ANGLO-IRISH PACT:EVIDENCE FROM the British and Irish cabinet papers for 1981 may reveal few clues that within four years Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher would sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.
But one of the key negotiators on the Irish side, Michael Lillis, has left us some important testimony in the letters pages of this newspaper earlier this year after FitzGerald’s funeral which had been attended by Robert Armstrong, leader of the British team of negotiators at Hillsborough.
Lillis revealed that after Armstrong returned to London he had written to express what it had meant to him to be at FitzGerald’s funeral with many of the surviving negotiators on the Irish side: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Armstrong wrote that the British could recognise the ideals which FitzGerald “was pursuing, and we could not only respect but also respond to those, and he became and never ceased to be a friend, and an inspiration”.
Armstrong also recalled that when sitting in the cabinet room in London with Thatcher and British ministers discussing drafting and the details of the 1985 agreement, “reflecting that relations between Britain and Ireland had been discussed in that room over centuries, that we were now adding a new chapter to a long history, and that we had the possibility of creating an opportunity for a profound, beneficial and lasting change in that relationship. I am proud and grateful that we were able to do so; and I am sure that we should not have succeeded without Garret.”
Lillis added that the presence of so many of the negotiators of the Hillsborough Agreement at FitzGerald’s funeral “completed for ‘the band of brothers’, as we have become, our sense of having been permitted to play some part in helping move the tectonic plates of one of history’s most bitter legacies. Throughout, Garret Fitz-Gerald led the Irish team . . . with unyielding determination and typical control of every detail. The evidence of his influence was in the transformation of the seemingly settled pro-unionist convictions of the British prime minister and in her admirable . . . support for the agreement in the face of convulsed loyalist rioting and outrage afterwards. The Irish government had a real and ungainsayable role in the processes of government of Northern Ireland. The political landscape was transformed.”
