February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The four men remain in jail for the manslaughter of Det. Garda Jerry McCabe in 1996, despite Sinn Fein’s claim that they qualify under the terms of the Good Friday agreement.
Bertie Ahern told the Dail last Wednesday that the men would have been released last year if the IRA had decommissioned fully as part of a sequence intended to restore Northern Ireland’s political institutions.
“It was to happen only in the context of acts of total completion,” he said. “That term means arms decommissioning and an end to all forms of paramilitarism by the IRA, which means that the IRA will have moved definitively away from violence to the end position.”
The October 2003 deal collapsed when the UUP leader, David Trimble, declared himself dissatisfied with the amount of detail on the IRA’s third act of decommissioning, despite the approval of the Independent International Commission.
The Irish and British governments subsequently followed Trimble in reneging on a deal to proceed with the agreement, including a side deal to free the remaining four IRA prisoners.
Ahern said it had been consistently made clear that a “complete” transition to a peaceful and democratic society in the North was required for their release.
“It was only one part of the total process of what we were trying to negotiate in April and October. We are still trying and have not been successful,” he said, and there was no sign of an immediate breakthrough.
Speaking earlier, Gerry Adams confirmed there had been a deal to release the men.
“The focus of the Sinn Fein leadership since then has been to get the process working again,” he said. “I am confident that that is [Ahern’s] aim also and we are working very closely to achieve this.”
The DUP leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, criticized the taoiseach. “What confidence can unionists have in him when it appears Bertie Ahern is prepared to break his word and release murderers in order to placate the demands of Sinn Fein/IRA?” he said.
“The only way forward is for Sinn Fein/IRA to disarm and forever commit themselves to exclusively peaceful and democratic means. It is only then can there be real progress to lasting peace.”
“Mr. Ahern has already demonstrated what he is prepared to do in order to save himself. Soft talk about enduring peace and then resorting to do what he is about to do with the McCabe murderers is the vilest of hypocrisy.”
DUP European election candidate Jim Allister told Ahern not to follow Tony Blair’s example by breaking his pledge not to release the killers of Garda McCabe.
“While it is welcoming that Bertie Ahern should pledge that the IRA killers of Garda Jerry McCabe are to be kept in prison, there are those of us who will remember his British counterparts promise in 1998 that prisoners would be kept in jail unless violence was given up for good.
“This is obviously insufficient. The rule of law and the criminal justice system in the Irish Republic should not be perverted in the same way as it has been in Northern Ireland,” Allister said.
The SDLP deputy leader, Alasdair McDonnell, has accused Sinn Fein of letting nationalists down by negotiating for members of their own movement at the expense of a broader agenda. “Sinn Fein tells us again and again that they are out negotiating on equality and human rights. In fact, again and again, they negotiate for themselves alone,” he said.
“Whatever you think of getting an amnesty for On the Runs or getting Gerry McCabe’s killers out, one thing is clear: it has nothing to do with securing equality for nationalists or implementing the agreement.”