Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (108 page)

On 7 July, a meeting took place between Mrs Thatcher, Atkins, Whitelaw, Gilmour and others. It was agreed that the proposed Atkins statement should be shown to PIRA in advance, with its terms revised at the order of Mrs Thatcher.
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The message was sent. Shortly after midnight Atkins met Mrs Thatcher to explain that PIRA had objected to the message received, and that the government had therefore responded that discussions were now at an end. The IRA then (‘a very rapid reaction’) said that what they did not like was the tone rather than the content of the statement.
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The government therefore decided to ‘elaborate’ on the draft statement to PIRA overnight, presumably in the hope of getting agreement. At 5.40 that morning, however, Joe McDonnell, the next hunger striker in the queue, died, and it was too late for any means of ending the strike.

In the endgame, Adams and his associates had mishandled matters. As McFarlane had written to Adams at 10 p.m. the night before: ‘I’ve been thinking that if we don’t pull this off and Joe dies then RA [IRA] are going to come under some bad stick from all quarters.’
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The problem for Adams and McGuinness was that the political success caused by the hunger strike seemed too great to take the risk of ending it unless they could claim an unambiguous victory: hence their preoccupation with the ‘tone’ of the British statement more than the content.
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It may also be that Gerry Adams was nervous that those of his senior colleagues who did not know about the back-channel would suspect double-dealing on his part. As the hunger strike unfolded, it became clear that the IRA had missed a big chance to deal and had ‘shot their bolt’.
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The British were also blamed, of course. In the propaganda war, Britain was made to look intransigent for not reaching agreement when the prisoners, it was alleged, had withdrawn their demands for political status. The ICJP accused the government of bad faith. Garret FitzGerald also blamed British intransigence for the failure to find a solution. In an angry letter to Mrs Thatcher, conveying these thoughts, he called future cross-border co-operation into question. She was beset with reports from embassies, notably in Dublin and Washington, about unfavourable foreign reaction, and was persuaded by Carrington, worried that relations with the Republic and the United States ‘were now at serious risk’, to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross into the Maze.
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But she refused his suggestion that the prisoners should be surreptitiously fed intravenously with glucose in their drips. Force-feeding, she believed, ‘was almost a violence against the person’, and if people wanted to kill themselves, they should be discouraged but not prevented.
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In Britain, public opinion remained solidly behind her.

The dilemmas besetting Mrs Thatcher in her handling of the hunger strike are well illustrated by a further attempt, later in July, to use the channel to the IRA. On 18 July, Philip Woodfield,
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who had succeeded Stowe as permanent under-secretary at the NIO, came to her to report that PIRA had just asked that a British official go to meet the hunger strikers. Would this be a good idea, he asked, so that the official could clarify the government’s position, in effect offering a little bit more? As Woodfield put it, coldly, there was, in Northern Ireland terms, ‘a good deal to be said for letting the hunger strike continue’,
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but the opposite applied to the Republic and the United States. Mrs Thatcher said that she was ‘less concerned about the situation in Dublin than in North America’. She decided that the channel should be activated that night and the official should go in the next day. But she rang Atkins first. Probably stung by what had happened a fortnight earlier, he counselled against this course, saying that the thing was bound to leak. So Mrs Thatcher went back on her earlier decision, comforting herself over her change of mind by saying that she was ‘more
concerned to do the right thing by Northern Ireland than to try to satisfy international critics’.
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The following morning, however, it emerged that the channel had, in fact, been activated without waiting for Mrs Thatcher’s final approval. Since this had happened, Atkins decided to use it to send a message to the Provisionals that more might be done on prison clothes. No useful reply came from PIRA, and Atkins ordered the channel closed on the evening of 20 July. Farce and tragedy were near allied.

Brendan McFarlane had made it clear that the prisoners ‘have no power to give up’.
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He meant that the decisions on their life and death were for the IRA alone, and therefore it was the IRA alone with whom the government should deal. But in fact the IRA’s grip on the prisoners, most of whose families naturally did not want them to die, was weakening. On 31 July, the family of Paddy Quinn, who had been on hunger strike for forty-seven days, intervened to save his life. By the middle of August, three more hunger strikers had died. On 20 August, Owen Carron, who had been Bobby Sands’s agent in the first Fermanagh by-election, was victorious in the second. The tenth hunger striker died on polling day. With each death, there were protests and renewed rioting, but each time the public attention was less. Mrs Thatcher’s government was winning, at least in the sense that no one now believed that she would give in to the IRA. Garret FitzGerald, who had been so loud against her in July, quietened down over the summer. He realized that his public criticisms of the British government undermined the possibility of further progress on the political side. He may also have realized that the Republic was on weak ground in suggesting any concessions to hunger strikers when its own history was one of robust refusal. Dermot Nally remembered FitzGerald quoting Eamon de Valera, arguably the most nationalist of Irish prime ministers: ‘No government which I have led has given in to this sort of blackmail.’
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FitzGerald reverted to his aspirations for a change in the relationship between the Republic and the United Kingdom, and publicly floated his idea that the Irish constitution’s claim to Northern Ireland should be amended.

On 14 September 1981, Mrs Thatcher reshuffled her Cabinet. She replaced Humphrey Atkins, as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, with Jim Prior. Prior had fought hard against the move
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and his reluctance to go to the province made him immediately unpopular with the Unionist population. Nor were Unionists pleased that, as part of the deal by which, in return for ‘exile’, he could have his own people round him, he chose junior ministers – notably Lord Gowrie and Nicholas Scott – whose views were well known to be green.
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But the fact that Mrs Thatcher gave Prior
quite a free hand in his new job did at least clarify the decision-making process. He had more scope than Atkins. In relation to the hunger strike, he used it. ‘He came in saying to himself and to us that he was going to get things moving. To get the SDLP on board he would want to make progress with the hunger strikers. So there was a linkage with political progress.’
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On 17 September, he visited the Maze prison to see for himself.

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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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
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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” ’.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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,
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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, you invented it,’ said FitzGerald.
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