Garret FitzGerald

As Taoiseach, FitzGerald negotiated the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher in 1985, giving the Irish government a formal consultative role in Northern Ireland through a standing intergovernmental conference and secretariat at Maryfield. Unionists protested furiously, but the agreement established that London and Dublin would manage the conflict together, the framework within which every later deal was made. His 1981 'constitutional crusade' to make the Republic more pluralist was part of the same project.