreed by them in advance.
¹⁰³
Mrs Thatcher herself was shown the draft of the message which would be sent through the channel, and altered it, toughening it up a little on points about work and association. She also approved the following: ‘If the reply we receive is unsatisfactory and there is subsequently any public reference to this exchange we shall deny it took place.’
¹⁰⁴
There can be no doubt, therefore, that Mrs Thatcher went against her public protestations about not negotiating with terrorists, and actively did so, though at a remove. ‘The lady behind the veil’ had weakened.