Sir, – As the three remaining survivors of the small team of Irish officials (led by the secretary to the government, the late Dermot Nally) that negotiated the text of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 with a corresponding team of British officials led by Sir Robert Armstrong, the British cabinet secretary, we read Mark Hennessy’s article in last Saturday’s Irish Times about the “Spycatcher” court case in Australia in 1986 with great interest (“Spycatcher may have one final chapter”, News, August 23rd).
Beyond what has appeared in newspaper reports, none of us has any personal knowledge of the Spycatcher case or of the responses given under cross-examination by Armstrong, who had been sent there to explain to the court the position of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her government. We can, however, say something about the late Robert Armstrong as we came to know him over the two years of intensive negotiations that preceded the 1985 Agreement.
That agreement was a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations and an important step on the long road that eventually led to the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
The political structures it established – an inter-governmental conference that met regularly at ministerial level and was supported by a joint British-Irish secretariat resident in Belfast – gave practical expression for the first time to the “Irish Dimension” of Northern Ireland that had been recognised in principle in a British government Green Paper in 1972. Before the agreement was signed, Armstrong and one of our number (Sean Donlon) travelled together to Washington to lobby US president Ronald Reagan, House Speaker Tip O’Neill and other high-level political contacts there, for a fund to support what would be a ground-breaking agreement between the two governments.
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The eventual outcome was the International Fund for Ireland, funded by the US, the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand: it has since disbursed close to €1 billion in support of economic and social projects in Northern Ireland and the six counties on the southern side of the Border.
We who sat across the table from him on the Irish side for 36 intensive negotiating sessions over the years 1984-85 retain warm memories of the creative role played by Robert Armstrong over that whole period. Then, and afterwards, he maintained some of the personal reticence that he saw as appropriate in a senior government official. But he was clearly central to the success of the negotiations: without him, and his colleague David Goodall (whose memoir of these events was published by the National University of Ireland in 2021), there would simply have been no agreement. In a letter years later to Goodall’s widow, he described it as the best thing both of them had done during their careers.
Armstrong always represented his government’s position with integrity but, as head of the British civil service, and an adviser trusted by Thatcher, he had a key role throughout in helping to shape his government’s policy. Notwithstanding his personal reticence, he had a deep personal commitment to the effort to resolve the historic conflict in Northern Ireland and redress the mistakes of earlier generations. It is clear from the documents of the time that his concern dated back at least to the early 1970s, when he had an influential role, as principal private secretary to the then-prime minister Ted Heath, in the lead-up to, and during, the Sunningdale conference: he advised against internment in 1971; and, at the height of the conflict in 1974, he counselled Harold Wilson strongly against going ahead with his idea of a peremptory and unprepared withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
Whatever may have happened in a New South Wales courtroom a year later, in 1986, we who remain of those who sat across the negotiating table from him over the two years 1984-85, will continue to remember the part he played in opening a new and more positive stage in Anglo-Irish relations and in the effort to bring peace to Northern Ireland. – Yours, etc,
SEAN DONLON,
Dublin 6;
NOEL DORR,
Dublin 14;
MICHAEL LILLIS,
Dublin 6.