THE EVENTS of 1980, revisited in the light of the current batch of State papers just released in Belfast, Dublin and London, manage to appear both remote and relevant at the same time.
The remoteness lies in the overarching dominance of the problems of Northern Ireland. As 1980 began, the deaths of three Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers brought the death toll to over 2,000 since the Troubles began. Before the year ended, there were hunger strikes in the Maze and Armagh prisons as the campaign by republicans to be treated as political prisoners moved up a notch from the “dirty protest”. Those hunger strikes ended without fatalities but the next hunger strike – in 1981 – would claim 10 lives.
Grappling with these and other problems were two leaders who had taken office the previous year. Charles Haughey became taoiseach in December 1979 and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom earlier in the year. Both were seen as activist leaders, anxious to put their stamp on affairs. Though both carried “baggage” from their past, neither was quite as blinkered as their critics would have us believe. They met twice in set-piece summits in 1980, the first in May in London when Haughey gave his guest a personal gift of a silver teapot, the second in Dublin in December. The meetings took place in highly charged times, barely a year after Thatcher had lost her right-hand-man Airey Neave in a car bomb planted by the Irish National Liberation Army in the precincts of the House of Commons. Haughey had replaced Jack Lynch with the support of those in Fianna Fáil who sought a harder line on Northern Ireland. We can now see that both were trying to make allowance for the other’s difficulties, without departing from what each saw as first principles. She emerges as more pragmatic than was thought possible, he more flexible, in this reading. Yet the early promise of a breakthrough was not fulfilled, though they came close.
But in John Hume there was another voice, another leader who was not yet at the top table. He took the helm of his party in 1979, replacing the SDLP’s founding leader Gerry Fitt. Hume told Northern secretary Humphrey Atkins in May 1980 that there were three important elements to political talks: (1) relationships between the people of Northern Ireland; (2) relationships between the people of North and South; and (3) relations between Britain and Ireland. Here we see the seeds of what became the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
Despite the cruel pattern of violent deaths and the economic and social problems which faced the island and poisoned relations with our nearest neighbour, Hume saw a way forward and worked tirelessly to persuade others to adopt it though, as a working politician, he could not ignore the current issues of the day. The relevance for us 30 years later, facing painful economic problems, is the need to achieve a similar balance: to address immediate political problems while developing a vision for a better Ireland and working together to attain it, even with those with whom we disagree.