By Niall O’Dowd

The killing of Garda (Police Officer) Jerry McCabe has once again moved center stage in the Irish political debate over the peace process. Like the Pat Finucane case in the North, it simply never seems to go away.

The killing of McCabe in June 1996 was one of the worst outrages of The Troubles and occurred at a time when the IRA was supposedly on ceasefire. I was in Ireland when it happened, and the public reaction matched that of the slaying of journalist Veronica Guerin which also occurred that month.

McCabe was shot in a hail of bullets when a mail van robbery gone wrong occurred at Adare, near Limerick City, on June 7. A renegade group of IRA members were responsible and four men were subsequently caught and jailed.

The McCabe story is never far from the media headlines in Ireland. The outrage over killing a cop — and by all accounts a decent and beloved family man — was widespread. 

McCabe’s widow, Ann, has proven a determined guardian of her husband’s memory and a strong opponent of the attempts to have his killers freed as part of the final Good Friday Agreement peace deal.

The killing of a cop in Ireland used to be grounds for the now defunct death penalty. Because Irish cops in general are unarmed it is considered an even more heinous crime as a result. 

The idea of letting cop killers go free, especially one killed in so brutal a manner, sticks in the craw of every Irishman and woman.

The McCabe issue has become a political minefield for all the political parties involved. Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern accepts that under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement all prisoners related to The Troubles must go free, including McCabe’s killers. That is the price of peace in Ireland, one that, in the McCabe case, does not come cheap.

One of the most cynical maneuvers in Irish politics for some time occurred last weekend when the Progressive Democrats, the minority partner in the Irish government coalition, decided they would oppose the peace deal being put together by Ahern. Basically it once again involved fallout from the McCabe case.

The PDs had been feeling the heat and the stinging criticism in the media because Ahern had stated very publicly what had been rumored for months — that as part of the final deal, the killers of Garda McCabe would be released.

In 2003, on the last occasion that a comprehensive peace deal almost happened, the release of the McCabe killers was agreed by the Irish government side, including the PDs.

However, when the current media backlash, stoked as usual by the neo-Unionist cabal in the Irish media began, the PDs quickly began to run for cover.

Rather than confront the issue of McCabe, however, and accept that they had acquiesced in the potential release of his killers, the PDs raised a totally spurious objection that Ahern had gone too soft on the IRA in the proposed peace deal. The reason they stated was that there was no evidence whatever in the peace document that the IRA had also agreed to end alleged criminal behavior.

It was a minor point, but one calculated to earn kudos for the PDs and paint them as hard on the IRA, thereby winning back some of their core vote which was upset at them over agreeing with Ahern on releasing McCabe’s killers.

It has left the PDs open to the charge of quite unprincipled opportunism. After all, not even Ian Paisley had raised the issue of alleged IRA criminal dealings and had essentially ignored the McCabe issue. 

But the PDs obviously felt they had to create space between them and Ahern on the issue, but in so doing they jeopardized the very agreement that the coalition government has spent so long seeking to bring about.

For the PDs it may have been a way of ensuring viability. They are a tiny party, with only a handful of TDs, as Irish parliamentary representatives are known, and are utterly dependent on Fianna Fail to stay in power. 

Paradoxically, it does them no harm every now and then to prove their independence from their coalition partner. 

By midweek the McCabe case once again raged in the newspapers, as those for and against freeing his killers made their points. There seems little doubt that it is an issue that will not go away, and even if there is a final peace deal it will continue to rumble.