Stephen Goss: The lessons of the forty year old Anglo Irish agreement are that you actually need ‘agreement’ | Conservative Home

Dr Stephen Goss is a freelance historian, lectures in history and politics in London, and is a Conservative councillor in Reading.

Last week marked the 40^th anniversary of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA). On 15^th November 1985, Margaret Thatcher and Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald signed the treaty at Hillsborough Castle.

The AIA remains a controversial but pivotal moment in relations between the UK and Ireland – and its legacy endures in more ways than is acknowledged.

The Agreement was the first time since partition that Dublin had been formally invited into the governance of Northern Ireland. It established a formal consultative role for the Irish Government in Northern Ireland’s affairs via the Anglo-Irish Inter-governmental Conference, while simultaneously reaffirming that full constitutional change for Northern Ireland would only come with the consent of a majority of its people.

It sought three inter-twined objectives: peace, stability, and prosperity throughout the island of Ireland; enhanced cross-border coöperation; and recognition of the Republic of Ireland’s interest in Northern Irish affairs. It sent the message that London recognised the legitimacy of Dublin’s involvement, and – for the first time – the Republic acknowledged that Ulster Protestants could not be coerced, that unification could only come with consensus. The AIA advanced Anglo-Irish coöperation on security and legal issues; it placed regular dialogue between officials in Dublin and London on a formal footing; and helped open the pathway to power-sharing initiatives. In that sense it was a foundation stone of the peace process.

Yet, in Northern Ireland the AIA was met with fury.

Unionists saw it not as a breakthrough, but a betrayal — a constitutional sleight of hand that gave the Irish Government a say in Northern Ireland’s affairs without the consent of its people. What’s more, to make matters worse, the joint secretariat established at Maryfield in east Belfast meant that civil servants from the Republic were actually based in loyal Ulster. Unionists were not consulted. They were not even warned. As former Ulster Unionist leader Lord Empey recently put it, ‘it was negotiated behind our backs’.

The reaction was swift and powerful: 100,000 people rallied at Belfast City Hall under the banner ‘Ulster Says No’. Sharing the platform with the UUP leader James Molyneaux, Ian Paisley gave his famous retort of ‘NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER’. Every unionist MP gave up their seat to force by-elections in protest. A campaign of civil disobedience followed where unionists showed the British state the price of its perfidy by not paying their TV licences. Peter Robinson and a band of loyalists invaded the Republic, occupying Clontibret in Co. Monaghan until Gardaí showed up to disperse them. Nationalists guardedly welcomed recognition Dublin had a role to play in Northern Ireland, but were unimpressed it was merely a consultative one. Republicans (including Fianna Fáil leader Charley Haughey) denounced it for accepting the North’s place in the UK.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement did not bring peace. It brought a new phase of political warfare. The IRA intensified its campaign. Loyalist paramilitaries escalated their violence. The Assembly elected in 1982 became even more dysfunctional. Even Mrs Thatcher came to regret it.

She later admitted that the security guarantees for which she had hoped never materialised, and that Dublin’s refusal to extradite terrorist suspects undermined the very premise of co-operation. Nonetheless, the AIA set in train institutional and diplomatic relationships which would eventually help make the Agreement in 1998 possible. While the AIA did not deliver its full promise of reconciliation, it achieved a quieter but arguably more durable legacy: embedding mutual recognition, laying the groundwork for cross-border structures, and signalling a shift from trying to find an exclusively internal UK solution.

Four decades on, the significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement lies less in its immediate outcomes than in the long arc of constitutional and diplomatic change it helped initiate. The AIA represented a profound shift in mindset. For unionists, it was a bruising demonstration that Westminster could — and would — make decisions about Northern Ireland without them. For nationalists, it was the first tangible expression of London’s recognition that the Irish Government had a legitimate interest in the North. And for both governments, it marked the beginning of a habit of structured coöperation rather than ad hoc crisis management.

Today, the echoes are unmistakable.

Departure from the EU, like the AIA, was experienced in Northern Ireland as an act carried out over its head. For nationalists, leaving the EU re-opened fears of vulnerability to decisions taken in London without regard for the island of Ireland. For unionists, the Northern Ireland Protocol carried the sting of the AIA: constitutional change implemented without their consent. Unionists were told to accept it as the price of peace and stability. The Windsor Framework tweaked the details but preserved the principle.  Just as Maryfield became a symbol of unwanted Irish influence in 1985, the post-exit trading arrangements are its modern echo, with EU officials overseeing trade rules within the UK’s internal market.

As this column has argued previously, Northern Ireland’s cultural battlegrounds are another front to the constitutional question. The recent Irish language row in Belfast, far from a benign cultural debate, is an instrument in a wider strategy to advance a nationalist narrative that frames unionist concerns as at best irrational, at worst illegitimate. That same dynamic was present in 1985, when unionists were told that their objections to Dublin’s new role were overblown – even as the AIA fundamentally altered the constitutional landscape. The legacy of the Troubles remains equally unresolved. Attempts to ‘draw a line’ under the past – from the Historical Enquiries Team to Stormont House to the Legacy Act – have all failed for the same reason the AIA initially met with resistance: they were imposed rather than agreed. Victims were asked to accept processes designed around political convenience. Whether in language policy, legacy issues, or extra-EU governance, progress is undermined whenever one community feels that its anxieties are simply being managed rather than acknowledged and addressed.

The anniversary of the AIA therefore serves as a warning as much as a milestone. In 1985, London and Dublin believed that a carefully constructed framework could over-ride profound political insecurity. Instead, it confirmed that stability cannot be manufactured through clever institutional design while one community feels by-passed. The same applies today. The temptation in Whitehall and Brussels is to assume that technical fixes – amended frameworks, revised guidance, cultural accommodations – can smooth over deeper constitutional unease. However, Northern Ireland (and unionism in particular) does not respond to technocratic solutions imposed from above. What unionists require is not another set of assurances drafted elsewhere, but a genuine role in shaping the arrangements that govern their place in the Union.

The lesson of 1985 is that consent is not an inconvenience to be worked around, but the cornerstone of stability. If the AIA’s legacy tells us anything forty years on, it is that Northern Ireland endures only when both traditions feel heard, respected, and protected – not managed.