Editorial: IRA were certainly prepared to kill Irish security force members if they got in the way

Detective Garda Jerry McCabe was 52 when he was killed by the IRA 30 years ago.

​If he had not been slain in the line of duty that day, he might be alive and well now aged in his early 80s.

He was escorting a van that was preparing to unload mail in Limerick when the attack happened, during a Provisional IRA campaign that had been paused with the ceasefire of August 1994, but was resumed in Canary Wharf atrocity of early 1996, when Sinn Fein were not making the progress towards talks that IRA demanded (when the IRA later come off violence again, in 1997, Tony Blair was in power and SF admission to talks was swift).

Detective Garda McCabe’s widow Ann has kept his memory alive for three decades – an uncomfortable experience for a republican movement that killed other members of the Irish security forces such as the prison officer Brian Stack. In an embarrassing moment for Martin McGuinness in his bid to become president of Ireland in 2011, David Kelly—the son of Private Patrick Kelly, an Irish soldier murdered by the IRA —confronted the then Sinn Féin MLA over the killing.

The provisionals did not target the Irish security forces during the Troubles the way they did UK ones – Sinn Fein would have been even more unpopular in the Republic than they were, typically winning 3% of the vote in the 1980s and 90s.

But the Provisional IRA did claim to be the de jure military force of Ireland, and were certainly prepared to kill southern Irish men and women who put on a uniform, if they got in their way.

The rewriting of history in Irish nationalism to justify retrospectively IRA violence that was rejected by cross-border voters at the time is succeeding only because the generations who remember that terror are passing on. The memory of Garda McCabe and others is an obstacle to distortions of the past.​​​​​