Why
Jerry McCabe's killers should walk free There are moral as well as political
reasons for releasing the killers of Jerry McCabe, writes Fintan O'Toole
From IRISH TIMES August 5th, 2000
Aside from the pain that it would cause Jerry McCabe's family, the strongest
argument against the release of his killers is the message it would send
to Irish society as a whole. But what message does a refusal to release
them send in the context of the dozens of other early releases? It inevitably
suggests that there are different categories of victims in the bleak history
of the Troubles. If some killers are singled out for special treatment,
the inescapable implication is that some deaths somehow matter more than
others. Contrary to their own best intentions, those who make this kind
of argument actually fall in with the logic of the killers themselves. The
organisation responsible for the killing of Jerry McCabe was besotted with
the notion of "legitimate targets", sifting human beings through its own
warped categories into proper and improper objects of its annihilating contempt.
To suggest that what happened in Adare in June 1996 was somehow of a higher
order of crime to what happened in Greysteel three years earlier or in Ballymoney
a year later is to engage, however inadvertently, in the same kind of reasoning.
For the one thing that makes the killing of Jerry McCabe exceptional is
that he was not, in the IRA's own terms, a legitimate target. By its own
rules, the IRA was not supposed to murder members of the Republic's security
forces. But to accept that this really makes some kind of fundamental difference
is to take one's morality from the IRA. It is surely far better, and far
less dangerous to democracy and the rule of law, to take it from the Belfast
Agreement and its open, honest, clear-eyed decision to choose the lesser
evil of early releases over the much greater evil of endless violence. |
