She galvanised Irish nationalism

By Darran ANDERSON

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“If God did not exist,” Voltaire wrote, “it would be necessary to invent Him.” Inventing Gods is a tricky business though. It requires actual work, effort, thought. It’s much easier to invent the devil, minor imps or even an entire demonology. You never think, especially as an airheaded boy, that you might be assigned a place in such a diabolical hierarchy or that you would grow up to demonise others in turn. Yet this encapsulates the way Troubles-era Northern Ireland was, and increasingly the way the rest of the West operates, innovators that we were.

My earliest memory of Margaret Thatcher, born a century ago today, was not a photograph or footage but graffiti on the side of Brutalist flats. It was painted rather than sprayed, in those days. Ireland being consumed by Great Britain, with the West coast of Scotland morphing into Thatcher’s face as she gnawed on Ulster with crazed eyes like Goya’s Saturn. I was scared shitless at the time but grew used to the image. And as the years passed, I would see her effigy dragged out and immolated in different places that all shared the common denominator of state callousness. Poll Tax riot sites. Post-Hillsborough Liverpool. South Yorkshire pit villages. Virtually anywhere in Scotland or Wales. Even the soundtrack had a sacrificial quality — Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” or Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine”, which earned him a grilling from Special Branch for fear he’d dispatch the Prime Minister with a withering swipe of a flaccid gladioli.

There were any number of reasons for ordinary citizens to loathe Thatcher from the miners to Section 28 to the Belgrano, the third-degree burn catastrophe of deindustrialisation and the slow-burn catastrophe of financial deregulation. In Northern Ireland, she somehow eclipsed even the folk memory of the Black and Tans and Cromwell, entering the mythic. Even then, supernatural figures like the banshee, dearg due, the bánánach and the abhartach seemed sympathetic by comparison.

Few would admit it then, or now, in Irish Republican circles, but Thatcher was the demon Sinn Féin needed, and she became one of their greatest benefactors. It had been very difficult, after all, to galvanise total resistance to the securocrats of the previous Labour governments and Ted Heath’s administration. Here was an archetype. In attempting to destroy them, she made them what they are now.

Thatcher’s Northern Irish debut was a horror show. A month before her election victory, her advisor on the province, Airey Neave, was assassinated leaving the House of Commons. Neave had been a war hero, escaping Colditz, personally serving Nuremberg Trial indictments to the likes of Goering, Speer and Hess in their cells, and was known as a force to be reckoned with. The Irish National Liberation Army, a Marxist splinter group and rival of the Irish Republican Army, placed a bomb underneath his driver’s seat with a mercury tilt switch, which activated as he drove his Vauxhall up the exit ramp. As a shot across the bows, it was exceptionally brutal. It would also seem immensely counter-productive if the cause of a United Ireland and/or Civil Rights for Catholics were assumed to be the aims of the Republican movement; but assume, we should not.

If there were a time when it felt like the IRA would win, this was it. Thatcher felt it too, so she attempted to change the framing of the war into simple criminality and a law-and-order issue. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,” she claimed, “as much as my constituency is”, which given Finchley at the time was not a place where civil rights activists were murdered with impunity or one section of the population had been subject to internment without trial or shoppers had their limbs blown off or daily assassinations were commonplace was a misnomer. Indeed, her insistence on normality just illustrated the abnormality of the place and situation — a colonised foothold of an island-nation effectively ruled over by a rheumatic and bellicose police force and a sash-draped organisation that were Cargo Cult British. Northern Ireland, to the British and the southern Irish, was Bedlam.

In reality, the Lady was for turning. Declassified records from 1983 reveal that Thatcher raised the idea of a “tactical withdrawal” to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Jim Prior, and it was only, seemingly, turned down because Prior argued that it would lead to all-out civil war. It is still hard for Unionists and Loyalists to accept such orphan judgements, but equally it is of cold comfort to magical thinking Republicans who are not going to conjure away a million or so Unionists/Loyalists when our day comes. At that point, escalation from an already horrific state of affairs was a likely possibility and the Republic government knew it. Yet it shows how close the IRA came to a United Ireland. At the same time, the high-profile attacks that had raised Republican morale had soured Irish American relations enough for the US to begin to stop the pipeline of support, forcing them to seek assistance from the nefarious enemies of my enemies.

This demonstrates a privately practical Thatcher, as well as the basket case of Northern Ireland. And yet she clung. Perhaps it was Airey Neave or doubts about her role in a world of old boys and hard men. But Thatcher made it personal and ultimately misjudged and lost. Her aim was not peace but unconditional surrender, with a degree of humiliation. For all the inevitable whataboutery, the British state was the only force that could have dialled down, if not turned off the violence, killing the civil rights issue with kindness for example, and yet Thatcher dialled it up.

At the same time, the comment by Sinn Féin’s Danny Morrison that she was “The biggest bastard we have ever known” was canny. There was no love lost, yet there’s a sneaking sense of  “We could do something with this”. Thatcher’s intransigence and militarism would eventually radicalise and galvanise the Irish nationalist community and ultimately spelt the decline of the moderate SDLP. She escalated the prison protests and hunger strikes into a battle of wills, locking horns with Sinn Féin, which made the latter seem totemically powerful to the Catholic community and then, because of the deaths of the hunger strikers, this spread to the international media. It also made the battle a sacred affair, with the saintly starving neo-Catholic martyrs versus the satanic Thatcher. Having made her name as the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter, she was ill-equipped for the irrationalism of Celtic eschatology.

So, Thatcher provided the devil that the faceless bureaucrats of the pre-Thatcher era could not. Her Iron Lady ego forced Northern Ireland out of multiple possible paths and into a binary where the citizenry had to pick for or against. This played into Sinn Féin’s hands, though they would never admit it, and is actually a strategy that the activist Saul Alinsky advocated in Seventies America — find or create a common enemy to centralise and radicalise opposition and push out other more ameliorative or alternative voices. I saw this in Derry where the SDLP, who had bravely had their heads cracked open on civil rights marches for years and largely came from trade union and teaching backgrounds, become overnight, thanks to Thatcher, the Stoop Down Low Party in the eyes of the community.

It all crystallised with the Hunger Strikes. Her insistence that the Troubles was criminal rather than political was self-defeating, inadvertently showing Sinn Féin, via Bobby Sands, the power of the ballot box. Their “Armalite and ballot box” strategy being an evolutionary device. She unintentionally gave them a way forward that has since proved immensely profitable. It was in both directions an exercise in cynicism. Thatcher was onto something when she said: “It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members.” At the same time, her insistence that the “PIRA have put the Catholic Community on the rack” during this time is abject, given everything the British state had put the Catholic community through.

Though Thatcher claimed as her mentor the wily Dubliner Edmund Burke, her ego meant she failed to pay heed to his wisdom, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Her opponents suffered from the same hubris as she did, dining out still on how close they came to taking her out in Brighton, endlessly repeating “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always”, a quote that ultimately proved untrue and indulgent. Had they succeeded, there is every chance their actions would have resulted in martial law and more suffering for northern Catholics, along with more bolstering of their positioning. One more boost to the ascendancy of Sinn Féin, perhaps the true aim rather than a United Ireland or civil rights equity.

Today Sinn Féin are adjacent to the blob, and more equivalent to Sturgeon-era SNP — albeit with concrete-filled weapons bunkers and piles of bodies as unavoidable as the Brits’ or the Loyalists’. They talk of a United Ireland, only one under their tutelage and for their benefit. If it happens, and almost a million Unionists will require accommodating, it will, given the dire state of the south and the north, be an unrecognisable Ireland to that which we dreamed and to the one we must start dreaming afresh, with a knowledge of yesterday’s victims and without yesterday’s ghouls. Their day has come, and, like Thatcher’s, it has passed.

Original article: unherd.com