Thatcher stood up to the IRA

The death of Margaret Thatcher has left us grappling with her considerable legacy.

Her relationship with Ireland was never comfortable and is linked with the hunger strikes. What did her period in office mean for Anglo-Irish relations?

The conventional narrative is that Thatcher was the devil incarnate, intent on breaking the will of the Provisional IRA through her treatment of the hunger strikers. This further entrenched the IRA and led to the Brighton bombing, in which she narrowly avoided death a few years later.

Though Thatcher was wrong on the issue of political status for the hunger strikers, she demonstrated that she had a will that was the equal of the ‘provisional’ movement. The new-look Sinn Féin have successfully commandeered the memory of the hunger strikes and Gerry Adams was quick to denounce Thatcher as someone who “prolonged the war and caused great suffering”. Such selective amnesia is the latest attempt by Sinn Féin to rewrite history. I would suggest to Adams that the IRA hold more responsibility for prolonging the war in the North than the democratically elected leader of Britain.

The mention of Thatcher in the Republic of Ireland instinctively leads to knee-jerk antipathy.

People pay occasional lip service to the hunger strikers as romantic heroes, but many of them were radical Marxists. While recognising that the intransigence shown by Thatcher made the conflict bitterer, the vast majority of people in the Republic had more in common with her than they did with Bobby Sands.

Both Charles Haughey and Dr Garret FitzGerald tried charm offensives with Thatcher, and relations became strained when these didn’t always bear fruit. But history should remember her as someone who stood up for her beliefs in the face of implacable criticism and pressure. Loved and loathed in equal measure, she will not be easily judged by history.

Billy McElligott

Doha

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