Thirty years on, I’m still loath to mention her name!

I tried not to write about her. You’ve all read, heard and seen so much about the woman, you doubtless need a break.

But I can’t help it. Thirty years later it still feels raw.

Being a hopelessly non-violent man who is generally crap at confrontation, there have been few people who’ve earned my hatred. It seems absurd to hate a distant dead woman, yet when I think of her, a raging anger inside me burns like acid through to the core of my soul and sense of justice.

I occupied the same space as her on two occasions, but the time I felt her presence most darkly and profoundly, she was physically far away.

As an eleven year old in 1971, my Tory parents took me to a meeting where the then Education Secretary for Edward Heath’s government was to make a speech. She’d recently scrapped a programme of free milk for the under-7s, and earned a moniker that would haunt her entire career. Edward Short, then the Labour education spokesman, described her action as “… the meanest and most unworthy thing I have ever seen.”

Far too young and ambivalent to care about such things, I do remember my dad getting flustered and red in the face when a bunch of protesters started shouting “Milk Snatcher! Milk Snatcher!” from the back of the hall.The next time I shared a space with the woman she was at the height of her power, at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth in October 1986.

Somehow I’d got a gig running a stall for the Glass Manufacturers Federation at all three party conferences that year. After a feeble gathering of Liberals in Harrogate and a hopeless and depressing Labour Party effort in Blackpool, the Conservative Party conference was doubtless the main event.

It was only two years after the IRA had bombed her hotel at the Brighton conference, so Bournemouth had been transformed into a military enclave. Snipers strolled rooftops, checkpoints popped up everywhere and it was all a bit intimidating. Yet nothing compared to the afternoon she made her conference speech.The convention centre was vast but crammed with an atmosphere of electric anticipation.

A half hour before her speech, I was sitting in the bar, watching the usually calm journalistic colossus Robin Day twitch and flit around like a schoolboy with itching powder in his pants. Geoffrey Howe and Malcolm Rifkind were skulking about the corridors, speaking in hushed tones, as if God might hear their conspiracies.

Predictably, the moment she appeared on stage the place went berserk. Even though I was standing as far away as is possible while being present, I still felt the tsunami of charisma that emanated from the woman.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.