Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [255]
We now sought the extradition of Ryan from the Republic; but this was refused, initially on what seemed a technicality, though the Irish Attorney-General later suggested that Ryan would not receive a fair trial before a British jury. I wrote a vigorous protest to Mr Haughey. I had already taken up the matter personally with him and with the Belgian Prime Minister, M. Martens, at the European Council in Rhodes on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 December 1988. I told both of them how appalled I was. I was particularly angry with M. Martens. I reminded him how his Government’s attitude contrasted with all the co-operation we had given Belgium over those British people charged in relation to the Heysel Football Stadium riot.* I was unconvinced and unmoved by M. Martens’s explanations. His Government had clearly taken its decision in contradiction to and in defiance of legal advice. As I warned him I would, I then told the press of my views in very similar terms. But as a Belgian government under the same M. Martens later showed at the time of the Gulf War, it would take more than this to provide them with a spine. And Patrick Ryan is still at large.
I had moved Peter Brooke to become Northern Ireland Secretary in the reshuffle of July 1989. Peter’s family connections with the province and his deep interest in Ulster affairs made him seem an ideal choice. His unflappable good humour also meant that no one would be better suited for trying to bring the parties of Northern Ireland together for talks. Soon after his appointment I authorized him to do so: these talks were still continuing at the time I left office.
Meanwhile, the struggle to maintain security continued. So did the IRA’s murderous campaign. On Friday 22 September ten bandsmen were killed in a blast at the Royal Marines School of Music at Deal. The following summer the IRA’s mainland campaign resumed. June 1990 saw bombs explode outside Alistair McAlpine’s former home and then at the Conservative Party’s Carlton Club. But it was the following month that I experienced again something of that deep personal grief I had felt when Airey was killed and when I learned, early on that Friday morning at Brighton in 1984, of the losses in the Grand Hotel bomb attack.
Ian Gow was singled out to be murdered by the IRA because they knew that he was their unflinching enemy. Even though he held no government office, Ian was a danger to them because of his total commitment to the Union. No amount of terror can succeed in its aim if even a few outspoken men and women of integrity and courage dare to call terrorism murder and any compromise with it treachery. Nor, tragically, was Ian someone who took his own security precautions seriously. And so the IRA’s bomb killed him that Monday morning, 30 July, as he started up his car in the drive of his house. I could not help thinking, when I heard what had happened, that my daughter Carol had travelled with Ian in his car the previous weekend to take the Gows’ dog out for a walk: it might have been her too. I went down to Eastbourne to see Jane Gow in the early afternoon and we spoke for an hour or so. That evening I went to a service in the Anglo-Catholic church where Ian and Jane always worshipped and I was moved to see it full of people who had come in from work at the end of the day to mourn Ian’s loss. Whenever Jane came to Chequers to see me she used to play the piano there…she is a fine pianist. She once remarked to me, speaking