Day the Iron Lady said the Irish were ‘a drain’ on UK
MARGARET Thatcher told Taoiseach Charlie Haughey that she did not want Irish people moving to Britain because they were a drain on resources and would bring political violence with them, confidential documents have revealed.
In a very tense 1988 meeting, then British prime minister Mrs Thatcher said that the gardaí were not a ‘highly professional police force’ and said that a united Ireland would lead to a massive civil war in Ireland that would spread to Britain.
She bitterly criticised then taoiseach Mr Haughey for advocating for a united Ireland and said she didn’t want any more Irish emigrants. ‘You talk of unity and I ask would that be better? I say no,
there would be the worst civil war in history,’ she said.
‘And it would spread to the mainland. Your people come over to us. I wish they wouldn’t. They come looking for housing and services.’
Minutes of the ‘unusually intense’ meeting the British prime minister had with Taoiseach Charles Haughey in June 1988 showed Mrs Thatcher was deeply angry at what she perceived as lack of co-operation from the Irish State and its police in the fight against cross-border terrorism.
The minutes of the meeting were disclosed for the first time yesterday under the 30-year disclosure rule. They show that the two leaders met on the fringes of a European summit in Hanover where Mrs Thatcher warned the Taoiseach: ‘We can’t have the border open as it is now.’
‘There are massive caches of
arms somewhere,’ she said, referring to IRA arms bunkers south of the border. ‘We know there are arms and weapons and we know that they bring them across.
‘We do not get intelligence from the gardaí, they are not the most highly professional police force.’
The taoiseach rebuked Mrs Thatcher, saying the Irish government was ‘constantly ballyragged’ by the British and received ‘no credit’ for their work.
‘There were 147 punishment shootings in Northern Ireland in a recent period,’ he said.
‘You had Lisburn. You had Enniskillen [bombings]. These are not failures of our making. These are things that happen within Northern Ireland where your security
forces operate.’
Mrs Thatcher, who continued to become increasingly exasperated in the meeting added: ‘I don’t know what to do about the border.’ She said the area contained the ‘biggest concentration of terrorists in the world’ and ‘despite technological and other surveillance we lose them’.
‘So, yes,’ she added, ‘I must send more young boys over to their deaths. I ask myself, am I entitled to do it? There is a border line ... but it is not an effective border.’
During the exchanges, she said she was ‘not winning the battle with the IRA’, sending in troops had been ‘useless’ and she had ‘lost’ unionists in the north.
‘So I have failed,’ she said. ‘I have to deal with guns, bombs, beating people to death with sticks and many other barbaric acts.’
She went on to say she was disappointed in moderate nationalist party the SDLP and its leader, John Hume, especially as he would not fully support the Royal Ulster Constabulary police force.
‘They have the gift of the gab, but no, they won’t talk to their people and tell them to join the RUC. So I have failed,’ she said.
She also expressed her revulsion at the killing of two British corporals
at an IRA funeral in March of that year, in which they were dragged from their car, handed over to the IRA, beaten and eventually shot dead.
The meeting came in a particularly tense time for the two leaders as Mrs Thatcher had written to the taoiseach in April telling him she was ‘deeply upset’ at speeches he had made in New York and Harvard.
Mr Haughey had made it clear to the British leader in a secret message four days before the meeting that he utterly rejected violence.
Despite the ill-feeling, a British government press release issued afterwards said ‘a great deal of useful work had been done’.
news@dailymail.ie
Didn’t want more Irish emigrants ‘I must send more boys to their deaths’