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After centuries of oppression, and two decades into the modern Troubles, the agreement changed everything and nothing
A year after the IRA made an attempt on her life in Brighton, Margaret Thatcher did an extraordinary, visionary thing. By signing a deal with Dublin at Hillsborough Castle in 1985, she set off on a path for peace which has now led to the Queen's visit. The Iron Lady displayed uncharacteristic flexibility, and in old age she actually came to regret the compromises made. Not so her co-signatory, Ireland's taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, who has just died, and for whom the Anglo-Irish agreement was the culmination of a career. After centuries of oppression, and two decades into the modern Troubles, the agreement changed everything and nothing. Nothing because the new advisory cross-border agencies lacked all clout, and nothing, too, because sectarianism was initially aggravated. Unionist MPs resigned their seats and forced byelections to prove "Ulster said no". The IRA kept bombing, the RUC still policed for some and not all, and the British army remained on Northern Irish streets. Yet a wind of change stirred that day which over the next quarter-century slowly carried all before it. Nationalists, Washington and the wider world now had something solid to point to as they persuaded republicans that progress could be made through the ballot box instead of the bullet. More profoundly, loyalists realised London would no longer wield a veto on their behalf. Once that penny dropped, the Downing Street declaration, the Belfast agreement and Dr No's learning to say yes were all a matter of time.
