Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [239]
Charles Haughey had been elected leader of his Fianna Fail Party and Taoiseach in mid-December 1979. Mr Haughey had throughout his career been associated with the most Republican strand in respectable Irish politics. How ‘respectable’ was a subject of some controversy: in a famous case in 1970 he had been acquitted of involvement while an Irish minister in the importing of arms for the IRA. That very fact, however, might inhibit his Republicanism. I found him easy to get on with, less talkative and more realistic than Garret FitzGerald, the leader of Fine Gael. Charles Haughey was tough, able and politically astute with few illusions and, I am sure, not much affection for the British. He had come to see me in May at No. 10 and we had had a general and friendly discussion of the scene in Northern Ireland. He kept on drawing the parallel, which seemed to me an unconvincing one, between the solution I had found to the Rhodesian problem and the approach to be pursued in Northern Ireland. Whether this was Irish blarney or calculated flattery I was not sure. He left me a gift of a beautiful Georgian silver teapot, which was kind of him. (It was worth more than the limit allowed for official gifts and I had to leave it behind at No. 10 when I left office.) By the time that I had my next talk with Mr Haughey when we were attending the European Council in Luxemburg on Monday 1 December 1980 it was the hunger strike which was the Irish main concern.
THE HUNGER STRIKES
To understand the background to the hunger strikes it is necessary to refer back to the ‘special category’ status for convicted terrorist prisoners in Northern Ireland which had been introduced, as a concession to the IRA, in 1972.* This was, and quickly appeared, a bad mistake. It was ended in 1976. Prisoners convicted of such offences after that date were treated as ordinary prisoners…with no greater privileges as regards clothing and association than anyone else. But the policy was not retrospective. So some ‘special category’ prisoners continued, being held apart and under a different regime from other terrorists. Within the so-called ‘H blocks’ of the Maze Prison where the terrorist prisoners were housed, protests had been more or less constant, including the revolting ‘dirty protest’, consisting of fouling cells and smashing up furniture. On 10 October a number of prisoners announced their intention of beginning a hunger strike on Monday 27 October unless certain demands were met. Of these, the most significant were that they should be able to wear their own clothes, associate freely with other ‘political’ prisoners and refrain from prison work.
There were several discussions among ministers in the interim to see what concessions might be made to avert the strike. All my instincts were against bending to such pressure, and certainly there could be no changes in the prison regime once the strike had begun. There was never any question of conceding political status. But the RUC Chief Constable believed that some concessions before the strike would be helpful in dealing with the threatened public disorder which such a strike might lead to and though we did not believe that they could prevent the hunger strike, we were anxious to win the battle for public opinion. Accordingly, we agreed that all prisoners…not just those who had committed terrorist crimes…might be permitted to wear ‘civilian type’ clothing…but not their own clothes…as long as they obeyed the prison rules. As I had foreseen, these concessions did not in fact prevent the hunger strike.
To the outside world the issue at stake must have seemed trivial. But both the IRA and the Government understood that it was not. The IRA and the prisoners were determined to gain control of the prison and had a well-thought-out strategy of doing this by whittling away at the prison regime. The purpose of the privileges they claimed was not to improve prisoners’ conditions but to take power away from the prison authorities. They were also keen to establish once