Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [240]
As the hunger strike continued and the prospect approached of one or more of the prisoners dying we came under a good deal of pressure. When I met Mr Haughey in the margins of the Luxemburg European Council on Monday 1 December 1980 he urged me to find some face-saving device which would allow the strikers to end their fast, though he said that he fully accepted that political status was out of the question. I replied that the Government could not go on making offers. There was nothing left to give. Nor was I convinced, then or later, that the hunger strikers were able to abandon the strike, even if they had wanted to, against the wishes of the IRA leadership. I had no objection to restating what we had already said, but there would be no more concessions under duress.
We met again exactly a week later for our second Anglo-Irish summit in Dublin. This meeting did more harm than good because, unusually, I did not involve myself closely enough in the drafting of the communiqué and, as a result, allowed through the statement that Mr Haughey and I would devote our next meeting in London ‘to special consideration of the totality of relationships within these islands’. Mr Haughey then gave a press briefing which led journalists to write of a breakthrough on the constitutional question. There had of course been no such thing. But the damage had been done and it was a red rag to the Unionist bull.
The Catholic Church was also a factor in dealing with the hunger strike. I explained the circumstances personally to the Pope on a visit to Rome on 24 November. He had as little sympathy for terrorists as I did, as he had made very clear on his visit to the Republic the previous year. After the Vatican brought pressure on the Irish Catholic hierarchy, they issued a statement calling on the prisoners to end their fast, though urging the Government to show ‘flexibility’.
Talk of concessions and compromises continued and intensified as we approached the point where one or more of the prisoners was likely to die. It was impossible to predict exactly when this would happen. But then on Thursday 18 December one of the prisoners began to lose consciousness and the strike was abruptly called off. The IRA claimed later that they had done this because we had made concessions, but this was wholly false. By making the claim they sought to excuse their defeat, to discredit us, and to prepare the ground for further protests when the nonexistent concessions failed to materialize.
I had hoped that this would see the end of the hunger strike tactic, and indeed of all the prison protests. But it was not to be so. In January 1981 we tried to bring an end to the ‘dirty protest’, but within days prisoners who had been moved to clean cells had begun to foul them. Then we received information in February that there might be another hunger strike. It was begun on 1 March 1981 by the IRA leader in the Maze, Bobby Sands, and he was joined at intervals by others. Simultaneously the ‘dirty protest’ was finally ended, ostensibly to concentrate attention on the hunger strike.
This was the beginning of a time of troubles. The IRA were on the advance politically: Sands himself in absentia won the parliamentary seat of Fermanagh and South Tyrone, at a by-election caused by the death of an Independent Republican MP. More generally, the SDLP was losing ground to the Republicans. This was a reflection not just of the increasing polarization of opinion in both communities, which it was the IRA’s objective to achieve, but also of the general ineffectiveness of the SDLP MPs. There was some suggestion, to which even some of my