Cormac McCabe murder anniversary: 'We dwell on the good that dad did, not on his killing,' says daughter of IRA victim

​On Monday the News Letter reported on how Captain McCabe’s daughter Sheila McCabe flew with her family from New Zealand for the remembrance service, held in the school where he was once principal (Aughnacloy College, then Aughnacloy Secondary). Captain McCabe’s killing is well remembered in that area, but is less widely known – the family has been private since that terrible day, Saturday January 19 1974.

Cormac, an officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, travelled in the evening with his wife Nora (nee Brady) and his other daughter, Anne, who is physically disabled, to dinner at the Four Seasons hotel in Monaghan. During the meal he left the table and never returned. He was abducted by the IRA and, at some point later, shot in the head, being found the next morning in a field near Clogher, back across the border.

Speaking to Sheila McCabe this week, after the service, I put to her reports that her father had been concerned about people in the bar looking at him and he was going to his car to get his gun.

"My mother always said dad said going to bathroom, that is what he told her. If there is anything more than that is something that he took with him,” she says. Or perhaps, she reflects, her mother was protecting her from any further details.

But Sheila, a commercial barrister who lives and works in Auckland, does not want to dwell on the murder. She was staying overnight with a schoolfriend that night. It is obvious, she says, that the whole period was utterly horrifying for the family. Sheila wants instead to look towards a better future for Northern Ireland. She adds: “I would much rather dwell on positive things that he did.”Her dad, who was aged 42 when he died, had been a mere 31 when he became headmaster. A graduate in French and German of Queen’s University, he met Nora at Stranmillis College where he was training as a teacher.

Cormac’s ability in speaking German was so good, and his appearance such, that people in that country thought he was actually German. He taught in Belfast, then Dungannon, then Omagh, before joining Aughnacloy Secondary in 1963. The family rented Bantry rectory, a short drive from Nora’s mother. “It was cold but a fabulous place to live,” says Sheila of the Church of Ireland rectory. Then they moved to Aughnacloy. Nora taught at Bantry primary, and when it closed at Minterburn, then became headmistress at Churchill Primary in Caledon

Was there a sense of the Troubles, I ask? "Oh yes,” replies Sheila. “There were murders in surrounding country areas. Everyone was aware of them.”Her father, Cormac, joined the Ulster Defence Regiment soon after it was formed in 1970.

Was it frightening that her father was in the security forces? The passage of time is such that Sheila finds it hard to separate her childhood memories of a time before and after her dad died, but she reiterates: “It was something you were aware of.”She was proud of her father being a head teacher. “What stands out was his commitment to education. He saw it was the key to opening doors to what you want to do in life. He had a great sense of fairness and what was right and wrong.”

In a video interview, conducted in New Zealand and played to last Saturday’s service, Sheila told her friend Cathy O’Sullivan, in reply to a query about her memory of her father, that he was “bossy,” prompting laughter in the audience.

She elaborates with a smile: “I had two head teachers in the family and you wonder why I use the word bossy?!”

Sheila adds of her dad: “He also had a great sense of humour."

Cormac joined the UDR because “his view was if you didn't like how things were where you were living you had to do what you could to change things”.

He enjoyed coaching football and was involved in boy scout movement. “Not only was he a dedicated father and family man, he was a leader in education, the military and the community. He was also involved in the Aughnacloy Church of Ireland and the Masonic movement, always in leadership roles.

"Whatever he did he would do fully. People have stopped me in the street and talked about how he helped them and how he mentored them.”She notes that the Cormac McCabe Award (a recipient of whom Jayne Bloomer read a lesson last Saturday evening) is for for truthfulness, diligence, and initiative. “The school felt reflected they were the things that were more important to him.”A stained glass window, put up in the school in Captain McCabe’s memory, reflects the same values.

A striking feature of the murder of Captain McCabe is that he was in the Republic at a time when it was dangerous for a member of the British security forces to be so. “We had holidays across the border all the time, often Donegal,” says Sheila.

“Also, Wexford. We went somewhere different each year. I don't know when that stopped, or if it stopped, during the Troubles. I have a memory of big hotels in the south, staying as a family.

“My grandfather on my father's side was from Cavan, Mervyn McCabe, a police detective. That might have been pre partition.”After Cormac’s murder the family eventually moved to Armagh, although Nora still taught in Caledon until she retired. Her mother was, Sheila recalls, “remarkable”.

How did she cope on her own? “She would not want me to discuss how she coped, she had no choice.”Nora did not discourage her daughter from moving to New Zealand after winning a scholarship to a university there after studying law in Aberdeen.“She was selfless, never tried to stop me to get away from Troubles. She was happy for the next generation to be somewhere that didn’t have the history and division we had here. I had lost dad, and had a disabled sibling [Anne is still alive] – a lot of mothers would have wanted their child to stay.”Nora came out to New Zealand and developed a “fantastic” relationship with Sheila’s daughter Bridie, a vet, 28, who travelled to Aughnacloy for last week’s service with Sheila’s husband Tom Birdsall.“They were so close,” she says of the relationship between Nora and Bridie. “For several weeks each year they had an intense time together.”

Sheila loves New Zealand and Northern Ireland: "When I am here I talk about there as home, and when I am there I talk about here as home. The scenery in New Zealand is similar to NI but a better climate”.

She adds: “My daughter loves it here – and can do a really good Northern Ireland accent too.”

The remembrance service also commemorated three former Aughnacloy pupils who were murdered:

Lance Corporal Cecil McNeill, UDR, killed age 22 in 1983; Private Martin Blaney, UDR, killed 1986 age 27; Reserve Constable Cyril Willis, killed in 1990, age 35 (the web version of this story will link to a report of the service with quotes from their relatives).

The Royal Irish Regiment band played popular pieces of music to an audience of 500 people, and the Rev Alan Irwin, whose father Thomas and uncle Frederick were both murdered by the IRA, conducted the remembrance service, including hymns.“This was a very big event. It was very well organised and very special,” says Sheila. “For me the memorial focus was on what my father achieved, as opposed to the circumstances of his departure. And it was a celebration of the lives of the other three men who were murdered as well.

"It is my view that the benefit of acknowledging the circumstances of their deaths is that we must never go back to that. The younger generation do not know what it was like.”