Second paragraph of third chapter:
As usual when confronted with a range of unwelcome alternatives, Mrs Thatcher tacked and veered from one point to another, interrupting Geoffrey Howe’s attempts at ordered exposition and from time to time bringing things back to square one with an observation of startling primitiveness. Why could we not redraw the border to exclude predominantly Catholic areas and relieve ourselves of the expense of paying social security to people who did not want to belong to the United Kingdom anyway? It was pointed out that this would not solve the problem: Catholic and Protestant communities were too intermingled in border areas; and even if adjustments were made to the border, the main body of Catholics lived in West Belfast and would remain within Northern Ireland. In that case, why not a wall through the centre of Belfast like the Wall through the Centre of Berlin? (No one seemed to want to comment on this). Following this line of thought, the Prime Minister asked why arrangements could not be made to transfer those members of the minority community who did not wish to remain under British rule to the Republic. After all, she said, the Irish were used to large scale movements of population. Only recently there had been a population transfer of some kind. At this point the silence round the fire became transfused with simple bafflement. After a pause, I asked if she could possibly be thinking of Cromwell. ‘Cromwell: of course.’ ‘Well, Prime Minister, Cromwell’s policy was known as “To Hell or Connacht” and it left a scar on Anglo-Irish relations which still hasn’t healed’. The idea of a population transfer was not pursued.
I am going to start by noting that a couple of my recent Facebook posts about Irish politics have attracted some tedious trolling from drive-by commenters. I will wield the block function more readily in future, for trolls of any variety. I will also note that the last couple of offenders were from one side rather than the other.
Several people had recommended this book to me as the authentic insider account of the negotiations behind the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1983-85. They were right; it’s absolutely what I wanted to read.
Goodall was the right hand of Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, who was the brains behind the entire process; the story Goodall tells is one of constant negotiation between the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland office and the prime minister herself, plus occasional appearances from the Irish government, where Garret Fitzgerald as Taoiseach was closely engaged and senior officials very motivated to make things happen.
My basic question was, what was the origin of the Agreement, which gave the Irish state direct input into policy-making in Northern Ireland in the absence of a devolved government? The answer appears to be that Armstrong was the prime mover; after her second election victory, he put it to Margaret Thatcher that the only place in the world where British troops were being killed in anger was inside the United Kingdom, and something had to be done. He was also friendly with Dermot Nally, his equivalent on the Irish side, as both had been closely involved with the Sunningdale negotiations of 1973, only ten years earlier. But it helped that he had Thatcher’s complete confidence, and that she too saw the logic that something had to be done.
One widely circulated theory that I did not find much evidence for from Goodall’s account (though of course his is necessarily a partial view) was that the Americans had pressed the UK into signing the Agreement at the urging of John Hume. I am sure that Hume did his best to mobilise the Americans to that end, but without Armstrong there would have been nothing to mobilise about. There were several points when negotiations reached a low point, and it was Armstrong who decided to invest his personal political capital into saving the process. Hume was not close enough to the negotiations, let alone to Thatcher, to have been able to do that.
Anyone who subscribes to the very silly notion that Garret Fitzgerald and Fine Gael were crypto Brits should read this; it’s absolutely clear that the Irish government which he led pushed the case of Irish nationalism very effectively, and came out with more concrete results than sixty years of whining about Partition had achieved. At the same time there was a learning process for the Irish side, to discover how far the British could go and for how much in return. And I must say it is striking how many rounds of negotiations were concluded over luxuriously catered lunches and dinners, and the beverages consumed afterwards. (Though you still had to report back in the morning.)
It’s also very striking that the only woman with a speaking part in the whole process is Margaret Thatcher. At the time she was the only woman in the British cabinet, and there was also only one woman in the Irish cabinet (Gemma Hussey). Their officials and advisers were all middle-aged white men too, and so were the political party leaders in Northern Ireland (who were barely consulted anyway, including Hume). And this is only forty years ago.
I found a passing reference to an elderly retired British diplomat who I know, who played a minor part in keeping the show on the road at a late stage, and sent him snapshots of the pages where he is mentioned. He was delighted; he had no idea that he was in the book.
I think that the Anglo-Irish Agreement was a success, and that it was critical in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement thirteen years later, now 28 years ago. It was constructed to be almost unwreckable. It showed political Unionism very clearly that a return to majority rule was not on the cards. Unionism was deeply traumatised, but they had it coming to them, having wilfully destroyed the Sunningdale power-sharing arrangement and failed to put forward anything even half as good themselves. It was an important and significant on the way to lasting peace.
One of several essays by other people in the last third of the book also asserts that the Agreement gave a push to the new thinking in the IRA and Sinn Fein that led to the Hume/Adams talks, the secret channel with the British government and the ceasefire. I think the biggest factor there was certainly exhaustion from decades of conflict with no progress, but the fact that there was a political process happening demonstrated that other ways of investing energy could bear fruit.
I still don’t quite understand Thatcher’s own psychology here. I suspect that she thought there would be clear and immediate benefits on security co-operation – I remember a very conservative family friend telling me, the weekend after it was signed, that if there were security benefits, then infuriating the Unionists would have been worth it. Any such benefits were not really obvious; there were 57 deaths in the Troubles in 1985, which was actually the lowest of any year between 1971 and 1994, so the violence actually increased after the Agreement. But it clarified the landing zone for how it could be brought to an end.
Really one for history nerds, or people who love diplomatic insider accounts. But a great bit of storytelling. You can get The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 here.
