Introduction

The much-feted partnership between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and that, albeit to a lesser extent, between Thatcher and George H. W. Bush, and then Bush and John Major marked an upturn in Anglo-American relations that, in some ways, had declined since the 1960s and 1970s. The Reagan–Thatcher relationship comprised a personal friendship between the President and the Prime Minister, a commonality in economic philosophies and a broader belief in individual freedom, and a stronger response to the Soviet Union and renewed Cold War tensions. The Bush administration lessened the emphasis on Anglo-American relations with its focus on Germany in the context of the ending of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the new world order. Inevitably, any policy or attitude towards Northern Ireland during the Reagan and Bush administrations must be viewed in these contexts.

In November 1982, the Irish government internally outlined its policy towards the US and Northern Ireland. During the previous ten years, the main components of the policy were: to secure American recognition of and concern about the Northern Ireland conflict as ‘a destabilizing factor in Western Europe’; for the US to recognise that it was a political problem and not ‘simply a matter of British internal security’; for the US government to agree a solution revolving around consensual ‘reunification of North and South’; for the US government to pressure the British government to act along such lines; to secure American cooperation in tackling Irish–American financial support for dealing with violence; and to achieve American investment in Northern Ireland and the Republic so as ‘to create conditions in which violence would cease to flourish as prosperity grows’. By the time of Reagan's presidency, the Irish government could certainly claim to have achieved American co-operation in tackling support for the IRA and the promise of increased investment in Northern Ireland, subject to a political solution being agreed. Whereas Irish–Americans, including some in Congress, satisfied the remainder of the Irish government's list, they had failed to convince successive presidents to intervene to an extent that would have fulfilled the remaining criteria. However, there was a suggestion that some within the Reagan administration favoured a united Ireland, and the President did endorse a political solution in the form of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA).