The Fall from the Anglo Irish Summit

IS IT SERIOUSLY SUGGESTED THAT BECAUSE nobody in the Irish Embassy in London could get RTE on Monday evening when Mrs Thatcher's press conference was being broadcast live to the Irish nation that we have lost the best chance for peace in our time, screwed up Anglo-Irish relations and brought much closer a civil war scenario in the North?
Let's leave aside for the moment the. fact that the london embassy has known for months that it was often impossible to get RTE because of the activities of the pirate ,Radio Laser. Irish people in Britain' have been loud in their complaints about it and the Department of Foreign Affairs has raised the matter with the British Government. Nor should we, attempt to answer the questions it raises about the running of our London embassy. Presumably Messrs Donlon, Dorr and Lillis are even now having "full and frank" discussions to find out why there was only one official at Downing Street who had to hurry back to brief the Taoiseach , when every cub reporter covering a Fianna Fail election meeting in rural Ireland knows that you make some arrangement with a local stringer to keep an eye on the last fifteen minutes when you have to rush off to catch a deadline.

What about all these foreign journalists whom Foreign Affairs have been bringing to Ireland, wining and dining and educating them on Irish sensitivities about the North? It's fifteen minutes walk from Downing Street to the Irish

FitzGerald discussed with her the need each has to lull the paranoia among their own people Embassy in Grosvenor Place and couldn't one of them have mentioned "OUT! OUT! OUT!" to one of their erstwhile hosts. What's Peter Prendergast being paid for anyway if he can't make a phone call to Dublin to find out what the dogs in the street are saying about Mrs Thatcher on the box before he sends the Taoiseach into a press conference to talk to the Irish people live about his special relationship with the lady? Particularly since it was agreed that she would hold her press conference first because it would be helpful for Dr FitzGerald to know what she'd said and how people back home were likely to react to it. Which of course, it would have been if ....

Be fair, there are times when you can't help having a sneaking sympathy with English gents like Willie Whitelaw who just shake their heads and say "But they'll never get their act together." And I mean "act". Because what all this shows, yet again, is that the main point of Anglo-Irish summitry is not what gets said, but how it gets presented afterwards. That applies to Britain too. Mrs Thatcher has had her problems with presenting her side with what they want to hear but she's learnt from her mistakes. Even if he'd known about "OUT! OUT! OUT!" Garret would probbably have blown it. Charlie would almost certainly have blown it too though in rather a different way.

THERE HAVE NOW BEEN FOUR SUMMITS, two between Thatcher and Haughey in May and December 1980, two between herself and FitzGerald in November 1983 and November 1984. In theory, any meeting between two EEC prime ministers can be called a "summit" but the word seems to have entered media coinage here when Haughey met Thatcher for the second time at Dublin Castle. Between that meeting and the Thatcher FitzGerald rapprochement came the Hunger Strike, the Falklands and several changes of government. Our people come and go, but Mrs Thatcher is always there. And will be for the next dozen or so summits if they go on at their present annual rate.

She's also just as good at taking gratuitous offence as she is at dishing it out, which is why the presentation of the summit afterwards has to be finely judged and acted out. Say too much and the lady won't ever talk to you again. Haughey's relationship with Mrs Thatcher took an irreverrsible nosedive within minutes of his sweetest moment of success when he had brought her over to Dublin after months of careful, clever political wooing. He bounced her into a communique full of fine phrases about the "totality of relationships" which she never understood at the time. That was clever of him. She put her name to the document with Peter Carrington guiding the pen and if Haughey had had a twitter of wit and kept his mouth shut afterwards her own stubborn pride would have made her stick by it and to hell with the Unionists. Instead he had to come out bleating about historic progress having been made leaving her to pick up the pieces back in London. Not clever at all.

The damage was compounded by Brian Lenihan's claim that everything was "on the table" including Irish unity. No problem. Anyone who thinks Mrs Thatcher was gratuiitously offensive last week should have been around when Haughey was called in to answer for Lenihan when he met the lady at an EEC meeting in March 1981. The word is that she nearly ate him. For months afterwards her own ministers had a pact not to mention Ireland if they could possibly avoid it, because it was distressing to see her start foaming at the mouth and talking about Brian Lenihan.

Garret learnt from that. Be discreet, gently does it.

She trusts you, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. And you know that can't be bad. Even before the press conference his own officials were urging him to start off with some remarks to the effect that the British and Irish governments "are now in business". He wouldn't do it, might upset her. The minddblowing thing about this is that she does actually have some appreciation of Garret's domestic political problems. She knows about Haughey for a start. But she also knows about the broad swathes of sensitive greenery that can be set quivering if any Irish Taoiseach is too polite to the Brits. Several times in the past she and Garret have discussed the need each has to lull the paranoia among their own people.

She even tried to make it a bit easier for him, or at least her officials did. As I said, it was agreed that she'd hold her press conference first so he could react to it. Her opening remarks in which she spoke about these having been "the fullest, frankest and most realistic discussions" ever held between the two governments were agreed in advance to help the Irish delegation. She also made a great deal of the fact that she would emphasise that they had been talking about "specifics" which everyone assumed would drive the Unionists crazy.

Nobody thought to worry about her style. The only person who might have done so if he'd been around to menntion it was John Hume. He's always said that even if the two governments could agree on some future initiative on the North the thing most likely to wreck it would be her complete insensitivity to Irish feelings on the ground. Still, the last thing anyone in the Irish delegation was thinking about as they drove back to London after 22 hours closeted at Chequers was Mrs Thatcher's tone of voice. And anyway the atmosphere at Downing Street was as warm and relaxed as a Radox bath compared to the way she'd treated her own officials at Chequers. It had been, physically at least, an intimate affair. A bit like Castlereagh. Three politicians and three senior officials on each side, dinner on Sunday evening, a few drinks, country house party conversation.

THE SERIOUS BUSINESS CAME NEXT DAY. What seems to have shocked our side most was the breathtaking scale of her ignorance. At one stage she admitted that yes, it was disgraceful the way the Unionists discriminated against Catholics in Londonderry. Douglas Hurd, new boy eager to impress the teacher, tried to point out that actually it was the other way around. If anything a touch of the jackboot was coming from the Nationalists, for example in changing the name from Londonderry to Derry. No, No Douglas, she insisted, we must admit when our people are in the wrong; the Unionists are still behaving very badly in Londonderry. As shocking to our rather sensitive souls was the way she treated her own, very senior officials, querying what they had done in private negotiations, expressing disbelief at their naivete.

At one stage the game didn't seem worth the candle.

Both sides withdrew, ours to discuss whether to pull out there and then. The main bone of contention was whether Ireland would get an executive as opposed to consultative role in the running of the North (NO. NO. NO). In the end our delegation decided to 'keep talking. They didn't (and don't) have any alternative, although the Taoiseach seems to be the only politician in Ireland aware of that fact. Barring an accident with a bus or the IRA getting lucky second time around (their words, not, Heaven forbid, mine) she's going to be with us for a long time. If anything is going to be done about the North Mrs Thatcher is going to do it. Not President Reagan, not Chancellor Kohl. It's Margaret Thatcher we 'have to deal with, to try and concenntrate her shallow and uncaring mind on what happens to Catholic youths when they get stopped by the UDR on the streets of Armagh and what that does to the Catholic cornnmunity. It's got to be done against formidable odds - a miners' strike which a sizeable section of the British estabblishment now believes is threatening to rupture three hundred years of social cohesion in her own country, Enoch Powell's bony thumb, the lady's passionate belief that it's her United Kingdom and that anyone who wants to erode her sovereignty is a knave or a fool or both.

In a kind of a way the Irish at Chequers pulled it off. At least they bought time, the chance to go on talking and an agreement about what they should be talking about. She didn't rule the continuing process out, out, out as most of them had feared she would. They emerged shellshocked frorn the experience. As they set off from Chequers to their respective press conference nobody thought of the dangers lurking in Mrs Thatcher's habit of treating each journalist as if he or she is a retarded five year old who has to have ,. her sums explained very, very slowly indeed.

That was foolish of them and may turn out to have been fatal. At the very least the Irish lot should have known that the Irish media had predicted failure, maybe even anted it. Well, success on scale which most Irish journalists would see as success was never on the cards anyway, so they needed failure to make a story. They knew Charlie was waiting at home and that a lovely juicy row was in the offing. Even if Mrs Thatcher had announced that she now understood the attractions of a united Ireland and wanted to discuss them with Paisley and Molyneux, Haughey would have described it as a defeat. "Sell out," he'd have said. After all, these people have no right to put a veto to the march of the Irish nation, she's upholding the guarantee.

THE ONLY PERSON WHO JUST MIGHT HAVE understood how important it was to present the very little they had achieved in a tough, aggressive way was Peter Barry and he had to fly off for a meeting of EEC foreign ministers. He would have known because he feels it in his guts, just how most Irish people react when they see and hear Margaret Thatcher. And Douglas Hurd, come to that. He can't bear either of them, loses his temper, gets emotional, just like most people who were sitting at home watching television in Ireland were doing. He's not much fun at times for his own diplomats when they're trying to keep the temperature down, bur he knows more about how Irish people feel, not to ention how Fianna Fail will react, than was ever dreamt or in the civilised salons of Palmerston Road.

But Peter Barry wasn't at the press ~onference. It was all down to the Taoiseach. Even now it's impossible to underrstand why he couldn't have done the minimum that she did, kept stressing that the going had been tough, tough, tough but that was because they were talking about real issues, not about getting their names in the history books for solving an 800 year-old conflict. He could have said that of course life gets difficult when you get away from the easy platitudes that form the bulk of the Forum Report, and God knows it had been difficult enough to agree them. Of course, he regretted, and was angry about, her dismissal of the Forum Report but if he couldn't get what Nationalist Ireland wanted now he was determined to negotiate someething that would ease the lives of the Nationalist minority in the North. What, he might have asked, is Mr Haughey's alternative?

Instead we got - what? Total collapse. A national humiliation, A day when you were ashamed to be Irish. And so on. The question remains. Why didn't the British see it that way? At the same time as all this was going on in the Irish papers the Guardian was running a splash story "Ulster summit sets agenda for new initiative". Most British commmentators have reacted the same way. They keep saying, over and over again "Can't you understand, she's always like that?" and asking why we get so excited about appearrances when the substance has gone our way.

The real danger is that Mrs Thatcher herself thinks exactly the same thing. A lot of her cabinet colleagues agree with her view that "it's all metaphysical with the Irish". Whitelaw is known to say wearily rhat it's hopeless trying to deal with the Irish because they never know themselves what they want. It used to drive Prior absolutely crazy until he started to go native towards the end and began behaving like an Irish politician himself. "Give me a shopping list," he'd say to John Hume, "what do you want me to do, for example about the UDR." "And then," one aide recalled last week, "John would go off into the Celtic mists talking about reconciling the two traditions."

Perhaps they're right. It's hard to see Garret or even C).H. as Robert Mugabe. He wanted his country and it's hard to imagine him agonising about who was patronising him on the way to getting it. Perhaps we've lived with losing for so long that we need it like a junkie needs a fix. Certainly it takes a fair degree of determination to snatch a major national humiliation from the jaws of what was a modest, but real, victory at Chequers. But we managed it. But then no one, not even Mrs Thatcher, has ever quesstioned our talent for defeat. •