Noel Dorr is the politest of men, but the most difficult of subjects to interview, even if he is so engaged in the conversation over a lunch near Trinity College that he barely touches his food.
Now a vigorous 91-year-old, Dorr has spent a lifetime involved in Irish diplomacy, remaining as interested today as when he retired as the Department of Foreign Affairs’ most senior official 30 years ago last June.
The lunch was sought to talk about the 40th anniversary of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, one in which Dorr was a central figure as the then Irish ambassador to London, but not just that agreement.
Instead, with little effort, the lunch roams over 700 years of history, and the consequences of history.
RM Block
The rule to the interview, if the word can be used about so polite a man, is that the conversation is less about him, but, rather, more about the things he is interested in. And he is interested in many things.
But, first, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, a treaty signed in Hillsborough by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald on November 15th, 1985 that gave Dublin for the first time a voice in Northern Ireland’s internal affairs.
The road to Hillsborough could be said, perhaps, to have begun in London in May 1980 at the first meeting between Charles Haughey and Thatcher – the famous “silver teapot” summit, one witnessed by Dorr.
The Georgian teapot might never have been presented if then minister for foreign affairs Brian Lenihan had listened to Dorr’s advice: “I tried to persuade Lenihan to persuade Haughey not to give her the gift.
“I thought it would be crass because she wouldn’t have anything for him. If it were a head-of-state visit, there’d be gifts on both sides. But this was to be a working visit with the prime minister, not with the head of state.
“But the gift worked beautifully. It did work. She was genuinely pleased, so I was quite wrong,” continues Dorr, remembers that Haughey was “cock-a-hoop” afterwards.
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However, the Haughey-Thatcher relationship soured. By the mid-1980s, Fitzgerald, now in power, was worried by Sinn Féin’s rise, fearing that it could win United States support and make electoral gains in the Republic without giving up violence.
Dorr’s memories are filled with the names of Foreign Affairs colleagues who played the leading roles in the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, such as Dermot Nally, Michael Lillis and Seán Donlon.
But there are British ones, too, such as David Goodall and Robert Armstrong, both now gone, but still remembered with respect – the names few know, but to whom many should be grateful, he feels.
New ideas, even extraordinary ones, were broached when Lillis and Goodall famously strolled along the Grand Canal in 1983, including Lillis’s push for Irish troops, gardaí and judges on the ground in Northern Ireland.
Such a move, if it had been accepted by the British, would have given nationalists confidence in the rules under which they had to live, so that they would see them as “their own”.
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In return, Goodall wanted Dublin to consider dropping the territorial claim to the North enshrined in Articles 2 and 3 – a claim that was not to fall away until the Belfast Agreement 15 years later.
The British focus on Articles 2 and 3 stayed live for months, until it finally became clear that Thatcher could not go far enough in ways that would tempt Dublin to take a referendum gamble. One it would probably have lost.
Dozens of officials’ meetings were held, “sometimes in clubs in London, sometimes in the Cabinet Office, sometimes in Chevening, the foreign secretary’s residence” Dorr says.
In Ireland, they met mostly in Dublin Castle, or Iveagh House: “We met somewhere that’s now a Cheshire Home, I think, or something like that, or a home for children, some big house down in the Midlands.
“Very much in secret. I was under strict instructions to keep it to myself, even within the embassy in London. I did detailed reports for home,” he remembers, “but we gradually worked our way towards the deal.”
Deep friendships were created: “Each side was honest and faithful to its mandate. But that didn’t mean that being thrown together so much that we didn’t develop a friendship and a respect. We did.”
For the British, the Free State was a pretty extreme solution. It was the farthest out they could contemplate
— Noel Dorr
For Dorr, however, the 1985 is but one chapter, if an important one, in the centuries-old Anglo-Irish relationship. No stranger to writing books, he has written a third that is now with his agent, tracing that history over 700 years.
For it can be understood only through the broad sweep: “I’m too deeply drawn into the history. To really understand The Troubles, you must go back much further,” he says.
Modern-day Irish history is rooted in the plantations in the 1600s, Dorr says: “The origins of the division lie in the 17th century, when the plantation of Ulster, in particular, led to the development of two different communities on the island.”
However, he takes no simplistic, green-tinged attitude to the past. The Act of Union in 1801 was an attempt by the prime minister of the day, William Pitt, to “solve the divisions that history had left by joining the two islands together.
“In his view, it would allow Catholic emancipation and allow freedom, complete freedom to Catholics within the larger polity of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, his intention was frustrated.
“King George III, and a good deal of the political establishment in Britain opposed emancipation, and it was only achieved a generation later under O’Connell,” Dorr goes on.
Later chapters of Irish history are equally less well understood, too, he argues, particularly the Anglo-Irish Treaty that led to the ending of the War of Independence and the creation of the Free State.
Partition was not a last-gasp attempt by the British to maintain a hold on part of Ireland, he argues, but rather the minimum that it had to keep if it was to disentangle itself from a political and military morass.
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“It wasn’t intended to be lasting. The British would have wanted the whole thing settled. But they couldn’t, at that stage, in the face of the absolute intransigence that was shown by the unionists.
“For the British, the Free State was a pretty extreme solution, it was the farthest out they could contemplate. And, remember, Lloyd George was a minority in his own government, so his room for manoeuvre was limited.”
The Anglo-Irish Treaty differed, too, from the approach taken by London elsewhere in its empire, since London regarded it as an international treaty: “This was a recognition of Ireland as a separate polity.
“It was a treaty between two political entities rather than simply the ending of a colonial relationship within the empire,” says the former diplomat, breaking off for a moment to order.
Notwithstanding that Lloyd George was “devious and a trickster”, Dorr tends to accept the diaries of a contemporary top British official, Thomas Jones, who recorded the Welsh politician’s time in 10 Downing Street.
Over five or six pages in Jones’ diary, Lloyd George recites the options London had tried, and failed: “Whether he was sincere or not, it comes across as the best apologia for partition,” says Dorr.
The history tour offered by Dorr – and this is just a part – is no lecture, however. The past is important and the way it is remembered even more so, he says, pausing to find his mobile telephone that has burrowed itself beneath a volume of paper.
Finally, the mobile is found, and quietened. Resuming, Dorr recalls his days in primary school in Foxford, Co Mayo: “Maybe you didn’t, but I learned stuff about prehistory, about the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha Dé Danann as if it were history.
“And when the Celts came, and then others came like the Normans and the Danes and so on, and were assimilated. And then the plantation. So why wouldn’t they take their place in the quilted pattern of Ireland?”
For 40 years after partition, Dublin and London forgot about Northern Ireland, leaving a unionist-controlled Stormont to discriminate, before both struggled to cope with the crisis after the Troubles erupted in 1969.
Old habits took years to fall away, only to return repeatedly. Conservative prime minister Ted Heath rebuffed taoiseach Jack Lynch’s complaints about nationalists’ treatment, declaring that Dublin had no role.
“‘You are a foreign government. You’re friendly, but this is our business.’ That was the line. There were some very rough exchanges. But Bloody Sunday transformed the scene for the British.”
By then, Heath realised that things had to change, which led him to import many of the ideas long pushed by Dublin, including powersharing in Stormont and the Irish dimension, even if he did not admit that.
Everything led to the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973: “My memory of Heath [then] was that of a benevolent outsider willing to more or less accept whatever the North and South in Ireland could agree on,” Dorr remembers.
Years later, Dorr, by then ambassador to London, visited Heath in his Wiltshire retirement: “He believed that he had done it at Sunningdale, and that Harold Wilson had failed to face down the unionists afterwards.
“He was friendly. Whatever rough language he had exchanged with Lynch was long, long forgotten and he was a well-meaning mediator who was disappointed that his best efforts hadn’t succeeded,” he says.
The Ulster Unionist leader, Brian Faulkner, proved “much weaker than we had thought” when the Berkshire deal was signed, though he was not helped by the Irish government’s inability publicly to back the deal.
The restriction was forced by a legal challenge from Fianna Fáil’s Kevin Boland, who argued that the government’s signature on the deal was invalid because it contravened Articles 2 and 3.
“We were blocked in every way from helping. Faulkner needed help. He needed almost a crusade to help him, to say, ‘Give us a chance, we have now a fair settlement’,” Dorr says.
Though he does not volunteer the phrase, Boland was “an awkward sod”, Dorr agrees, repeating the words back slowly: “Sunningdale needed to be ‘sold’ and we weren’t able to sell it,” he says.
In a month where the memories of retired politicians and diplomats of a certain vintage will go back 40 years to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, for Dorr and others, Sunningdale will always be the one that got away.
