Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [244]
BACKGROUND TO THE ANGLO-IRISH
AGREEMENT, 1983–1985
I saw Garret FitzGerald at Chequers on the morning of Monday 7 November 1983 for our second bilateral summit. It was a modestly useful discussion, but the Irish always had difficulty understanding that joint sovereignty was a nonstarter. Immediately after the Irish team left I held a further meeting with ministers and officials. I felt that we must now come up with our own proposals and I asked Robert Armstrong to draw up an initial paper setting out the options. I laid special stress on the need for secrecy; a leak would destroy the prospects for a new initiative. This meeting, from our side, was the origin of the later Anglo-Irish Agreement.
The need for Irish help on security was again evident after the appalling murder by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) of worshippers at the Pentecostal Gospel Hall at Darkley in County Armagh on Sunday 20 November. In spite of all the fine words about the need to defeat terrorism which I had been hearing from the Taoiseach, the Irish Justice minister refused to meet Jim Prior to review security co-operation and the Garda Commissioner similarly refused to meet the Chief Constable of the RUC.
Then the IRA struck again on the mainland. After lunch on Saturday 17 December I left Chequers to attend a carol concert in the Royal Festival Hall. While I was there I received news that a car bomb had exploded just outside Harrods. I left at the first opportunity and went to the scene. By the time I arrived most of the dead and injured had been removed but I shall never forget the sight of the charred body of a teenage girl lying where she had been blown against the store window. Even by the IRA’s own standards this was a particularly callous attack. Five people including two police officers died. The fact that one of the dead was an American should have brought home to US sympathizers with the IRA the real nature of Irish terrorism.
The Harrods bomb was designed to intimidate not just the Government but the British people as a whole. The IRA had chosen the country’s most prestigious store at a time when the streets of London were full of shoppers in festive mood looking forward to Christmas. There was an instinctive feeling…in reaction to the outrage…that everyone must go about their business normally. Denis was among those who went to shop in Harrods the following Monday to do just that.
Two days after the bomb we received word that the Irish Cabinet was to meet the following day to consider proscribing Sinn Fein south of the border. I summoned a meeting of ministers straight away to consider our response. Clearly if the Irish proscribed, we would take similar action. But our tentative conclusion was that proscription would not directly affect the fight against Irish terrorism in Great Britain, and would probably lead to disorder and violence in Northern Ireland. In the event the Irish Cabinet decided not to go ahead.
On Christmas Eve I visited the province myself, meeting members of the security forces and the general public. I was all but mobbed by cheering well-wishers in the main street of Bangor, a seaside town in County Down, and added to my rapidly growing collection of Tyrone crystal, purchased on Ulster visits, while Denis acquired another tie.
By the end of the year the prospects for some kind of negotiation seemed reasonable, but the acid test for me would be the question of security. Not that the picture on security was wholly bad. The Irish Government devoted significant