Garda representatives will today express their deep anger at the Government agreement to release the killers of Det Garda Jerry McCabe if there is a final peace deal in the North.
The Garda Representative Association (GRA) will meet the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, today on the issue, having yesterday branded the Government's position as "a disgrace".
Adding to the Government's difficulty on the issue, the widow and family of the late detective garda said last night that they expected the Government to honour its past commitments not to give the men early release. Fine Gael meanwhile declared its opposition to early release, with its party leader, Mr Enda Kenny, demanding that the matter be taken out of any future negotiations on a permanent deal in the North.
The GRA's representative in Limerick and a friend of the McCabe family, Mr Paul Browne, said yesterday that gardaí wanted to hold the Government to past assurances that there would be no early release of the killers.
He said this stance had support from the public, and that the late detective's widow, Mrs Anne McCabe, was "absolutely devastated" by the news.
The association's comments came after the Taoiseach indicated to the Dáil that the agreement to release the McCabe killers as part of a deal was being considered in March of last year, and not just in October as previously reported.
"If we had been successful in obtaining the kind of framework we were setting out in March last year, there would have been a whole sequence of events concerning a whole range of issues," Mr Ahern said.
If there is to be an end to the IRA, "then we will have to be brave and take some pain to get some gain".
He said the issue was "of the highest sensitivity" and the Government "would not do anything without direct contact between the Government, the widow of Jerry McCabe and the family of Ben O'Sullivan" who was badly injured in the Adare post office raid in which Det McCabe was killed.
In its statement last night the McCabe family said that it trusted "that the pledges made by Government will be honoured". In a letter to Mrs Anne McCabe in December 1999, the then minister for justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said: "There is no question of granting early release to those concerned, either under the terms of the Good Friday agreement or for that matter on any other basis either."
The McCabe statement said that "the solemn undertaking given by most senior figures in Government" was "the sole consolation for the pain, anguish and bottomless sense of loss which has been constantly revisited on the McCabe family by the repeated resurrection of the murder in Adare of a husband, father and guardian of the law".
Mr Kenny condemned what he described as the Government's secret deal with the IRA. "The Provisional IRA now believes that it will get whatever it demands in return for the fulfilment of its commitments.
"Fine Gael rejects this concession being put on the table by the Government. It offends ordinary decent people throughout the land," he told the Dáil.
"This U-turn is a step too far. Will he tell Sinn Féin that the Irish people will not accept it?"
The Fianna Fáil MEP, Mr Gerard Collins, said yesterday that he would "not at all" favour the early release of the IRA killers of Det McCabe, despite the Government's willingness to contemplate it. The former minister for justice and West Limerick MEP said he would be making his views known to the Taoiseach and in as strong a way as he could to those in government.
Det McCabe had worked for many years on the security detail of Mr Collins. "The views I hold are personal", he told Radio Kerry's Kerry Today programme yesterday.