Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [241]
Michael Foot, then Leader of the Opposition, came to see me, asking for concessions to the strikers. I was amazed that this thoroughly decent man could take this line and told him so. I reminded him that the conditions in the Maze Prison were among the best in any prison anywhere, well above the general standards prevailing in Britain’s overcrowded gaols. We had since gone even further in making improvements than the European Commission on Human Rights had recommended the previous year. I told Michael Foot that he had shown himself to be a ‘push-over’. What the terrorist prisoners wanted was political status, and they were not going to get it.
Bobby Sands died on Tuesday 5 May. The date was of some significance for me personally, though I did not know it at the time. From this time forward I became the IRA’s top target for assassination.
Sands’s death provoked rioting and violence, mainly in Londonderry and Belfast, and the security forces came under increasing strain. It was possible to admire the courage of Sands and the other hunger strikers who died, but not to sympathize with their murderous cause. We had done everything in our power to persuade them to give up their fast.
So had the Catholic Church. I realized that the Church might be able to bring pressure to bear on the hunger strikers, which I could not. So I went as far as I could to involve an organization connected with the Catholic hierarchy (the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP)), hoping that the strikers would listen to them…though our reward was to be denounced by the ICJP for going back on undertakings we had allegedly made in the talks we had had with them. This false allegation was supported by Garret FitzGerald who became Taoiseach in place of Mr Haughey at the beginning of July 1981. I wrote to the new Taoiseach to say that he should not be misled into thinking that the problem of the hunger strike was susceptible to an easy solution, wanting only a little flexibility on our part. The protesters were trying to secure a prison regime in which the prisoners…and not the prison officers…determined what went on.
I also saw the Catholic Primate of All-Ireland, Cardinal O’Fiaich, in No. 10 on the evening of Thursday 2 July in the forlorn hope that he might use his influence wisely. Cardinal O’Fiaich was not a bad man; but he was a romantic Republican, whose nationalism seemed to prevail over his Christian duty of offering unqualifed resistance to terrorism and murder. He believed that the hunger strikers were not acting under IRA orders: I was not convinced. He made light of the demands of the prisoners for special category status, and it soon became clear why. He told me that the whole of Northern Ireland was a lie from start to finish. At the root of what the hunger strikers believed they were striking for was a united Ireland. He asked when the time would come that the British Government would admit that its presence was divisive. The only solution was to bring together all the Irish people under a government of Irishmen, whether in a federal or a unitary state. I replied that the course he advocated could not become the policy of the British Government because it was not acceptable to the majority of the population of Northern Ireland. The border was a fact. Those who sought a united Ireland must learn that what could not be won by persuasion would not be won by violence. We spoke bluntly, but it was an instructive meeting.
In striving to end the crisis, I had stopped short of force-feeding, a degrading and itself dangerous practice which I could not support. At all times hunger strikers were offered three meals a day, had constant medical attention and, of course, took water. When the hunger strikers fell into unconsciousness it became possible for their next of kin to instruct the doctors to feed them through a drip. My hope