Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. And for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. Her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights.

Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. And when I and several other Sinn Féin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain.

Margaret Thatcher’s government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised, to a greater extent than ever before, collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads.

It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association.

Nelson travelled to South Africa where he helped negotiate a deal that saw the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance acquire AK-47 automatic rifles, pistols, grenades, and RPG rocket launchers in late 1987 or early 1988. The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more.

But it was the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989 that reveals the depth of the Thatcher government’s state collusion policy. At every level of his killing, British agents and agencies had a hand: the leader of the UDA group that carried out the killing was a Special Branch agent, as was the man who confessed to being the gunman, and the man who supplied the gun. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence.

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