One of the key figures behind a transformative moment in relations between Britain and Ireland was an English Catholic with Irish roots. His memoir of the tense negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 has just been published
On 4 January 1984 David Goodall was one of a small group of close advisers invited by Margaret Thatcher to join a meeting to discuss proposals from the new government in Ireland to address the conflict in the North. They convened in the Long Gallery at Chequers round a log fire, which Mrs Thatcher kept restlessly getting up to poke and replenish.
As usual when confronted with a range of unwelcome alternatives, Mrs Thatcher tacked and veered from one point to another, interrupting [Foreign Secretary] Geoffrey Howe’s attempts at ordered exposition and from time to time bringing things back to square one with an observation of startling primitiveness. Why could we not redraw the Border to exclude predominantly Catholic areas and relieve ourselves of the expense of paying social security to people who did not want to belong to the United Kingdom anyway? It was pointed out that this would not solve the problem: Catholic and Protestant communities were too intermingled in Border areas; and even if adjustments were made to the Border, the main body of Catholics lived in West Belfast and would remain within Northern Ireland. In that case, why not a wall through the centre of Belfast like the Wall through the centre of Berlin? (No one seemed to want to comment on this.)
