Margaret Thatcher secretly feared that giving concessions to Irish republicans could trigger separatist demands from Asians in Britain

Margaret Thatcher secretly feared that giving concessions to Irish republicans could trigger separatist demands from Asians in Britain, official files reveal today.

They show she fretted about the effect that appeasing nationalists in Northern Ireland – for example, relaxing the rules on flying flags – would have on other minorities in the UK.

Speaking at an Irish peace-building summit 30 years ago, she said: ‘If these things were done, the next question would be what comes next?

‘Were the Sikhs in Southall to be allowed to fly their own flag?’

Southall, an Asian enclave in West London, became a hotbed of racial tensions in the 1970s.

It was there that Blair Peach, an anti-racist campaigner, was killed after police knocked him unconscious during a protest against the National Front in 1979.

It was also the scene of a notorious race riot in 1981.

The late Baroness Thatcher told of her fears behind closed doors during her meeting with then Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald for talks at Chequers in November 1984. She could not understand why Catholics in Northern Ireland were looking for certain rights and demanding reforms in policing, justice, equality and power-sharing.

And she said there were minorities all over Europe who were not making the same sort of claims.

The newly declassified files released by Dublin’s National Archives contain an official note of the two-hour Chequers summit that reveals Mrs Thatcher’s ‘incomprehension’ as to what exactly Irish nationalists wanted. The meeting was described as rapid and vigorous by those there.

Mr FitzGerald, then leader of the Fine Gael party, explained that the minority felt they were Irish and a part of the majority of the island of Ireland ‘from which they had been cut off by an arbitrary act’.

The British had drawn a line around the six counties, creating a Protestant majority, cutting off the minority from the nation and people were ‘set against each other within a narrow space,’ he said.

He added there was ‘hard evidence’ of bias in the justice, security and policing systems in Northern Ireland while the guns of the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment were being used to ‘bully’ Catholics.

The late Baroness Thatcher told of her fears behind closed doors during a meeting with Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald

Mr FitzGerald warned Mrs Thatcher that she needed to deal with the alienation of northern nationalists.

‘They cannot fly the flag of their own nation in their own country,’ he said. But Mrs Thatcher insisted she could not understand why a minority would seek ‘particular prerogatives as of right’.

Turning to Europe, she said Macedonians, Croats, Serbs and Sudeten Germans were minorities who had no special rights in their countries.

But Mr FitzGerald rejected the comparisons.

He asked his British counterpart where else in the world could one sixth of the population say they had relatives imprisoned.