In the decade since Det Garda Jerry McCabe was killed by the IRA in Adare, his widow Ann's life has been consumed by her campaign for justice. Now she hopes she is approaching the 'final chapter' of the struggle, she tells Kathy Sheridan
For Ann McCabe, the time has come to step back into privacy. "Once Jerry's Mass is over [on June 10th] - when that's all over and done with - that's me finished," she says. "I'm 10 years at it, and it's been a long, hard 10 years."
How hard those 10 years have been, only Ann McCabe, her family and most intimate friends can tell. In a True Lives documentary to be screened by RTÉ, she vows to continue "as long as there are people who refuse to condemn my husband's murder". But here, at her kitchen table in Limerick, in her familiar soft voice, she says she has reached the end of the line.
"I hope this is the final chapter," she says. "It has taken its toll on me and on us all as a family. We were always a private family, but we have been brought into the public domain. We don't want any more headlines." Unless some extraordinary event were to force her into the public glare again - "if the issue of [ prisoner] release came up again" - she will be retreating into her private world.
Her tireless work has kept the facts of the case in the public eye. Her husband, Det Garda Jerry McCabe, was shot dead during an attempted IRA post office van robbery in Adare, Co Limerick in 1996, in which his partner Garda Ben O'Sullivan was seriously wounded, but survived. Four men - Kevin Walsh, Pearse McAuley, Jeremiah Sheehy and Michael O'Neill - were convicted of the manslaughter of Jerry McCabe and are still in prison. They were sentenced to terms of up to 14 years and are due for release on dates ranging from May next year to August 2009. In 2004, Sinn Féin attempted to link the men's early release under the Belfast Agreement to concessions it was seeking to advance the peace process in the North. The Government was criticised for considering the release of the men after Ann McCabe had been given assurances they would never be released early. The prisoners issued a statement last year removing themselves from the political process because they did "not want to be pawns in the negotiations".
But the challenge for Ann McCabe is that her private world is bounded by a solid wall of grief, barely chipped by time. Knowingly or not, but in a way that many families bereaved in violent circumstances will recognise, her passionate, dignified crusade for justice for her husband Jerry McCabe has kept him somehow alive, has prevented the door clanging shut finally on a decent, loving, dearly loved man.
"I was keeping him alive," she says, while stressing that she has no regrets about any of her actions. "If you were put in my position, you'd probably do it too. Nobody knows how they will react. And there are still unanswered questions."
She has no regrets, she repeats. But for all the times when she popped up like an awkward fairy around the Belfast Agreement christening, to remind the public of precisely the sort of people who were talking and being talked about, she and - she would contend - her children paid a heavy private price.
The morning Det Garda Jerry McCabe was killed, news had filtered through that two gardaí had been attacked in Adare.
"When they told me it was Jerry, I couldn't believe it, because Jerry would not put himself in danger for anybody," McCabe says. "And neither would Ben [O'Sullivan, his partner and friend]. Jerry went and did his work and I knew there were times - like when the Border Fox, Dessie Ellis, was around - I was a bit worried because they were all on high alert. But Jerry would not be a hero for anybody. His family were too important to him to do anything like that."
That morning, the youngest of their five children, Stacy and Ross, were a couple of days into their Leaving and Junior Certs respectively. They were preparing for school when Insp John Kearns came to the door. Ann McCabe must have screamed, she thinks now.
"I walked in to the room and fell on the ground," she says. "Stacy and Ross were coming down the stairs . . . They were screaming and screaming." Ross stayed in his parents' bed the rest of the day, with his head under the covers.
"He was only 15," she says. "It took an awful toll on him and us. He just adored his father. Like Jerry, he was very good with his hands, so there was that bond."
In the couple of years after Jerry's killing, a time when Ann was still barely able to absorb the fact of his death and had to continually view footage of the funeral "to convince myself that it was true", her life became a blur of public obligation.
"All this hype started - 'you have to go here, there's that there' . . . Then the scholarship [the Det Garda Jerry McCabe Fellowship at John Jay College of Criminal Justice] was set up in New York and that took up a lot of time. I felt I missed some quality time with Stacy and Ross . . . a good bit. I felt I should have been around a little bit more. But I did what I was told to do . . . I was in cloud cuckoo land, I guess. There were so many things happening. And that's where I felt I lost two years. There was this happening, that happening, a breakfast here, another function there, go go go all the time. I lost about three stone, I was a walking skeleton."
Finally, she sought help from a doctor, whom she still sees. "I'm on medication for depression for the last eight years, and I don't mind admitting it."
In the same unflinching way, she talks about the terrible despair that assails her when she looks to a future without Jerry. In True Lives, one of their oldest friends, Keith Lancaster, describes another time and a woman barely recognisable as today's relentless crusader.
"She was a very dependent housewife-cum-hairdresser," he says. "Jerry was her pillar of rock. She never had to bother to learn to drive. And all of a sudden, he's snatched and she's left isolated . . . like a flick of a switch."
She nods in agreement now, smiling at the accuracy of it. She loved her life, her husband and children, having a few jars and the craic.
Before her marriage, Ann, the daughter of a garda, had worked with Aer Lingus at Shannon and with the tourist board. "Then, when I got married, I thought I was going to retire from everything, do nothing," she says. She got into hairdressing through her sister-in-law and continued to work from home. .
"I worked for my clothes and my holidays", she says, recalling proudly that they went on a foreign holiday - mainly Spain - every year they were married.
They met at a dance in 1965, when Jerry, a 22-year-old Ballylongford, Co Kerry boy, was a garda based in Tipperary.
"There was just something about him, a lovely manner and very handsome. The pictures don't do him justice," Ann says.
Her memories of married life are of love, fun and harmony. "We were a very, very happy family. We had no problems. None," she says. Really? "None. That is the honest-to-God truth. We were looking forward to a lovely future because Jerry was about to retire the following year. He was very good with his hands and he had a lovely business going for himself. He was fixing electric showers.
The dream crashed on June 6th, 1996. Ten years later, time has not done its healing. "It's not any easier at all," Ann says. "I haven't moved on. It hasn't happened and I can't see it happening. Ever. I'd say to Stacy: 'What's wrong with me that I can't move on?' But I can't, I genuinely can't."
Supposing that her campaign to prevent her husband's killers' early release from jail had not been necessary? Supposing she had not had to spend her mental resources dealing with a voracious media or exposing herself to a political, legal and criminal world of prevarication, compromise and murderous cynicism? Might she be more reconciled?
"I don't think so. No," she says, emphasising that it was no sacrifice, that she would do it all again if she had to. "I just don't feel in my heart that I'm readyto move on. I can't ever see anybody replacing Jerry."
She counts her blessings in a devoted, ever-present family (Stacy and Ross still live in the family home), the companionship of a group of female friends, the sustained support of loyal old buddies. But how could anyone fill the gap of her vibrant, laughing man who never let a day go by without saying he loved her?
"Often we'd have his father, Charlie, for dinner as well. They were like brothers," she says. Charlie died of a broken heart, she adds. "After Jerry died, he used to come down and stand across the road, arms folded, staring over at the house, and he could not come in."
Her aching loneliness is palpable. "I feel lost, like a part of me is missing," she says. "Going out on my own does nothing for me, when you have to come home to an empty house.
"One day I was so down, I was walking over the Lee Bridge and I was just looking in at the water, just barely pulling one leg after the other, and I said it would be a very easy way out. And just literally from nowhere, she came - Stacy was in front of me. I was so delighted to see her because I feel I would have ended up in that river, even though it would have been a selfish way out.
"That's a few years ago now and thank God it never happened again. It's just the loneliness. You just feel you have nothing to wake up for."
She tried to wean herself off the medication before a recent holiday. "It's a very light dose, but I felt it was getting the better of me and was thinking 'why should I have to take this?'. But then I fell into a black hole again and went back on it."
Describing her loss and how, for example, the same good neighbours took her and Stacy out to Jerry's grave every evening for six months after his death, she says "this could be anybody else's story; it isn't just mine". Up to a point. There was the horror of his heart-shaped tombstone being desecrated, not once but three times.
"It wasn't anything political, it was just teenagers, the same kids," she says. But, inexplicably, they singled it out, among other things hacking off Jerry's picture.
In the meantime, two of the suspected killers, well-known IRA men Kevin Walsh and Pearse McAuley, who had been on the run for two years, were arrested. The Belfast Agreement was signed, with a public statement that Jerry McCabe's killers would not benefit from it.
"I suppose that's when it all started," Ann says. "Papers just started ringing me and I just felt I had to answer them." Her "main adviser" was Pat Kearney, a brother-in-law and former garda.
"From the day the trial started, Jerry became so public and so political, for the wrong reasons. That was why I started asking questions and answering questions because there were so many questions I needed answered."
From the beginning, when the McCabe fellowship was established in New York, she had been invited to address conferences, and was lucky to find a friend, Dr Eugene O'Brien of the University of Limerick, to write her speeches. When it seemed the McCabe killers might be released as part of a deal, she is adamant that it was she who decided to move. "Any time it came up, I knew what I wanted to say: 'Well, this is the assurance I got and I'm standing by it and I hope they stand by it as well'." It hardly helped that she was often cast as Banquo's ghost.
"I could imagine them - 'oh yes, here she comes again'. At times I felt I was treated very unfairly when there were deals done - and there were deals done," she says. "When I was invited by the Irish Peace Institute to go to Washington, I knew I wasn't wanted there. I was told by a senior person that 'your own Government didn't want you there'." But it was never suggested she should back off.
She is well aware of the argument that if widows in the North had to swallow the release of their husbands' killers for the sake of the Belfast Agreement, then what makes southern widows any different?
"I have met those people on numerous occasions and they are 100 per cent behind me," she says. "The only difference for me was that when the Good Friday agreement was signed, it was stated categorically that Jerry's killers would not be released. I would not be doing what I have done for the last 10 years only for that. I would have tried to live with it. But one of the reasons why I'm giving this interview, and why I co-operated with the documentary, is because they will remind people again of what exactly happened."
While Fintan O'Toole undoubtedly had a good deal of tacit support for his contention that the name of Jerry McCabe was being "used as a political weapon", she rejects this argument. As long as there are unanswered questions, the demands to "condemn" are valid whatever their origin, she says.
Her repeated demands that prominent southern Sinn Féin figures should use the word "condemn" in relation to her husband's death reflect her frustration at those whom she - and senior gardaí - believe are the real masterminds behind her husband's death. "The big question is: who authorised Jerry's killing?" If, as she believes, a well-known, senior republican figure was involved, it would explain a lot about the subsequent political manoeuvring when a peace deal seemed on the cards. "That's why I felt I was a pawn in the peace process for so long," she says.
Her final throw of the dice probably took place this year when she confronted Gerry Adams at a St Patrick's Day gathering in New York. When the floor was thrown open for questions, she found the courage to rise and ask him to name the person who authorised her husband's murder. His answer, captured in Gerry Gregg's documentary, was that he too had lost family members.
"I have outlined very clearly my revulsion at the killing of your husband," Adams says. "I think it was wrong. There are men serving prison . . ."
Can you not condemn, asks Ann McCabe. "I'm quite prepared to condemn," Adams says. "I condemn what I think is wrong. That won't bring your husband back. The people who killed your husband should be released - I know that's hard on you - but that's what the Irish Government signed up to do, in the same way as I saw people who killed my friends, family members and neighbours released under the Good Friday Agreement." His words are drowned in applause, while Ann McCabe says that as she did not get an answer, she is leaving.
Afterwards, she felt elated. "I felt great, really, really good," she says. "I was pinching myself to think that I was after doing it. I read it in the Times coming back."
It may well be the closest thing to closure that she will find. She reckons the killers will be out "in a couple of years. I hope they will serve out the short sentence". As a family, the McCabes have pulled through and life goes on. The "saddest" occasion of the past 10 years was the day she received the Scott Medal on her husband's behalf. "That was very, very difficult. He never aspired to the Scott Medal in his life, not in a million years."
Ross is now waiting for his medical to join the Garda Síochána. John, the eldest son, is already a garda. Mark is an electrician, Ian is in cargo sales, Stacy is a beautician. Each new grandchild reminds Ann of how much Jerry is missing. Mark's wedding was the only one he attended. John and Ian, who have both married since, chose to go to New York and Rome for their weddings.
Ann plays cards with a few female friends when they "yap for half the night" and enjoys a vodka. She is president of the Garda Survivors Support Group. She feels that Jerry is "very close".
Recently she woke up and thought she glimpsed him standing at the door of the bedroom. "It was just a flash and then - gone," she says. "I didn't dream about Jerry for years and years. They say that's a sign of acceptance, if you dream . . . But maybe it's only a myth."
True Lives: Jerry McCabe: Murder on Main Street is on RTÉ1 on Tue at 10.15pm