After being elected taoiseach in 1981, FitzGerald announced that he favoured ‘a constitutional crusade’ to make the Irish constitution more acceptable to the Unionists. Three years earlier (in 1978) he had revealed that in 1974 (the year of the Loyalist strike) he had told Unionists that they would be ‘bloody fools’ to join the Republic under the existing constitution. One of the few Unionists to take FitzGerald’s crusade seriously was William Craig, the former Vanguard leader. He said he found it ‘very significant’, and had talks with FitzGerald in Dublin in November 1981.
