The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985: A Memoir by David Goodall ed. by Frank Sheridan

Abstract

The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985: A Memoir by David Goodall, edited by Frank Sheridan with contributions by Morwenna Goodall, Michael Lillis, Robert Renwick, Charles Powell, Stephen Collins and Maurice Manning (National University of Ireland, 2021), 244 pages Sir David Goodall was a British diplomat educated by the Benedictine monks at Ampleforth and then at Oxford. He was central on the British side at official level to the negotiation with the Irish government of what has been called the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. After retirement from the diplomatic service in 1991 he wrote quite a frank memoir of the negotiation, which he lodged in an archive for the benefit of historians to be read later. Now published five years after his death in 2016, it affords a unique insight into the tortuous process that produced the Agreement and into the principal players. It all began for him shortly after he was seconded to serve in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet office in 1982. He found himself at a small dinner party she was giving for Lord Shackleton, the son of the polar explorer. Shackleton, a former Labour cabinet minister, was helping out with advice on the Falklands Islands, disagreements about whose recent reconquest had fractured relations between the Prime Minister and Taoiseach Charles Haughey. After dinner she bade Goodall to stay on for a drink. The conversation turned to Ireland. Goodall remarked sadly that the only place where the lives of British soldiers were now being lost in anger was in Northern Ireland. They discussed their Irish ancestry – both Goodall’s grandfathers were born in Ireland and Mrs Thatcher confessed to having a great-grandmother called Sullivan. ‘If we get back next time,’ she rounded off the exchange, ‘I think I would like to do something about Ireland’. When she got back in 1983 she was receptive to an approach from Garret FitzGerald’s government to revive the Anglo-Irish Governmental Council established by Thatcher and Haughey when they were getting on well. At the steering committee, which met in Dublin to prepare for it, Goodall encountered Michael Lillis, head of the Anglo-Irish Division in the Department for Foreign Affairs. They went for a walk along the Grand Canal. Lillis had authority to speak for Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, whose most trusted adviser he was. He floated a radical new departure for Northern Ireland, offering unequivocal Irish acceptance of the right of Northern Review Articles: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 488 Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom for as long as it was the wish of the majority there. In exchange he asked for the participation of Irish security forces in operations in the North and for judges from the Republic to sit in terrorist trials there. It was hoped that this, buttressed by giving the Irish government a say on security in Northern Ireland, would reconcile the Catholic minority in the North to the institutions of law and order and so stem the rise in support for Sinn Féin, which could have disastrous consequences for the island as a whole. Goodall was taken aback by what he described as ‘astonishingly far reaching ideas’ and was uncertain if they were to be taken seriously; he had little doubt that a suggestion to have Irish troops and police operating in the North would be a non-starter in London. The immediate British response was orientated to the problems created by attacks from the Republic and the ease with which those involved could escape across the border and avoid apprehension. Their counter-proposal was to create a security zone on both sides of the border that would be jointly policed, so allowing the security forces in Northern Ireland to invade the Republic in pursuit of terrorists. It was a non-starter in Dublin. Goodall had read Cecil Woodham-Smith’s book on the Irish famine and shared her view that ‘the English, normally kind, behaved in Ireland as they behaved nowhere else’ and was disposed to make amends. His research into his own family history in Ireland had given him a feel what it was like to be both a Catholic nationalist...