Jacques Chirac, the former French president, has blasted Britain's former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for the way she handled the Irish hunger strikes in 1981.

"No reform is worth the death of a man. All those who know me know I have little in common in this regard to Margaret Thatcher, who preferred to let a dozen Irish militants die rather than give into their demands," he writes in the first of his two-book memoirs; "Each Step Must Be Itself a Goal."

Chirac of course is commenting on the 1981 deaths of the nine Maze prisoners, including the most well-known Bobby Sands, who went on hunger strike in protest at the removal of their "special category" status.

The prisoners considered themselves political prisoners. Thatcher's government considered them criminals.

And so Thatcher's government turned its face away from what was actually happening in the North where support for the hunger strikers was so high that Sands was elected to Britain's House of Commons.

Thatcher refused to negotiate, saying: "Crime is crime is crime, it is not political."

The consequences of Thatcher's refusal to negotiate with anyone (think miners and Fleet Street) still resonate to this day.

And surely, for the North, peace could have come much sooner had Thatcher not been in charge during such a pivotal time.

After the strike ended, Lady Thatcher said: "Faced with the failure of their discredited cause, the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what may well be their last card."

Well, we all know how well that turned out.