Ten years after her downfall, how are we to consider Margaret Thatcher? Her policies on Ireland might seem to some to be - paraphrasing James Connolly on Daniel O'Connell and the working classes - a chapter of horrors. The hunger strikes of 1981 were an unmitigated catastrophe, and the Gibraltar killings of 1989 barely less so. In between there was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which Irish nationalists favour, while unionists cordially loathe it, even preferring the present Executive to the quango at Maryfield.
At the most basic level, the hunger strikes were an assertion of tribal dogma. If women prisoners were allowed to wear civilian clothes before, during and after the hunger strikes, why not males? But just as her policies, represented by the entirely negligible and now deservedly forgotten Humphrey Atkins, sought victory through an absolutist interpretation of a small print most people could not read, let alone understand, opponents reached into the darkness of tribal memory to unleash by means of ritualised death forces which are almost impossible to control once free.
Prison issues
Were the hunger strikes avoidable on mutually acceptable terms? Probably not. The IRA was getting nowhere, it was riddled with informers, and the supergrass system had almost broken it. The struggle was being confined more and more to prison issues, traditionally a symptom of a campaign on its last legs. With the hunger strikes, and the procession of bodies emerging from the Maze nearly 20 years ago, the IRA was able to return to a primary well of nourishment, martyrolatry. Never was the primally Catholic nature of the IRA more closely realised and elaborately celebrated than in both the protocol of death and the funerals which followed in 1981.
I believe that the IRA would almost certainly have pushed for further prison concessions until the British government could only say no. A prison crisis was inevitable, not least because, long before the first prisoner died, the first members of the prison service were being murdered. Pacelli Dillon, an officer in Magilligan who was named after Pope Pius XII, was murdered four years before Bobby Sands died. Two dozen prison officers were similarly murdered. The IRA was deliberately creating conditions in which a British concession to the prison crisis would be impossible.
There are - to say the least - extenuating circumstances for the British government's policies during the hunger strike. There are none for the Gibraltar killings in 1988. I believe the SAS went to the Rock with the single sole purpose of wiping out the IRA unit in a primitive and lawless revenge for the Brighton bombing of 1984, which was in turn revenge for the hunger strikers' deaths. We know the consequences of the Gibraltar assassinations all too well. Seldom have state killings been so utterly counter-productive.
Imagination
On the other hand, Margaret Thatcher's willingness to engage with constitutional nationalism through the AngloIrish Agreement showed that she had imagination of purpose (and, incidentally, the courage of the RUC in facing up to loyalist intimidation at the time should have won it accolades from Northern Irish nationalism which have still not been granted).
The legacies of Thatcher's Irish policies are therefore mixed; but her legacy to Ireland is not. No country embraced and endorsed economic Thatcherism as we did; and wherever we see deregulation and low tax, we see prosperity and growth. Where we see dirigisme and protection, we see inertia, sloth and poverty. We did not use Thatcher's methods - to be sure, we did not have to. Our trade unions, generally led by non-ideological and intelligent pragmatists, saw that excessive trade union power was in fact counter-productive; and even as Thatcher was making her departure, the conversion of our entire political establishment to economic Thatcherism was just about complete.
There are many features of Margaret Thatcher which Irish people find incomprehensible. Her manner was, and is, absolutely loathsome, a revolting combination of trite authoritarianism and sanctimonious, headmistressy condescension. Yet clearly, what repels most people on this side of the Irish Sea attracts and attracted so many Britons.
Falklands War
Perhaps this is because they sense and they like the steel which lies in her heart. It is an imperial steel which necessarily is absent from the Irish body politic and our political vocabulary, though perhaps echoes of it might be heard in the last redoubts of the old gentry and the old IRA alike. No event revealed that steel so much as the utterly bizarre Falklands War, for its conduct required her to imperil the entire Royal Navy to save a sheep-infested and almost uninhabitable sub-Antarctic archipelago for a people who didn't want it from a people who did.
The second torpedo into the already crippled Belgrano - on her orders - remains inexcusable. Yet was Argentina not made a democratic country by her single-minded defeat of the junta? And what would have become of South America generally if fascism had triumphed locally in its conquest of the Malvinas?
She departed office 10 years ago this week, and we have not seen her like since; and that is good. The bonapartist identification of a person with a country, or with burning ideals, might have had some merit when we still lived in a bipolar world of totalitarians and democrats, but we don't any more; and the issues we face are too complex for the narrow simplicities of dogmatic, flag-waving nationalism. Still, you can say this about her. By God, she made things fizz, and without her, things have been strangely silent. And that's the way they should stay.