By John Spain

LAST week was the tenth anniversary of the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe by IRA thugs.It was marked by the showing of a brilliant hour-long documentary on the killing called Murder on Main Street on RTE television, which brought home to people here for the first time the full horror of what happened on that dreadful day when the IRA gang ambushed a cash delivery van in the small Co. Limerick village of Adare.

McCabe and his partner Ben O’Sullivan, who survived the shooting, were the two detectives in the security escort car with the van that morning. Almost half a million people here - 451,000 to be exact — watched the program last week, an unprecedented audience for a documentary of this kind. And they were shocked and disgusted by what they saw.

For the first time we were confronted with a reconstruction of the savagery of the ambush and the cold-blooded execution of McCabe. If there had been any doubt in anyone’s mind — and very few people here had any doubts — the film made it absolutely clear that this was murder.

It was not an accident, not manslaughter, not something that just happened by chance when things went wrong during the ambush, not something that could be justified by anything that was happening 200 miles away in the north of Ireland. It was vicious, deliberate murder. And it was done for one reason only: money.

The film had a huge emotional punch because it used family videos and pictures to build up a detailed portrait of the kind of man McCabe was, a decent family man, a good cop, popular with everyone. He took being a detective seriously and was known for always wearing a pressed suit and clean shirt to work.

But to him being a detective was just a job. He had no agenda or strong political views on the North or anything else.

His priority was his family. He was also interested in car engines and electrics and was already making plans for something in that line when he would retire. He and his wife Ann were a devoted couple as the family videos showed, still in love after their years together and unusually close and affectionate in comparison with the average married couple.

Nor was Jerry any kind of hero. He did his job, Ann explained, but he was much too devoted to his family to ever deliberately put himself in danger.

He was not involved in any heroics on the day he was murdered. In fact his revolver was fully loaded and still in its holster when his body was taken from the car and the Uzi submachine gun that Garda detectives carry was found unloaded lying on the back seat.

The fact is he never had a chance. Jerry McCabe was hit by several bullets and also by shrapnel as bits of the car flew off. He was shot at close range.

And from the pattern of the bullets (15 shells were found) it appears that there was a pause in the middle of the gunfire that killed him. Everything points to deliberate, execution-style slaughter.

That such a thing could happen in the early morning on the main street of Adare — a peaceful little town which is one of Ireland’s most picturesque places — magnified the horror. So did the target of the raid, a cash van bringing money for children’s allowances, old folks pensions and other welfare payments to post offices in that part of Limerick. On a list of low crimes, this had to be near the bottom.

Not that this was any concern to the IRA thugs who carried out the operation, led by Kevin Walsh, the head of the IRA in the area. The gun that killed McCabe, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, was Walsh’s personal weapon and had been used by him in previous robberies.

That gun has never been found. And it was that lack of evidence and the refusal of witnesses to testify after very serious intimidation by Sinn Fein and the IRA that led to what should have been murder convictions ending up as manslaughter.

The film went through the despicable behavior of the Sinn Fein leaders after the ambush. They did what they usually do in situations like this. They lied through their teeth for a while to buy time and wait for public anger to cool down.

It was not an IRA operation, they said. The IRA knew nothing about it. Sinn Fein knew nothing about it.

Eventually, of course, the truth came out. It was an IRA operation after all but it had not been authorized. This was then modified to it not being authorized at the top level but at some unspecified middle level.

By the time Gerry Adams was finished, of course, he was demanding that because the killers were on an IRA mission they should get early release under the Good Friday Agreement. And if it had not been for Ann McCabe, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern might have caved in.

That was the other powerful aspect of Murder on Main Street — the documentation of the way Ann McCabe changed from being a quiet, stay-at-home housewife happy to be in her husband’s caring shadow (she did not even drive), to becoming a strong woman who steeled herself to appear in public, protect her husband’s memory and keep his killers in jail.

Apart from the horror of the shooting itself, probably the most dramatic section of the film was the part shot in Rory Dolan’s in the Bronx just before St. Patrick’s Day at a fundraiser at which Gerry Adams was the star attraction.

When it came to questions and the microphone was being passed around the adoring audience, Ann McCabe showed extraordinary courage by standing up and identifying herself and then asking Gerry a question which stopped him in his tracks. The camera clearly showed his guilty, shifty reaction.

Ann McCabe reminded him that he had already said on Irish TV that the shooting of her husband had been authorized at a middle level in the IRA structure. Who, asked Ann McCabe, had authorized the killing?

In one of the slimiest, most disgusting performances I have ever seen on TV, Gerry dodged the question. Not only that, but he attempted to equate his own suffering during the Troubles with that of Ann McCabe, saying that he had lost relatives himself.

Let’s be quite clear about this. Gerry Adams’s wife has not been murdered by some Loyalist scum trying to raise a pile of money. Neither Ann McCabe nor her husband were in any way involved in paramilitary activity, nor did they hold strong political views about the North.

For Adams to put his hand on his heart and say that he, too, has suffered, as though there is some equivalence between the two of them, is both ridiculous and disgusting.

So rattled was Gerry by Ann McCabe confronting him in front of his American audience that he fell back on the usual cliches he uses. Any condemnation I could make will not bring back your husband, he said. Loyalist killers were freed under the Good Friday Agreement, etc. We have all suffered, etc.

The reaction of the crowd to all this was illuminating. The woman sitting beside Ann McCabe visibly recoiled from her when she realized who she was, leaning away from her as if she had the plague. The rest of the crowd went silent.

Gerry struggled on with the cliches and the audience, to their shame, applauded. When Ann McCabe failed to get a straight answer to her question she walked out.

At the end, Gerry wished them all a peaceful and sober St. Patrick’s Day ... and they applauded loudly, relieved that the earlier little embarrassment was now safely out of the way.

If you ever wondered why so many Irish people look down on large sections of Irish America, then watch this film and you will understand. Not one person in that big crowd in Rory Dolan’s big room had the courage to say anything in support of Ann McCabe. When she walked out, not one person walked out with her. Were you there? If so, you should hang your head in shame.

Given the ignorance displayed, it is vital that Murder on Main Street be seen by Irish American audiences. Already there is huge interest in the documentary. The producer Gerry Gregg told me on Monday that as we spoke, the film was being marketed at a major TV showcase in Toronto. Possibilities in North American TV, the History Channel and the PBS network are being explored.

There is even the possibility that the hour long documentary could be turned into a drama. Gregg told me that a senior executive in Warner Brothers who had heard so much about the TV film had requested a DVD of the program.

And there is no doubt that, like the Veronica Guerin story, the Jerry McCabe story could make a great movie drama. But it is even more important that this documentary should be shown on TV in America.

More than anything else I have seen this one exposes the transparency of the slimy reasoning and justification that Gerry Adams uses. The cold-blooded murder of a detective guarding a cash van in Limerick cannot be justified by anything hundreds of miles away in the North. So many of the IRA are a bunch of sadistic, money-grabbing thugs and this film exposes that.

Murder on Main Street made a huge impact here because it showed so clearly the nature of the IRA threat to democracy and the rule of law. It showed how precious is the thin blue line that Jerry McCabe was part of. And it showed how twisted and disgusting so much of what Gerry Adams says is, whether it is about Ann McCabe or the McCartneys.

Make it your business to see Murder on Main Street. Ring your TV station and demand that it be shown.