Thatcher said the Irish were liars. Ain’t that the truth...

MARGARET Thatcher did not ‘lie in state’, but she left us with the parting shot that the Irish State lies.

Well, that is according to former northern secretary, Peter Mandelson, who may not be the most impartial witness to history, as he is known as the ‘prince of darkness’, and he lobbed a little hand-grenade into her coffin as it passed by.

To be fair to the former British prime minister, she was, apparently, not just referring to the State, but all Irish people.

“Although I helped to organise the Labour Party’s opposition to her policies throughout the 1980s, I only ever met her once,” trilled the dark prince, conveniently forgetting that Mrs Thatcher called the ‘New Labour’ reordering of centre-left politics in Britain, to which he was central, her “true legacy”.

“It was the day I was appointed Northern Ireland secretary and our paths crossed.

“She came up to me and she said, ‘I’ve got one thing to say to you, my boy … you can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars’, she said, ‘liars, and that’s what you have to remember, so just don’t forget it’.

“With that, she waltzed off and that was my only personal exposure to her,” said Mr Mandelson.

Given Mrs Thatcher’s, shall we say, robust attitude towards Ireland, perhaps we should abandon our natural instinct not to believe a word said by Mandelson, easily the worst and most divisive northern secretary of the past 20 years, and take his comments at face value.

Especially as Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr, also made a refreshing break from the pre-funeral fawn-fest to brand Thatcher “unabashedly racist”, after she saw fit to tell him her views on Asian immigration to his country.

Mr Carr said: “I recall one conversation I had with her, in her retirement, where she said something that was unabashedly racist, where she warned Australia — talking to me, with Helena [his wife of Malaysian origin] standing not far away — against Asian immigration, saying that if we allowed too much of it we’d see the natives of the land, the European settlers, overtaken by migrants.”

Considering that Thatcher did not seem to accept that the “natives” of Australia are the aboriginals, and she infamously branded Nelson Mandela — the closest thing the secular world now has to a living saint — a “terrorist”, while she sipped tea with the blood-stained leaders of the racist, police-state apartheid regime, her wider views should hardly come as a surprise.

However, Labourite Mr Carr then praised Thatcher for the way she transformed his party, and its political sisters in Britain and Ireland.

Carr said: “She produced a realignment of politics. She forced my side of politics, the social democrat parties, to think more deeply about the role and function of the state, of the public sector.”

And when it comes to the public sector, maybe Mrs Thatcher has a point about the honesty of the Irish, well, the Irish State, anyway.

Just look at all the threats and blackmail used by ministers like Brendan Howlin in the run-up to the ‘Choke Park’ ‘no’ vote.

Growlin’ Howlin was adamant that if trade union members dared to disobey the Government, they would feel the full wrath of its righteous anger, which was likely to amount to an across-the-board cut of 7% of wages being ram-raided through the Dáil.

Tough talk, and also empty talk, it would now seem, as Mr Howlin, Taosieach ‘Ends Kenny’ and Tanaiste ‘Eamon Gilmole’ scuttle back from their pre-vote bravado and look rather lost — yet again buffeted by events rather than shaping them.

Mr Howlin cut a bit of a sorry figure on the evening news as he stumbled through the debris of the ‘no’ vote, whining to the interviewer he would have to get on the telephone to the Troika and explain how such a calamity had come to pass.

Mr Howlin had tried to present himself in the talks process as some kind of Stroke Park Wizard of Oz, who was master of all.

Now, like the wizard, he has been exposed as the little man behind the curtain, using trickery to appear somewhat greater.

In reality, ‘Joke Park II’ was lost when the Government started cutting special deals with sectional interests, as they did with the prison officers.

Parents of multiple children will know that, sometimes, you have to give more dessert to one than the other — the mistake Mr Howlin made was going onto the national airwaves to boast about which of the people he was treating like kiddies he favoured most.

Proof of an interest in truth is also missing from other key policy areas as, in opposition, Fine Gael and Labour promised us a swift, slick insolvency system that would play a major role in lifting people out of debt misery and reviving the spend economy, at the same time.

Did they know they were lying to us, at the time, or were they just lying to themselves that they would have the spine to stand-up to the ‘Bankrocracy’ (‘Bankruptacy’?) that still clearly runs this country?

Despite having a much-admired, working template governing such matters on the other side of the Irish Sea, it has taken the Coalition more than two years to cobble together a system that, unlike its British counterpart, still hands the bankers the whip hand.

Maybe it is just the depressing norm for politicians to talk big in opposition and then crumple in office.

Was Fianna Fáil leader, Micheal Martin, lying when he waded into the judges row with the risible assertion that it had the makings of the greatest constitutional crisis in the history of the State?

Or does he believe that and was merely, once again, revealing the lack of political judgement that saw him and his ‘Fianna Fiasco’ buddies deny that the IMF had taken over the country, even when the Troika that Mr Howlin now prostrates us before was landing at Dublin Airport.

It is funny that the judges never complained about their independence being interfered with when Bertie Ahern sent their wages rocketing, yet now they face some of the same financial pain as the rest of us (though in a much higher pay bracket), they squeal about being compromised and, in so doing, shamelessly denigrate this country’s international image with their attempted smoked-salmon-mousse revolution.

So where does political truth lie? Probably not with Mrs Thatcher, though it was deeply ironic that ‘Broke Park’ and 26 years of social partnership were buried on the same day as the icon of the slash-and-burn agenda on industrial peace.