McCabe killers - Honesty is the best policy

TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern insisted yesterday that the Government was contemplating the release of the killers of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe only in the context of the acceptance by the IRA of total arms decommissioning and an end to all forms of paramilitarism.

This would seem to run counter to repeated assurances that the killers would not be released early.

During the referendum campaign on the Good Friday Agreement, government ministers repeatedly stated that the terms of the agreement did not apply to the McCabe killers. Subsequent events would seem to confirm the Government’s stance, because all of the prisoners to whom the agreement did apply have already been released.

Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams stated recently, however, that the release of the killers was to have been part of the ill-fated agreement last October.

The Taoiseach appeared to confirm this in the Dáil. He explained, however, that it would not have been in return for a single act of decommissioning but in the context “of total acts of completion”.

It would have been part of a “complex set of undertakings, involving a range of elements which would emerge as a sequence of agreed statements and supporting actions,” the Taoiseach insisted. The people of this state would not be asked to agree to anything that the people of Britain and Northern Ireland had not subscribed to in the Good Friday Agreement.

People who murdered police in both Britain and Northern Ireland have long since been released. This was undoubtedly disagreeable to the families of the RUC and British police, as well as the families of so many other innocent people who were killed in cold blood, minding their own business.

The release of the McCabe killers would be extremely unpalatable, but people would probably understand and accept it, if the IRA made a clear and unambiguous declaration and demonstrated conclusively its termination of all forms of paramilitary activity.

Sinn Féin and the IRA cannot be allowed to use the release issue as some kind of bargaining ploy. No self-respecting government in any republic can be seen to bargain with the lives of its servants.

The whole issue has been causing public disquiet, because the Taoiseach seems to be saying one thing, while Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has been taking a very different line, as has Willie O’Dea, the Minister of State at the Department of Justice. Fianna Fáil MEP Gerard Collins has been taking a similar stand in his re-election campaign.

Sinn Féin became ensnared in the web of its own deception, when it initially denied IRA responsibility for the McCabe murder. Even though the Government insisted that the Good Friday Agreement did not cover this killing, it has come dangerously close to ensnaring itself in a web of deceit.

The whole thing must be very distressing for the McCabe family and for his Garda colleagues. PJ Stone, the General Secretary of the Garda Representative Association, has called for total honesty on the part of the Government.

Members of the Government must assume their constitutional responsibility to speak, as a collective, with one clear, unambiguous voice.