Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1975-1990. By Stephen Kelly

Abstract

When teaching American undergraduates about the conflict in Northern Ireland just after finishing my PhD, I always found time to show a video of Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘Out, out, out’ speech, where the Prime Minister summarily ruled out the three political models proposed to solve the conflict in Northern Ireland published in the report by the New Irish Forum in May 1984. Often, I would pair that video with a clip of the Revd. Ian Paisley’s bellowing ‘Never! Never! Never!’ to a Unionist crowd of 100,000 assembled in front of Belfast City Hall to protest the Anglo–Irish Agreement (AIA). These worked well together pedagogically as a vignette of political intransigence as students drew parallels between both leaders, noting the ways their rhetoric forestalled other potential political futures. Invariably a student would reference Thatcher’s moniker as ‘the Iron Lady’ and I would pitch in that Paisley was nicknamed ‘Dr No’—it all seemed like a match made in heaven. Of course, parallel political rhetoric does not make political alliances; indeed, Thatcher’s relationship to Unionists, if not Unionism, was fraught with personal animosity (she thought Paisley and his deputy, Peter Robinson, ‘self-indulged megalomaniacs’ (p. 235)), while Unionists fearful of British treachery and deceit viewed Thatcher and her policies as ‘inconsistent to the brink of schizophrenia’ (p. 72).