Dervla Murphy and Margaret Thatcher

A chara, – Unionists and many of her own closest advisers were astonished by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to sign and implement the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 with the then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, which for the first time since Partition gave Dublin an intrusive role in the government of Northern Ireland and a permanent presence in Belfast. Moreover, it ended the unionist veto on any future arrangement which had been entrenched for years by Wilson, Rees and Mason, and accepted, as an international treaty obligation on the UK, the implementation of Irish unity should a majority in Northern Ireland so wish: this in itself, Johm Hume subsequently argued with Gerry Adams, removed any conceivable justification for the republican campaign of violence.

There is no doubt that FitzGerald’s patient and candid advocacy over two years’ intense negotiation was decisive.

The late David Goodall was deputy head (under Robert Armstrong) of the Cabinet Office during this period and his recently published The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 records that by late 1982 “what impressed me was the seriousness of her interest and the extent of her background reading on the subject, including several books on the Treaty and Dervla Murphy’s A Place Apart (1979) which she said she had found ‘fascinating’”. – Is mise,

MICHAEL LILLIS,