Guerin reported on attack weeks before death

JUNE 7, 1996, was back in the news yesterday when two IRA killers walked free from Castlerea prison.

Kevin Walsh and Pearse McAuley were among the gang which carried out a botched robbery on that June morning more than 13 years ago.

Detective Garda Jerry McCabe and Det Garda Ben O’Sullivan were gunned down by Walsh, who was armed with a Kalashnikov, even though neither garda posed any threat to him or his gang.

They were seated in their unmarked car and surrounded by the gang, who were planning to rob pension money from a post office lorry.

Neither garda had time to draw their Uzis or service revolvers.

Yet Walsh sprayed the car with gunfire.

In June 1996 I was news editor of the Limerick Leader. I had awoken to a glorious summer’s morning when I received word of what was to become the biggest and most horrific Limerick news story in my time, having started out at the Leader in 1971 as a junior reporter.

Ben O’Sullivan, a good friend for many years, who I had got to know when covering the district court, was badly wounded and another garda was dead in an attempted robbery in Adare.

I knew Ben and Jerry worked together in the Special Branch and feared that Jerry was the deadgarda.

I had met them in John Brennan’s pub, now a coffee shop in Catherine Street, after they had finished their shift only two days previously.

Jerry was from my own part of the country, north Kerry, and my late mother was a friend of his father, Johnny McCabe.

On getting to the Leader office, Eugene Phelan, now news editor of the Leader, confirmed my worst fear. Jerry was dead and Ben was in a very bad way at the Regional Hospital.

As reporters arrived in, we had one big problem from a journalistic point of view: our last paper of the week, the Friday city edition of the Leader, had been printed the night before, on Thursday night.

We decided to get stuck into the story in the expectation that a special edition might be brought out.

It was a massive story. While the names of the two gardaí were widely known, neither had been officially named.

We were building up profiles on Jerry and Ben and had amassed a huge amount of material on their careers and their family backgrounds within an hour.

Pat Kenny’s radio programme producer contacted me to take a call at the top of the programme at 11am. Minutes before going on air, I contacted Henry Street Garda Station and was given the all clear to name the dead and wounded garda as their families had been notified.

So I was the reporter who first made public the names of Jerry and Ben as the gardaí shot in Adare.

A few hours later a briefing was called at Henry Street. On entering the public office at the station, the first person I met was the late Veronica Guerin and we worked together over the coming days. Little did I know that within weeks she too would be shot dead.

Sometime on the afternoon of the Adare shooting, there was another major development in the investigation. Explosive devices were found in the jeep used by the gang to ram Jerry and Ben’s Garda car and in another car used as a getaway vehicle.

They had failed to explode and presented garda forensic experts with a vast amount of material which helped them identify the main gang members.

The IRA gang based in west Limerick were involved in numerous robberies at the time and Kevin Walsh was known to be a foremost figure.

The search for him and others was well focussed within hours of the attack.

Gerry Adams and others in Sinn Féin seem to think Adare is now over and done with after yesterday’s releases.

They had better think again. For some the horror visited on the families of Ben and Jerry will not be forgotten.