The Brighton bomb – no impact?
Professor Richard English – who has interviewed Patrick Magee, who planted the device – asks what if the IRA's bomb had killed Margaret Thatcher, and what if there had been no bomb at all.
On 12 October 1984, at 2.54am, an IRA bomb exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. The target was that year's Conservative Party conference. Five people were killed and over 30 were injured by the Semtex bomb, which had been planted the previous month and set on a long-delay timer.
Understandably, the attack generated huge international publicity. Even without killing the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, the bomb had been a startling assault on the political establishment: the IRA had come close to killing the British cabinet.
But what would have happened had the bombers actually succeeded in killing the prime minister herself? Would the history of Anglo-Irish relations have been dramatically different?
Stark measures
Among Irish republicans, Margaret Thatcher was then – and still
remains – one of the most hated of all British political figures.
She had been prime minister during the 1981 republican hunger strike,
which had seen 10 men die after protracted fast in jail. Even before the
end of that strike, the IRA had decided to try to kill her.
So what would have happened had they succeeded? The immediate response would have been a severe clamping down on Irish republicans, whether in the IRA or in its political wing, Sinn Féin. The killing of a prime minister would have prompted outrage on such a scale that other stark measures would have emerged. Internment would almost certainly have been one of these. There would also have been an irresistible impulse towards closing down the political space available to Sinn Féin, through censorship and other means.
A rockier and thornier path
So the political context for Northern Irish politics would have been
a more sharply polarised one. In this atmosphere, it is hard to imagine
the kinds of informal overtures that were, in fact, made during the late
1980s – overtures made in both directions, by the British and by
Irish republicans towards one another. In this sense, the slowly negotiated
path towards a peace process in Northern Ireland would have been rockier
and thornier.
Yet, in other ways, less would have changed than one might think. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement would not have come about in the form (or at the time) that it did. But the logic of that agreement – to establish a strong London/Dublin axis that could undermine Sinn Féin support in Northern Ireland by producing redress of nationalist grievances through constitutional rather than violent means – would have been as compelling or, perhaps, even more compelling had Margaret Thatcher been killed in 1984.
Overpowering logic
And, while emotional responses and political exigencies would have
closed down some paths in the wake of Mrs Thatcher's death, in the longer
term certain realities would still have led to a version of the kind of
politics that eventually emerged in Northern Ireland.
For the Northern Ireland peace process has not risen out of inter-communal good will or a sudden change of heart by Irish republicans, Ulster unionists or the British government. It has emerged primarily because those who had long thought that their violence would bring victory eventually came to the conclusion that this was not going to be the case. Rather, it was acknowledged that there existed a stalemate in which nobody – Irish republicans, Ulster loyalists or the British state – could be militarily defeated, but within which nobody was going to achieve victory either.
Once that was recognised, the logic of some kind of negotiation and compromise seemed overpowering. Even if Mrs Thatcher had been killed in 1984, this reality would not, ultimately, have been altered.
No victory from violence
Yes, had they killed the prime minister, the IRA would then have felt
that their capacity to do damage at the heart of the British establishment
had been strikingly demonstrated. But, equally, the subsequent survival
– in tougher form – of the British state would, in time, have
shown the IRA that their violence would not bring victory.
The central reason for the British not withdrawing from Northern Ireland was then, and remains still, the fact that most people in Northern Ireland do not want them to do so. The death of Mrs Thatcher would not have changed this. Indeed, it might even have made it more unlikely than before that the British would ever consider yielding to IRA pressure.
A push towards negotiation?
So did the Brighton bomb make any difference? Put another way, if
the bombing had not happened at all, how would history have been changed?
Patrick Magee was to serve 14 years for his part in the Brighton bombing. Looking back now, he himself feels that the bomb did make a difference, that after Brighton ...
There was a recognition that we weren't going to go away. We had to get that message across. If they thought they could continue to contain the struggle or perhaps, in some long term, defeat it, then, of course, they were going to go in for that. So the British establishment had to understand that we were there for the long haul and we weren't going to go away.
Magee has also claimed that Brighton decisively pushed the British government towards negotiation with the IRA, and ultimately towards the 1990s' peace process itself.
Bloody stalemate
But is such a view correct? The British had acknowledged, long before
1984, that the IRA could not be defeated militarily. So did they really
need Brighton to tell them that the IRA were not going to go away? And
the mid-1980s' response of the British state to Northern Ireland was not
primarily engaging in negotiations with the IRA, but rather trying to
isolate them through the bolstering of the constitutional nationalist
SDLP.
The real roots of the Northern Irish peace process lay in the belated recognition that continued violence would sustain bloody stalemate rather than produce clear victory. That reality would, ultimately, have held sway whether the Brighton bomb had happened or not, and whether or not it had succeeded in killing Mrs Thatcher.
The real significance of the 1984 Grand Hotel bombing lies not in its impact on the emergence of a peace process, but rather in its demonstration of the lethal capacity of the IRA to produce devastating political violence, and in the awful suffering that was inflicted on the actual victims of the bomb.
Belfast-born Richard English is professor of politics at Queen's University, Belfast. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Armed Struggle: The history of the IRA (Macmillan, 2003).
Find out more
• For an analysis of the IRA campaign, and for interviews with Patrick Magee, see Armed Struggle: The history of the IRA by Richard English (Macmillan, 2003) £20.
• For Magee's own outlook on the nature of the Northern Ireland conflict, see Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish republicans in 'Troubles fiction' by Patrick Magee (Beyond the Pale, 2001) £12.99.
• For Margaret Thatcher's perspective on Brighton, and on Northern Ireland more generally, see her autobiography, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993) £16.99.
