McCabe killers - Self-serving apology masks truth

The apology and expressions of regret by the killers of Jerry McCabe, after almost nine years, seems more like an opportunistic ploy than a sincere expression of remorse.

In the wake of the Northern Bank raid, the Government stated that the release of the four IRA killers was not open to negotiations.

The issue had been firmly closed and yesterday’s statement was essentially an expedient and self-serving recognition of that reality.

It was self-serving because the apology was used to mask a cynical attack on the Government, which they accused of reneging on an obligation to release them.

From the outset, the Government stressed that those men were not covered by the Good Friday Agreement. The whole issue was initially distorted by the tangled web of lies spun by the IRA and Sinn Féin in seeking to disassociate themselves from the murder.

The Government was emphatic at the time of the agreement that the killers of Jerry McCabe would not be released, but Sinn Féin has been using this issue to obscure the IRA’s own decommissioning failures.

Yesterday’s statement sought to confuse matters by accusing members of the Government of reneging on a non-existent commitment to release the four men.

“They have refused to do so and are now presenting our release as an obstacle to the negotiations and an agreement,” the prisoners claimed. “For this reason we do not want our release to be part of any further negotiations with the Irish Government.”

This is a flagrant distortion. It was Sinn Féin that tried to present the continued imprisonment of the four men as an impediment to the full implementation of the agreement.

It is grossly insulting to the McCabe family for these men to proffer an apology on the one hand and at the same time claim that they are being “used as political pawns or hostages” to undermine the peace process.

The McCabe family graciously accepted the apology in a spirit of Christian reconciliation, but the cynical attempt by the killers to present themselves as somehow being the people who were wronged, detracts from their apology and seriously undermines their expressions of regret, other than their regret at having been caught and deprived of their liberty in line with due process.

They are not the ones that have been wronged. It is Jerry McCabe’s widow who was robbed of her husband and her children who were deprived of their father.

How dare his killers seek to use such expressions of regret for their own distorted ends. Their apology was distorted by the addition of the self-serving comments that detracted from it and confused the real purpose of the statement.

What was the real aim - to express regret, or to attack the Government with their twisted protestations of having been wronged?

Of course, the Government does have an obligation to release the four men - when they have served their time and no sooner. They will all likely be released between May 2007 and August 2009, then they will be able to return to their families.

But Jerry McCabe will never come home.