Mike Chinoy IT’S 35 YEARS this month since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which laid out key principles that would subsequently shape the Good Friday peace deal of 1998.
Hadden, a Protestant, was a law professor at Queen’s University. Although from warring communities, they had become colleagues and friends in the 1970s, producing books and articles on policing, courts, security policy and human rights in Northern Ireland.
Instead, the two academics called for the Irish government to recognise the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and urged that immediate measures ‘be directed toward a fuller recognition of the identity, rights and interests of the nationalist minority in the North, rather than the unionist minority in Ireland as a whole’.
‘I suspect that Maggie Thatcher got her “out, out, out” on the basis of what we had said about each of the options’, Hadden observed years later. “We said none of these options were actually terribly realistic, except in slightly more diplomatic language.” #Open journalism No news is bad news Support The Journal Your contributions will help us continue to deliver the stories that are important to youNeither FitzGerald nor Thatcher ever publicly mentioned their conversation about Boyle-Hadden document. I only learned about the episode recently while researching a biography of Boyle.
Read somewhere where she apparently liked Haughey but didn't trust him. And trusted Fitzgerald but didn't like him. Ergo, Maggie could only do business with people she didn't like. Complicated lady.