The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

All the parties in the country, with the exception of the Unionists, who refused to attend, and Sinn Fein, who were excluded, took part in the forum. The result was a report which proposed three options: a confederal Ireland, a united Ireland (unitary state), or joint sovereignty. However, at a celebrated press conference, after an Anglo-Irish summit meeting at Chequers (on 19 November 1984) Mrs Thatcher completely cut the ground from beneath both Garret FitzGerald and Hume by itemising the three findings of the forum and saying after each one, ‘that is out’. The out… out… out… speech, as it was known, produced such a crisis in Anglo-Irish relations that even Mrs Thatcher came to realise the damage she had done. President Reagan had been amongst those who had welcomed the forum’s deliberations. Possibly her dismissive attitude was influenced by the fact that the IRA had made a savage attempt on her life and those of her cabinet during the Conservative Party Conference at Brighton a few weeks earlier (on 12 October). Whatever the reason, whatever her motivation, Thatcher’s standing in some Irish political circles may be gauged from the attitude that a prominent Fianna Fail politician displayed at lunch with me one day in a fashionable Dublin hotel. We were discussing the Brighton bombing. Glancing around at the gorging glitterati, he stunned me by remarking: ‘If it had only gone properly, it would have been greater than 1916 – the whole British Cabinet would have gone up.’