Margaret Thatcher

Biography

Britain's prime minister for much of the war's most intense phase, Margaret Thatcher took an uncompromising line against Irish republicanism. She refused to grant the hunger strikers of 1981 political status, letting Bobby Sands and nine others die rather than concede — a stance that broke the strike but handed the republican movement a propaganda triumph and a generation of martyrs. She herself narrowly survived an IRA assassination attempt in 1984, when a bomb devastated the Brighton hotel hosting her party conference, killing five. Publicly implacable, she nonetheless signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, giving Dublin a consultative role in the North — a pragmatic step that enraged unionists but helped lay groundwork for later negotiations. Her hard line defined the confrontational middle years of the Troubles.

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