Anglo Irish Agreement Pdf

No one could have predicted, after the «out, out» press conference of November 1984, that if the two Prime Ministers met a year later for a summit, this would be characterized by the signing of an Anglo-Irish agreement. The events that led to the evolution of Mrs Thatcher`s thinking go back not a year, but four years. The agreement represents a radical change in Prime Minister Thatcher`s position. During her first term, she placed the utmost importance on maintaining British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. In her first meeting with FitzGerald, after becoming Prime Minister in 1981, she noted that she considered the North «as British as Finchley» and was referring to her own constituency in the south of England. FitzGerald replied that Britain had not deployed thousands of troops to Finchley, nor had a secretary of state in the cabinet for Finchley`s affairs. An Irish official described Mrs Thatcher as «the last true trade unionist.» Irish republicans have been able to reject the only constitutional advance (in the eyes of many nationalists and republicans) since the fall of Stormont a decade earlier. As such, the agreement reinforced the political approach advocated by the SDLP and contributed to the republican recognition of the principle of approval as the basis for a fundamental change in northern Ireland`s national status by republicans, which was explicitly declared draft in the 1998 agreement. However, in ten years, PIRA announced a (first) ceasefire and the two governments negotiated with both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland, which culminated in the Good Friday agreement. [47] Unlike previous attempts to resolve municipal opposition in the North through regional institutions that, in order to succeed, required trade union cooperation, this agreement is exclusively between the sovereign governments of London and Dublin. This reality severely limits the room for manoeuvre of the unionist resistance. Prime Minister Thatcher met with Paisley and Molyneaux on 25 February and offered them his own consultation procedure. Whenever British and Irish cabinet ministers meet for the Intergovernmental Conference, union leaders could meet separately with the Secretary of Northern Ireland to be briefed and give their own advice on the issues under discussion.