Sir, – Niall Ginty (April 12th) admires Margaret Thatcher’s courageous leadership. “Had we been blessed with such a leader,” he muses, “we might not have lost our sovereignty to gambling speculators.”
A cornerstone of the Thatcher government’s economic policy was what became universally known as “big bang” – the massive and sudden deregulation of UK financial markets in October 1987. This action spurred a spike in financial “innovation” and expansion of the City of London over the following two decades. Widely lauded at the time, we are all too aware of the contemporary consequences of such light-touch regulatory oversight in the name of efficiency.
Specifically, by allowing the same firm to act in multiple capacities on the same transaction, independent advice was sorely lacking, and multiple conflicts of interest soon arose. Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer at the time of big bang, Lord Lawson, recently admitted that “Nobody at the time realised that if you put everything together, there would be a problem.”
Mr Ginty ought to be careful what he wishes for. – Yours, etc,
CATHAL MALONE,
Armagh Road,
Newry, Co Down.
Sir, – Political Editor Stephen Collins argues Margaret Thatcher “paved the way for peace” with the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Northern Editor, Gerry Moriarty, makes much the same argument saying she was “a pivotal figure in creating the conditions for the Belfast Agreement” and the 1985 agreement was a “stepping stone” to the Belfast Agreement (April 8th).
These arguments are false and depend on a superficial reading of history.
The policy of the Thatcher government was to defeat the IRA, not make peace with them. The purpose of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 was part of this strategy. The stated aim was to isolate Republicans politically. This would have made an overall defeat of the IRA easier.
The peace process of the 1990s, which led to the Belfast Agreement, embodied the opposite type of thinking – that republicans should be included in political dialogue and that a compromise should be reached with them. This was largely the creation of the Irish body politic and was utter anathema to Mrs Thatcher’s successors in the Tory party.
Their hostility to overtures by the Irish government on this new initiative is well documented in The Fight for Peace by David McKittrick and Eamonn Mallie.
The British were continually looking for ways to re-establish their old policy of isolating republicans. In other words, instead of embracing the peace process, they wanted to continue with the “war process”. This also explains their coolness and inadequate response to the IRA ceasefire of 1994.
These two entirely contradictory strategies on the stage of Irish history are not part of the same thing. – Yours, etc,
OWEN BENNETT,
Dean Swift Square, Dublin 8.
Sir, – The two lines from Eileen Hahessy (April 10th) must be the nastiest ever to have appeared on your letters page, followed by the letter from Joseph Mahon on the same date. – Yours, etc,
TOM GREALY,
Threadneedle Road, Galway.