As a young News Letter reporter, I spent late 1985 and much of 1986 tramping the damp and cold streets of Loyal Ulster producing column inch after column inch of copy on the Ulster Says No and Ulster Still Says No protests.
It is rather bemusing to see Unionists heap praise on the recently departed former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when in 1985/86, burning effigies of the Tory PM was the order of the day at anti-Dublin Diktat rallies.
Much has been made in the media about the so-called ‘celebration’ parties surrounding her death, especially in republican districts in Northern Ireland and mining communities in Britain. It makes me wonder what the reaction in Unionist communities in Ulster would have been if Thatcher had died of a sudden stroke in early 1986 instead of 2013.
I recall reporting on one of the biggest Ulster Says No rallies outside of the massive Belfast City Hall protest in my home town of Ballymena in North Antrim in 1986. On the platform sat the then Unionist leadership – Ian Paisley senior of the DUP, James Molyneaux of the UUP, and Jim Kilfedder from North Down of the Ulster Popular Unionist Party.
I looked up to see an effigy of Maggie being waved above my head. Suddenly, there was a loud cheer and the effigy erupted in flames above my head! I pushed people behind me to get away from the ‘flaming Maggie’ as moments later the effigy fell to the ground.
I just wonder what the thoughts of many of the thousands of loyalists who attended that Ballymena rally on that cold day in early 1986 are today with Mrs Thatcher now dead.
She was regarded as a devout supporter of the Union, yet from 15 November 1985, on the day she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Garret FiztGerald at Hillsborough, she became almost as big a hate figure in Unionism in Northern Ireland as in the republican community.
When she died, did she redeem herself in the eyes of the Unionist community, or even had she been forgiven by the time of her political downfall in the early 1990s?
Thatcher the Snatcher was another nickname she was labelled with – that’s how loyalists came to hate Maggie after she ‘snatched the Union’ away from Protestants by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Signed at her Hillsborough bolthole in Co Down with then Taoiseach FitzGerald, with the stroke of a pen Thatcher became the most hated woman in loyalism since the conflict erupted in 1968. In four years, the Tory PM went from hero to zero among loyalists despite her tough stance against the republican hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981.
While IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands MP saw an estimated 100,000 walk behind his coffin in 1981, Thatcher’s signing of the Dublin Accord four years’ later saw an estimated 250,000 loyalists attend a massive Belfast City Hall protest rally at which Paisley senior issued his defiant ‘Never, never, never.’ speech.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement gave the Republic its first say in the running of the North since partition in the 1920s. The Dublin Diktat, as it was dubbed, led to the formal opening of the Maryfield Secretariat near Belfast where Southern civil servants were based.
But in reality, did Maggie really become Thatcher the Hatcher rather than Thatcher the Snatcher? Did she hatch a plan to give Unionists an effective say in the running of the Republic, but they were so busy protesting they failed to see the political gift Thatcher had handed them? While some may suggest that in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Thatcher laid the foundation for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the modern peace process, is the real legacy of November 1985 still to be written?
Is the true legacy of the Anglo-Irish Agreement the foundation for the Republic to rejoin the Commonwealth and for southern Ireland to join the United Kingdom in leaving the European Union? On the surface, Maryfield was an historic compromise which angered Unionists. Was it simply to get greater cross-border security to force the Provos to the negotiating table, and ultimately the 1994 ceasefire?
Unionism failed to return the serve of Maryfield. Unionists took to the streets in their tens of thousands instead of the then Unionist leadership demanding an effective say in the running of the Republic. Partition was The Great Betrayal when Carson and Craig condemned tens of thousands of Southern-based Unionists to their fate in a Catholic-dominated, nationalist-run Irish Free State. What about the contributions which Southern Ulster counties had made to the original Ulster Volunteers?
In 1985, Messrs Paisley senior, Molyneaux and Kilfedder should have been on the first train to Dublin to open a Unionist Embassy in Leinster House and demand that the Dail address the faults of the make-shift banana republic. Perhaps in 1985 if Unionism had whined in Dublin rather than walked in Ulster, the IRA and INLA would have been brought to their knees sooner than the 1990s?
The anti-Thatcher ‘Ulster Says No’ campaign saw a mobilisation among loyalists not witnessed since the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of May 1974 which collapsed the Sunningdale Executive. However, just as Thatcher had faced down republicans over the hunger strikers’ demands, so too, she was equally determined to face down loyalist demands to ditch the 1985 Agreement.
Not only did moderate Unionists mobilise by joining the mainstream Unionist parties, but Thatcher’s determination to keep the Agreement saw a huge boost in membership of loyalist death squads such as the UDA and UVF. It also sparked the creation of numerous new hardline groups as loyalists frantically searched for means to topple the Agreement. Working class loyalists launched the Ulster Clubs movement, which was a mirror image of the Unionist Clubs network formed in the early 1900s to combat Home Rule for Ireland.
The most notorious of the groups was the red-bereted Ulster Resistance, once openly supported by former and current DUP leaders and First Ministers Ian Paisley senior and Peter Robinson. Army agent the late Brian Nelson arranged for a huge consignment of South African weapons to be smuggled into the North for Ulster Resistance, the UVF and UDA, a move which resulted in the murders of dozens of nationalists.
The extremist Movement for Self-Determination (MSD) was also launched to campaign for an independent Ulster, with the racist National Front also arriving in the North to try and take advantage of loyalist unrest.
The Agreement also ended the historic link between the Ulster Unionist Party and Thatcher’s Tory Party when the Ulster Unionist Council withdrew from the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations. When she gave her blessing for the launch of Conservative Associations in the North, the project quickly floundered such was the anger against her. While many who established the Conservative Associations in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s were themselves Right-wingers and loved to be photographed with Thatcher, the immediate legacy of the Anglo-Irish Agreement meant that the Tory move into Ulster was doomed from the start. What right-thinking Unionist would vote for the party which had signed away the Union?
In 1985, Thatcher was seen as a traitor by Northern Ireland Unionism for signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement. That was her immediate legacy among the Unionist community. But when – not if – the Commonwealth standard flutters over Leinster House, and as the south grows through Ulster ever more interconnected with the mainland, Unionist history may quickly rewrite her legacy.
