Thatcher felt inmates were just showing ‘virility’

CARDINAL Tomas Ó Fiaich claimed Margaret Thatcher lectured him on the North as she accused hunger strikers of “demonstrating virility”, state papers have revealed.

His account of his meeting with the British prime minister in the summer of 1981 left officials in no doubt about shattered Anglo-Irish relations.

“In general the cardinal’s account of his meeting with the prime minister reinforced the impression that she is insensitive and of an authoritarian disposition,” a report to the Taoiseach’s office stated.

The cardinal gave his views on Mrs Thatcher in a private meeting with Carmel Heaney, the consul general in Boston while in the US to fund raise for a library in NUI Maynooth.

Ms Heaney described to taoiseach Garret FitzGerald’s office on November 4 1981 details of the PM’s hardline attitudes towards the hunger strike.

“He described her lecturing him and telling him she had read all the documents about Northern Ireland and didn’t need to be told what it was all about,” she wrote.

“She wondered if the motivation for the hunger strikers wasn’t to demonstrate their virility!

“She could not understand the continued Irish animosity against the British considering that even the Germans were now willing to be friends.

“Cardinal Ó Fiaich suggested that the perhaps the reason the Germans were now friends with the British was that the British were no longer in occupation of Germany.”

In a speech the night before at a fundraiser the Cardinal did not mention the Northern situation.

After Bobby Sands’ death on May 5 and Francis Hughes’ death on May 12, Cardinal Ó Fiaich sent a telegram pressurising Mrs Thatcher to reach a deal with the IRA.

The passionate appeal stated: “In God’s name, don’t allow another death.” The cardinal, who released the note to the press at the time, accused the prime minister and her cabinet of an “inflexible policy” on the prisons.

Mrs Thatcher replied publicly: “The solution does not lie in our hands. It lies with the hunger strikers themselves, their families and advisers.

“More directly, it lies with the leaders of the Provisional IRA, who have taken a cold-blooded decision that the unfortunate men now fasting in prison are of more use to them dead than alive. This seems to me the most immoral and inflexible decision anyone could take.”

The papers also show that over lunch in Rome in late 1981 the ambassador to the Holy See warned that appointing a papal nuncio to London would endorse partition and divide the church in Ireland. Pope John Paul II’s diplomatic staff were told such a move would create disdain, doubt and dismay and leave Irish Catholics aggrieved.