in May and December 1980, particularly the latter, had long-lasting consequences for British–Irish relations and more specifically the Irish government’s involvement in Northern Ireland affairs.
Chapter Four reveals that initially Haughey and Thatcher got on with one another. Lord Charles David Powell, a former key foreign policy advisor to the British prime minister, recounted some years later that after the first Anglo-Irish summit meeting between the two prime ministers in May 1980 ‘there was a glint’ in Haughey’s eye, which Thatcher had ‘found attractive’.47 This honeymoon period, however, did not last long. Haughey’s overselling of the second Anglo-Irish summit meeting in December of 1980 infuriated Thatcher. She was particularly upset by Haughey’s claim that in the context of the ‘totality of relationships’ between the British and Irish governments, that Northern Ireland’s constitutional future was to be renegotiated on behalf of Dublin and London. Thereafter, Thatcher never again trusted Haughey.48 As Thatcher’s chief press secretary, Bernard Ingham, later recalled: Haughey ‘thought he could twist her [Thatcher] around his little finger – he learned, no way!’49
In a more positive light, the Anglo-Irish summit meeting of December 1980, as explored in Chapter Five, undoubtedly heralded a new era in Anglo-Irish relations. Although Thatcher refused Haughey’s request for the holding of an Anglo-Irish conference to consider Northern Ireland’s constitutional future, the goalposts in British–Irish relations undoubtedly shifted. Over the ensuing years, senior Whitehall officials, including Sir Robert Armstrong (created Lord Armstrong of Ilminster in 1988), Thatcher’s cabinet secretary, recognised the Irish government’s ‘legitimate’ right to be consulted on the affairs of Northern Ireland, irrespective of Thatcher’s personal protests. Due to Haughey’s continued co-operation on cross-border security and intelligence and Thatcher’s commitment to foster the ‘unique relationship’ between the two countries, British officials argued that it was now time to realise that the solution to the Northern Ireland conflict ‘… is not to be found exclusively within a narrow Northern Ireland framework’, to quote a Foreign and Commonwealth Office memorandum, dated November 1980.50
This recognition by London of Dublin’s legitimate right to play a formal role in helping to find a workable solution to the Northern Ireland conflict was facilitated through the establishment of a series of British–Irish joint study groups in 1981, which first convened under the auspices of a supervisory steering group, comprised of senior British and Irish civil servants in London on 30 January 1981.51 The commissioning of the British–Irish joint-studies, together with the establishment of the Anglo-Irish intergovernmental council in 1982, played an important role in paving the way for the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and for the genesis of the Northern Ireland peace process during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Haughey’s association with the Republican hunger strikes, the first in 1980 and the second in 1981, is pieced together in Chapters Five and Six. For the first time, readers learn the extent to which Haughey was forced to play a marginal role during this enveloping crisis. In particular, because of his inability to influence British government thinking during the second Republican hunger strike campaign, Haughey found himself in the one position he despised most: politically impotent. On each occasion that he attempted to intervene directly with Thatcher and her officials in an effort to find a negotiated settlement to the hunger strike campaign, the door was shut in his face.52 As a result, Haughey cut a very depressing figure during this period, banished to the political side-lines as the Thatcher government dealt directly with the Republican movement over the heads of the Irish government.
Haughey’s anxiety and frustration was compounded by the Irish government’s support for Thatcher’s refusal to grant the so-called ‘five demands’ to the Republican prisoners.53 His willingness to endorse the Thatcher government on this highly emotive issue, together with his inability to influence the British prime minister’s thinking, left him open to accusations of political indecisiveness and certainly damaged his reputation as a firebrand nationalist. The Republican leadership, under Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams, was particularly astute at propagating the message that Haughey had ‘sold out’ on his republican principles, having become ‘a collaborator’ with Thatcher’s government, to quote Owen Carron.54
The subject of the Falklands War in 1982 is central to Chapter Seven. This crisis was a defining moment for Haughey and Anglo-Irish relations. It explains how and why he made a ‘mess’, to quote Desmond O’Malley, of Anglo-Irish diplomatic relations during the crisis and the political fallout between Dublin and London thereafter.55 The taoiseach’s display of so-called ‘macho nationalism’56 during this period demonstrated the opportunistic nature of his political thinking, revealing the ruthless, even sly, side of his character. Haughey saw the Falklands crisis as the key moment to get his own back on Thatcher because of her unwillingness to allow him play any meaningful role during the second Republican hunger strike. Yet, the result of his stance during the affair, chiefly his decision that the Irish government withdraw support for the British government’s sponsored sanctions against Argentina, resulted in a dramatic deterioration in Anglo-Irish relations.
The fall-out had immediate consequences for Haughey’s plan of convincing the British government to permit Dublin a legitimate role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. During his remaining time in government, Thatcher refused to formally meet Haughey to discuss Northern Ireland, never mind consider permitting the Irish government a functional role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. As a result, Haughey decided to help kick-start a bold new initiative in relation to Northern Ireland. His inability to convince the British government to support his calls for an ‘Irish dimension’ resulted in the taoiseach deciding to drop a central plank of his Northern Ireland policy, in the immediate period, at least. Instead of promoting direct dialogue between the two sovereign governments in Dublin and London to find a negotiated settlement to the Northern Ireland conflict, Haughey proposed his own version of the Social Democratic and Labour Party’s (SDLP) so-called ‘Council for a New Ireland’. His involvement with the Ireland Forum from 1983 to 1984 is the underlying theme of Chapter Eight.
The New Ireland Forum was formally opened by taoiseach Garret FitzGerald at a public session of the gathering in May 1983. The forum comprised the four major Nationalist political parties on the island of Ireland: Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the SDLP (this ensured that the forum represented more than 70 per cent of the population of Ireland). The central purpose of the forum’s working ‘was to devise ideas through which lasting peace and stability could be achieved in Ireland through the democratic process’.57 Over eleven months the forum met approximately ninety-six times, publishing its final report in May 1984. This chapter examines the workings of the forum, not merely from the perspective of Fianna Fáil, but it also analyses both FitzGerald’s and the British government’s attitude to this body.
Haughey was a regular contributor to the forum’s proceedings and his message was routinely the same: Northern Ireland was a failed entity, politically and economically. Therefore only a settlement, based on his calls for a unitary state, negotiated on behalf of the British and Irish government, could deliver lasting peace to Northern Ireland, he argued.58 To the frustration of FitzGerald and many others on the forum, Haughey refused to consider the two alternative models proposed by the final report as a solution to the Northern Ireland conflict, namely, a confederal/federal model or British–Irish joint authority over Northern Ireland. Although he was not ‘against’ the proposals, he said that the simple fact remained that a unitary state was the only viable option.59
Chapter Nine, the concluding chapter of this study, opens with an analysis of Haughey’s initial opposition and later support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Throughout Fianna Fáil’s period in opposition from December 1982 to March 1987, Haughey played a peripheral role in the Irish government’s Northern Ireland policy and more generally in Anglo-Irish relations. Instead, to his frustration it was left to his political nemesis, Garret FitzGerald, to develop and nurture Irish government policy on Northern Ireland, under the auspices of the so-called ‘Armstrong–Nally Framework Talks’.60 These series of talks, comprising British and Irish senior civil servants,
