`I was always dying to talk about the grocery trade. She wasn't the least bit interested. I said to her on many occasions `I'm a grocer's son and you're a grocer's daughter, what problems had ye with the price of sago?' It was no good - she wouldn't bite. It always struck me as very odd that she wouldn't talk about the grocery business."
So former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Peter Barry, described his efforts to chat up Margaret Thatcher when he was placed beside her at various banquets. The former British PM regarded him, he tells Vincent Power in his book Voices Of Cork, with deep suspicion and saw him as the "hard cop" of the Barry-Fitz- Gerald duo negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement. "She had a higher regard for Garret and Dick Spring than for me. She had been told, or else formed the impression, that I was an intransigent, unreconstructed Fenian."
She thought of people purely in terms of the job they did, Peter Barry says, whether they agreed with her or not; but not whether they might be good fun on a night out.
On politics at home, Peter Barry says Garret had enough confidence to allow intellectual equals around him. "Charles Haughey as Taoiseach didn't want any questioning at his own level of his own judgment. So he surrounded himself with people who were intellectually inferior to him. Garret didn't; he sought people whom he could bounce ideas off and who would be able to respond to him. If you look at Haughey's cabinets there were lots of very nice people but they certainly weren't going to challenge anything he was doing."