McCabe widow welcomes legal costs move
The widow of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe today praised the courts after her husband’s IRA killers were ordered to pay the costs of their failed bid for freedom.
Ann McCabe’s husband was gunned down by a Provisional gang during a botched raid on a post office in Adare, Co Limerick, in 1996.
Two of his killers, Pearse McAuley and Jeremiah Sheehy are serving 14 and 12 years for his manslaughter and sought release under the Good Friday Agreement, claiming their detention breached their human rights.
The High Court threw out that challenge before Christmas and today the two terrorists were dealt a second blow and ordered to pay costs for their failed lawsuit.
Mrs McCabe said it was the right decision.
“I don’t think they should be allowed costs. If it was the likes of you or I that had to go to the High Court in the morning we would have to pay our own costs,” she told newstalk radio.
“[It would be] the taxpayers’ money that are paying their costs so I don’t see why they should.”
But Mrs McCabe warned that the two IRA men had plenty of supporters ready to help them pay the legal bill.
“I’m very glad at the outcome of the High Court that they have to pay their own [costs], but I’m sure they won’t be found wanting. There will be people that want to pay their money for them – people within Sinn Féin/IRA, people who they represent and who represent them,” she said.
In 1999, McAuley, 40, originally from Strabane, County Tyrone, and Sheehy, 45, from Limerick, pleaded guilty at the non-jury Special Criminal Court in Dublin to the manslaughter of Det Gda McCabe during an attempted robbery outside Adare post office in June 1996.
They opened fire on him and his close colleague Ben O’Sullivan as they sat in an unmarked car guarding a cash delivery van. Mr O’Sullivan survived.
During their bid for freedom, the men’s lawyers argued they should be released because they were qualifying prisoners under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
But Mr Justice Daniel Herbert ruled their imprisonment was not discrimination.
He also said it made no difference whether the offence was prior to or subsequent to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Before the case was brought Sinn Féin claimed the pair were to be released as part of a secret deal to restore the North’s power-sharing executive in 2003.
At that time, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said the releases were conditional on the IRA decommissioning and an end to paramilitarism.
However, last year, Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern warned that Sinn Féin would hit a brick wall if it again requested their early release.
