It’ll be painful, but early releases will happen if peace talks succeed

IF a broken promise will ultimately bring a permanent settlement to Northern Ireland, then political expediency will prevail and Jerry McCabe’s killers will not serve their full sentence.

Whatever assurances Minister for Justice Michael McDowell may have given to the Garda Representative Association (GRA) are irrelevant because he was pre-conditioned by the imperative of a Northern solution.

Yet the representatives of the GRA afterwards said that they were "reassured" that the killers will remain in jail.