Ahern denies Adams claim on McCabe killers
The claim was made by Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams yesterday, who said that in private discussions with the Taoiseach during the 1998 negotiations, Mr Ahern had left him with the clear understanding that all IRA prisoners, including the four men convicted for the manslaughter of Mr McCabe, would qualify for release under the terms of the Agreement (GFA).
Mr Adams assertion, made at a Sinn Féin election launch, was strongly disputed by Mr Ahern in the Dáil later in the day.
He said that Mr Adams was “under an enormous misapprehension” in his recollection of their private meeting. “The Government made it clear at the time of the GFA that the release of Jerry McCabe’s killers was not covered by the Agreement. I said so on several occasions in a latter and subsequent statements to this House and elsewhere.”
“Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness argued that they should be covered but we argued that it should not,” he said.
Mr Ahern said that the McCabe killers were convicted in February 1999, 10 months after the GFA negotiations took place. “We made it clear that the GFA would not include this aspect,” he said.
The Taoiseach’s recollection of the discussions was at odds with those of Mr Adams earlier in the day. “The reality is that I spoke to the Taoiseach on this matter during the GFA negotiations and I said that if these people on remand are convicted then they will have to be part of that. I left the Taoiseach on the very clear understanding that that was his understanding of the situation. If you look at the Agreement you will not find any get-out clause, Mr Adams said.
“What the Irish Government then did was to give that discretion for release to the minister. The reason we argue on the issue because under the terms of the Agreement.”
Asked if the Taoiseach had expressly stated that the McCabe killers would qualify for early release, he replied: “Well, he told me that he understood that all of these prisoners who were involved with the IRA would have to be released without exception.”
He went on to say that the meeting was a private one-to-one meeting between the two men. Saying that Sinn Féin were negotiating a hugely difficult agreement for republicans, he argued that there was “no way that the management of SF were going to leave those negotiations without being assured that everybody who was about to be released as part of that agreement were going to be released”.
“We were probably dealing with a hypothetical situation that those people were on remand. I made it very very clear that they would have to be released if they were sentenced. I left the Taoiseach with the very clear understanding and that was my view that there was nothing in the agreement that demurred from that,”
Mr Adams said during the launch of Sinn Féin’s election campaign yesterday.
