A politician with great conviction
As minister at the time of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, I had a front-row view of how Mrs Thatcher’s government worked.
And, I believe that she may, in time, become a less divisive figure than she was during her political life.
She was a very, very strong-willed person. She had her views about things and these points of view didn’t change easily —but still, they could change.
I don’t think you should be in politics if you don’t believe in something: you should be in politics for a reason, not a salary and she was certainly a conviction politician who had strong beliefs.
We first established contact with Mrs Thatcher and her team while in opposition and then on entering government in the early 1980s, the then taoiseach Garrett FitzGerald, myself and others set about trying to convince her of the merits of a different approach to resolving the crisis in the North.
Her solution in Northern Ireland was through the security forces. I used to keep trying to emphasise that a solution like that was not going to achieve what she wanted and what we wanted, which was peace.
Instead, we argued the route was through politics, through involving the nationalist community and its politicians, like John Hume and Seamus Mallon of the SDLP, in the making of decisions — and that is what eventually happened. She was reluctant to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement but when she signed it, she worked with it.
We were lucky in that the people who were more immediately concerned with negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement were more in favour of it than she was herself, people like Geoffrey Howe, Britain’s then foreign secretary.
The peculiar thing is that when the Anglo-Irish Agreement went to the Dáil and the House of Commons, there was a far bigger vote in favour of it in the House of Commons. She had an enormous majority in the Commons at the time.
The years prior to the signing of the agreement were difficult, to say the least, from the wreckage of the hunger strikes to the Brighton bombing in which Mrs Thatcher’s hotel was targeted. The hunger strikes, in particular, were very difficult. We were more versed in Irish history and the way hunger strikes occur in Ireland than she was but her attitude was simply that they, the hunger strikers, had broken the law and so had to pay the price. We knew, however, that there were a lot more subtleties at play.
She would be horrified to hear me say this, but I think she had a residual position that Ireland was still a British province and I think it half-coloured her thinking on the Troubles.
I also believe the Brighton bombing, in which five people died but she escaped, may have influenced her later views on how best to deal with the Troubles.
The handling of the hunger strikes was not clever, and not in the interests of Irish people or the British people. But I think she changed her view with the Brighton bombing — she was not set in stone.
Following an Anglo-Irish summit in 1984, Mrs Thatcher infamously declared that certain options were “out, out, out”, but while some believed it rattled Irish efforts at the time, I now believe she was caught off-guard — politicians, when they have microphones in front of them, can say things in a way they don’t actually mean.
Margaret Thatcher had many interests and many different views and she could quote policies from a different point of view all the time. She was leader of a party that had a view of how the world should be run and it did not coincide with my view — but she was entitled to have her views.
She was a strong-willed, determined person, and her views coincided with the majority of her own party and after the Falklands War then with the majority of the British people. Her euro-scepticism would also be echoed by the British people. I also believe that the Anglo-Irish Agreement laid the building blocks for future developments in the peace process.
By the time she stepped down the Anglo-Irish situation had improved, we had found a basis for talking and without coming to blows. The Anglo-Irish Agreement and what flowed from it was pivotal to a peaceful Northern Ireland.
I now believe that she will prove a less divisive figure in death than she was in life. From an Irish point of view, I also hope we will have a better view of the past in another 100 years. Her tenure in office did open a door in Northern Ireland, that the gun was not the solution and that politics was the solution. It was a door that other British governments probed further.
She was, after all, what she should have been as prime minister of Britain: as far as she was concerned, the interests of the British people were paramount.
There will not be a single view of her— from her country’s point of view. There will be a feeling that she straightened a lot of things that needed tackling, whether I would agree with them or not doesn’t matter. She will be highly regarded in her own country in the future.
* Peter Barry was in conversation with reporter Noel Baker.
