The Downing Street Years (67 page)

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 again, as they felt they had in 1972, that their crimes were ‘political’, thus
giving the perpetrators a kind of respectability, even nobility. This we could not allow. Above all, I would hold fast to the principle that we would not make concessions of any kind while the hunger strike was continuing. The IRA were pursuing with calculated ruthlessness a psychological war alongside their campaign of violence: they had to be resisted at both levels.

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 advisers gave credence, that the IRA were contemplating ending their terrorist campaign and seeking power through the ballot box. I never believed this. But it indicated how successful their propaganda could be.

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 was that the families would use this power to bring an end to the strike. Eventually, after ten prisoners had died, a group of families announced that
they would intervene to prevent the deaths of their relatives and the IRA called off the strike on Saturday 3 October. With the strike now over, I authorized some further concessions on clothing, association and loss of remission. But the outcome was a significant defeat for the IRA.

However, the IRA had regrouped during the strikes, making headway in the nationalist community. They now turned to violence on a larger scale, especially on the mainland. The worst incident was caused by an IRA bomb outside Chelsea Barracks on Monday 10 October. A coach carrying Irish Guardsmen was blown up, killing one bystander and injuring many soldiers. The bomb was filled with six-inch nails, intended to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. I went quickly to the scene and with horrified fascination pulled a nail out of the side of the coach. To say that the people capable of this were animals would be wrong: no animal would do such a thing. I went on to visit the casualties at the three London hospitals to which they had been taken. I came away more determined than ever that the terrorists should be isolated, deprived of their support and defeated.

After Garret FitzGerald had overcome his initial inclination to play up to Irish opinion at the British Government’s expense I had quite friendly dealings with him…all too friendly, to judge by Unionist reaction to our agreement after a summit in November 1981 to set up the rather grand sounding ‘Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council’, which really continued the existing ministerial and official contacts under a new name. Garret FitzGerald prided himself on being a cosmopolitan intellectual. He had little time for the myths of Irish Republicanism and would have liked to secularize the Irish Constitution and state, not least…but not just…as a way of drawing the North into a united Ireland. Unfortunately, like many modern liberals, he overestimated his own powers of persuasion over his colleagues and countrymen. He was a man of as many words as Charles Haughey was few. He was also, beneath the skin of sophistication, even more sensitive to imagined snubs and more inclined to exaggerate the importance of essentially trivial issues than Mr Haughey.

How Garret FitzGerald would have reacted to the new proposals we made in the spring of 1982 for ‘rolling devolution’ of powers to a Northern Ireland Assembly it is difficult to know. But in fact by now
the whirligig of Irish politics had brought Charles Haughey back as Taoiseach and Anglo-Irish relations cooled to freezing. The new Taoiseach denounced our proposals for devolution as an ‘unworkable mistake’ in which he was also joined by the SDLP. But what angered me most was the thoroughly unhelpful stance taken by the Irish Government during the Falklands War, which I have mentioned earlier.
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Jim Prior, who succeeded Humphrey Atkins as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland shortly before the end of the second hunger strike, was a good deal more enthusiastic and optimistic about the proposals in our white paper than I was. Ian Gow, my PPS, was against the whole idea and I shared a number of his reservations. Before publication, I had the text of the white paper substantially changed in order to cut out a chapter dealing with relations with the Irish Republic and, I hoped, minimize Unionist objections: although Ian Paisley’s DUP went along with the proposals, many integrationists in the Official Unionist Party were critical. Twenty Conservative MPs voted against the bill when it came forward in May and three junior members of the Government resigned.

If the aim of the white paper initiative was to strengthen the moderates in the nationalist community it certainly did not have this effect. In the elections that October to the Northern Ireland Assembly Sinn Fein won 10 per cent of the total, over half of the vote won by the SDLP. For this, of course, the SDLP’s own tactics and negative attitudes were heavily to blame: but they continued them by refusing to take their seats in the assembly when it opened the following month. The campaign itself had been marked by a sharp increase in sectarian murders.

The IRA were still at work on the mainland too. I was chairing a meeting of ‘E’ Committee in the Cabinet Room on the morning of Tuesday 20 July 1982 when I heard (and felt) the unmistakeable sound of a bomb exploding in the middle distance. I immediately asked that enquiries be made, but continued the meeting. As the morning wore on I noticed, looking out of the window, that the soldiers had not arrived on Horse Guards for their parade. When the news finally came through it was even worse than I feared. Two bombs had exploded, one two hours after the other, in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, the intended victims being in the first case the Household Cavalry and in the second the band of the Royal Green Jackets. Eight people were killed and 53 injured. The carnage was truly terrible. I
heard about it first hand from some of the victims when I went to the hospital the next day.