In the beautiful picture above, are images of Margaret Thatcher, Denis Donaldson, Gerry Kelly, Freddie Sacappattici, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, the reason is covered in excrement is explained below. This is what was the bulk of what was left, in the leadership of Brit Sinn Fein, after Ruairi O'Bradaigh, along with ethical republicans left, to form Republican Sinn Fein. Now as every Irish person knows, you will not find a more truthful race of people, on the face of this earth, other than the Irish. Of course when dealing with perfidious Albion, and particularly it's politicians, the Irish do employ an occassional bit of blarney, because the reason God did not allow the sun to set on their British Empire, was because, he simply couldn't trust them in the dark. Now before I go any further, I wish to male it clear, that the author is not aligned to any political organization, in the interest of journalistic objectivity.
After Thatcher made these comments, she was taken aside by an aide and told that 70% of English people, had Irish ancestry from centuries of Irish emigration. However many experts believe, that Thatcher's prejudice towards the Irish, was coloured by her dealings with the leadership of Brit Sinn Fein. Of course the Brighton bomb, didn't help matters either, as she was just relieving herself on the toilet seat, when it exploded beside her and covered her in excrement, from head to toe. This has been a closely guarded secret for many years, but recent revelations. along with what she was doing with Jimmy Saville over their Christmas holidays together, have revealed a treasure trove of information, which we may return to at a later date. She did not trust her own intelligence services, to deal with the Adam's groupies, after the assassination of her close friend Airey Neave, she had her own handpicked, services, to deal with the Irish troubles. Below are two articles that explain matters further. One an older one from The New Statesman, the other from todays Guardian Newspaper, based on newly declassified government documents. If you like the articles I would appreciate you sharing, particularly in Irish Facebook groups, as they have temporarily managed, to have these articles censored there.
Why did Margaret Thatcher have a jaundiced view of the Irish? Brit Sinn Fein?
Did Margaret Thatcher have a problem with the Irish? It seems a fair question after Peter Mandelson’s odd revelation the other day about meeting her after he had just been appointed Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999:
She came up to me and she said ‘I've got one thing to say to you, my boy’. She said, ‘you can't trust the Irish they're all liars’, she said, ‘liars, and that's what you have to remember so just don't forget it.’
With that she waltzed off and that was my only personal exposure to her he added.
This vignette is of a piece with what we know to be her attitude to Northern Ireland and Irish affairs more broadly; mistrustful, simplistic and, well, a wee bit bigoted.
In 2001 it came to light that Thatcher had suggested to a senior diplomat who was negotiating with the Irish government over the landmark Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 that Catholics living in Northern Ireland could be moved to live in southern Ireland instead. She made the suggestion to Sir David Goodall during a late night conversation at Chequers. He explained:
She said, if the northern [Catholic] population want to be in the south, well why don't they move over there? After all, there was a big movement of population in Ireland, wasn't there?
Nobody could think what it was. So finally I said, are you talking about Cromwell, prime minister? She said, that's right, Cromwell.
Cromwell’s policy of ‘To Hell or to Connaught’, forced Catholics to the less fertile lands on Ireland’s western-most province, forfeiting the land in the north and central parts of the country at the point of a sword in what we would now recognise as ethnic cleansing. Cromwell was also, in modern parlance, a war criminal too; butchering thousands of men, women and children as his forces cut a bloody swathe across the country.
To this quite glaring historical faux pas can be added the substance of what Thatcher did in office in relation to Northern Ireland. The "dirty war" which raged throughout the 1980s culminated in the notorious murder of solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989, killed by loyalists in his own home in front of his wife and children with the connivance of elements of the security services.
The Pat Finucane Centre for Human Rights and Social Change this weekrepublished a handwritten note from Thatcher in 1979, found in the National Archive, which shows her mixing up the terrorist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) with the Ulster Defence Regiment (then the largest infantry regiment in the British Army) – inadvertently praising the former’s "valiant work."
Meanwhile, her intransigence during the 1981 hunger strikes, when ten republican prisoners starved to death in a dispute over their political status, may have shown what her admirers regard as her iron resolve in refusing to accede to their demands, but she effectively granted them all a short time afterwards.
In the current edition of Prospect magazine, the Independent’sesteemed Ireland correspondent David McKitterick offers a more generous assessment, arguing that Thatcher paved the way for the peace process by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the southern government a consultative role in the affairs of the north for the first time, to the chagrin of unionists. However, given Thatcher’s own strident unionism, this is something of a back-handed compliment, as she herself later regretted signing it.
So what shaped Thatcher’s jaundiced view of Irish affairs? Was it merely the loss of her close colleagues Airey Neave and Ian Gow in republican bombings and her own near miss at the hands of the IRA in Brighton in 1984? Or is it simply that a Grantham girl remembered Cromwell fondly, (perhaps because his first successful battle of the English Civil War was to capture the town from Crown forces?)
Or was she merely echoing Churchill’s equally exasperated view of the Irish: "They refuse to be English."
Margaret Thatcher’s intransigence in Irish talks revealed in archive files
PM argued that giving Dublin an official role in the running of Northern Ireland would plunge it into civil war
Email
Redrawing Northern Ireland’s border would be a fatal mistake, former Irish premier Garret FitzGerald privately warned the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, newly declassified government files reveal.
During robust exchanges at a critical summit in the runup to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Thatcher argued that giving Dublin an official role in the running of the region would plunge it into civil war.
Venting her fears that the north of Ireland was heading towards a Marxist state, Thatcher told her Irish counterpart in the November 1984 talks that resolving the crisis could mean “simply” moving the border. “She wondered if a possible answer to the problem might not simply be a redrawing of boundaries,” records an official note of the top-level meeting, which has only just been declassified under the 30-year-rule.
But Taoiseach FitzGerald rejected the apparent offer.
“What we have achieved at present is a lowering of expectations,” he said. The pair later discussed a federal, Belgium-style model. FitzGerald said the Irish government had worked on dampening hopes among some for an end to Northern Ireland as it was constituted.
Most people had accepted “unity was not on” in the short term.
The secret files, just released in Dublin’s National Archives, include an official note of the two-hour Chequers summit, which reveals Thatcher’s “incomprehension” as to what exactly Irish nationalists wanted.
FitzGerald, leader of the Fine Gael party, explained that the minority felt Irish and part of the majority of the island of Ireland “from which they had been cut off by an arbitrary act”.
The British had drawn a line around the six counties, creating a Protestant majority, cutting off the minority from the nation, and people were “set against each other within a narrow space”, he said.
FitzGerald added there was hard evidence of bias in the justice, security and policing systems in Northern Ireland while the guns of the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment were being used to “bully” Catholics.
He warned Thatcher that she needed to deal with the alienation of northern nationalists.
FitzGerald pressed Thatcher for a new system of governing Northern Ireland, based on agreed policies between Britain’s secretary of state and an Irish government minister. Where they could not agree, decisions would be appealed to the prime minister and the taoiseach, he said.
But Thatcher “reacted strongly” to the plan, according to the Dublin government files. “No, no – that is joint authority. You are giving them 40% of our country.”
Thatcher said Catholics in Northern Ireland, who made up 40% of the population, argued that they owed no allegiance to London, “but they took the government’s money”.
They thought they were different to any other minority and were “drawing on resources which the republic did not provide,” she told FitzGerald. “The nationalists feel that all they have to do is to wait.”
She accepted there were problems with Catholics getting jobs and admitted some areas – pointing to Lisburn as an example – “would not accept Catholics”.
During their exchanges, described by those at the meeting as rapid and vigorous, Thatcher fretted about the wider consequences of addressing Catholic alienation in relation to ethnic minorities in Britain.
She said: “If these things were done, the next question would be what comes next? Were the Sikhs in Southall to be allowed to fly their own flag?”
Southall is a west London suburb with a large Asian community which was the scene of a notorious race riot just three years earlier.
FitzGerald said there had been agreement on an Irish government role in running the region, adding that he could not ask the nation to give up its territorial claim over Northern Ireland without such a deal.
But Thatcher insisted: “It smacks too much of joint authority. That was definitely out.”
She added: “The unionists would say you are giving up your constitutional claims but you are coming across the border and don’t really need the claim. That would put us well on the way to civil war.”
Her Northern Ireland secretary, Douglas Hurd, could “no longer manage”, and she would not “fetter his judgment in that way”, she said, urging the taoiseach to “please understand that”.
During one sharp exchange, as she argued that Westminster was answerable for Northern Ireland, FitzGerald retorted that “for 50 years they had not regarded themselves as being answerable.
“They had never permitted a question on Northern Ireland to be discussed in the house,” he said. “That was partly the reason for the present trouble.”
On a suggestion from the taoiseach of a Belgium-style solution – a federal arrangement under a monarchy – Thatcher said she “had not ruled it out, even though it would be attacked by unionists as an effective repartition”.
She added: “History shows that the Irish, whether the Scottish-Irish or the Irish-Irish, don’t like to move. However, they all seem to be terribly happy to move to Britain.”
Thatcher complained there was too much public-sector employment in the north of Ireland, there was no wealth creation and that it was costing London £2bn a year in subventions at the time.
During the two-hour meeting at her country house retreat, Chequers, Thatcher said there were worries about a threat of more violence as a result of the Anglo-Irish talks.
“There was a real danger that a Marxist society could develop,” she added.
Later that day, in a press conference, Thatcher gave her infamous “out, out, out” declaration, when she rejected three options put forward from the Irish for a solution to Northern Ireland – Irish unity, a two-state federation or joint authority.
It was later reported that FitzGerald thought her behaviour was gratuitously offensive.
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