The Boundary Commission Revisited: The Thatcher–FitzGerald Talks

Almost sixty years after the Boundary Commission fiasco, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher suggested to Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald that the Irish border should be substantially redrawn. The revision was just what Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith had hoped for when they signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, but it was rejected by FitzGerald in 1984 as a potentially ‘fatal mistake’.

After her first term in Downing Street, Thatcher had come to the conclusion that a new frontier, which would involve the transfer of a significant number of nationalists into the Irish Republic, was the solution to the ongoing violence of the Provisional IRA.