By Mairead Carey

As all parties inch towards a deal in the North, it is almost certain that the killers of Detective Garda (Police Officer) Jerry McCabe would be released as part of an overall settlement. 

Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern is expected to meet the widow of McCabe, who was shot dead in Adare in 1996, once the IRA formally offers to decommission its weapons. 

Ahern told the Dail (Parliament) on Tuesday that the IRA men who received a manslaughter sentence for McCabe’s killing would have to be released as part of a lasting peace agreement in the North.

“If we are to have a comprehensive deal, this matter will be part of it, and I would recommend that that be the case. I do not see how we will be able to deal with it otherwise,” he said. 

His comments have provoked fury inside and outside the Dail. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said the release of the killers would completely undermine the integrity and authority of the office of the taoiseach.

Kenny said the release would prove categorically that the government was incapable of upholding the rule of law or of distinguishing between right and wrong. Its solemn commitments not to release the killers should not be overturned by the IRA Army Council, he said. 

McCabe’s killers were not freedom fighters, but thugs and bank robbers who murdered Jerry McCabe in cold blood, according to Kenny, and he asked how Justice Minister Michael McDowell could look any Garda recruit in the eye and say, “This government will stand by you as you put your life on the line for us.”

Former Progressive Democrats leader Des O’Malley said their release would “appease terrorism.”

Pearse McCauley, Jeremiah Sheehy, Kevin Walsh and Michael O’Neill are all serving lengthy prison sentences for the killing in June 1996. McCabe was shot several times as he sat in a car outside the post office in Adare, Co. Limerick.

His colleague Ben O’Sullivan was seriously injured when the IRA men opened fire on them. 

On February 9, 1999, McCauley, originally from Strabane, Co. Tyrone, and Sheehy, from Limerick, were jailed for 14 years and 12 years respectively after pleading guilty at the Special Criminal Court to the manslaughter of McCabe. 

Walsh, 45, from Patrickswell, Co. Limerick, also got a 14-year jail term, and O’Neill was jailed for 11 years for the same offense. A fifth man, John Quinn, pleaded guilty to conspiring with other persons to commit robbery and was jailed for six years.

The four are now serving their sentence in the low-security jail in Castlerea. They have been freed on occasion on temporary release, to the annoyance of both McCabe’s widow Ann and the Garda Representative Association. 

Mrs. McCabe is angry at the proposal to release the men in the context of an overall settlement in the North, and says that it is unjust of Sinn Fein and the IRA to hold her hostage and make out she is standing in the way of the peace process.

Mrs. McCabe this week accused Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams of diminishing her grief and that of her family by continually saying on radio and television that her husband had been killed, rather than murdered.

“I don’t know if any of Gerry Adams’s family was killed in the Troubles and I can’t speak for him,” Mrs. McCabe said.

“But let’s be very clear about this and let me say this to Gerry Adams: Jerry was never part of the Good Friday Agreement, never. If he was, then there would have been nothing we could have done about it, but he wasn’t.

“It’s unjust of Sinn Fein and the IRA to now hold me a hostage and make out I’m standing in the way of the peace process. We all signed up for peace, I voted for the Good Friday Agreement because they (her husband’s killers) didn’t come under it at the time. Their release was never on the table, as far I was concerned, during negotiations and I’m wondering now when it was put on the table,” she added.

The Garda Representative Association met with Ahern on Tuesday and reiterated their position on the release of the men.

“Guns should not be put to the head of the Garda Representative Association or Ann McCabe on this issue,” said spokesperson Paul Browne.

“The mistake, in my view, was made by the Government in putting this on the agenda with Sinn Fein when they knew full well that they should not because they had struck a deal with the GRA and, most importantly, with the McCabe family.”