One thing we can say about the Castlerea Five - which includes the homicidal crew whom the Government was secretly arranging to release last autumn, in violation of every undertaking given previously - is that their living conditions will certainly deteriorate when they get out of jail, writes Kevin Myers.
For in Castlerea, each man has his own bungalow in a special compound; each man keeps his own hours; each man has freedom of movement; and each morning fresh food and newspapers arrive from the local supermarket.
They're not in prison in any proper sense of the word, and they're certainly not being punished. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who have never laid a hand on a gun in their lives, never mind empty it into the prone body of another human being, who are living in infinitely worse conditions; yet the State is rewarding four of the vilest men in Ireland for the cold-blooded slaying of one of its servants.
Confused? Not as much as those cheery, insouciant butchers must be: why, a life of crime, and they're being treated as something special. And not as confused as Dessie O'Hare must be. He spent his young adulthood killing people, sometimes amputating his captives' fingers with industrial shears before shooting them dead. He was, of course, responsible for the kidnap of the dentist John O'Grady, and the severing of his little fingers, using a hammer and chisel.
By his own account he murdered many people - security sources indicate it could be as many as 36. Even when on the run after the O'Grady kidnap, O'Hare found no shortage of safe houses across Ireland - confirmation of the inordinate numbers of depraved and wicked people existing on this island. But the unbearable truth about Dessie O'Hare is not the evil that he did, nor the splendour of his present quarters, but that his career could have been halted in 1979. The Special Criminal Court then had him in its buttery grasp, and following the sort of querulous nitpicking in which our legal culture revels, it let him go.
On his wedding day in August 1978, his bride beside him, a British army officer, Lieutenant Gary Cass, was shot and critically wounded as he emerged from St Patrick's Church in Trim. At an informal identity parade at the Bridewell some time later, a wedding guest, a young army officer trained in identification techniques who made it his business to study the gunmen as they shot their victim, positively identified O'Hare as one of those responsible. Moreover, forensic evidence showed that O'Hare's clothing contained residues of firearms' discharges. However, both items of evidence were deemed unacceptable, on grounds which might have made sense to Irish law but made none whatever to Irish justice or history.
Thus by this triumph of pedantry, a murderous nutcase was set free; and Lord, what he made of his freedom - some three dozen killings, and hundreds of people caused to mourn their loved ones, then, now, and for ever more. Lives cut short, hopes extinguished, unbearable agony inflicted: and the author of all this misery now reclines on his sunbed, no doubt swapping tales of derring-do with his fellow inmates.
So who holds the line? Who stands by the Constitution? Can it even be lawful for the Government to release the killers of Jerry McCabe, if the popular endorsement of the Belfast Agreement and the accompanying Constitutional Amendments occurred after the Government had undertaken to exclude the killers from any early release programme? In the public's mind, the assurance that the purposeless and wicked murder of Jerry McCabe was not included in the (far too generous) terms of the Belfast Agreement was part of the process by which the Agreement was validated. It is beyond any one government's power to gainsay that validation.
But where does the Constitution stand anyway? It specifically states that there is one Army, answerable to the Oireachtas. But the Belfast Agreement has in effect recognised the legal authority of the IRA over its arms dumps. The surrender of those arms is to be done at the behest of the IRA alone, at its own pace, and at times and locations of its own choosing. Indeed, such have been the compromises made to propitiate the IRA that any Garda superintendent who discovered the location of an IRA arms dump and who - very properly - arranged for its capture would soon be on his way to direct traffic in Belmullet.
This is our peace process, one in which undertakings are not undertakings, the law is not the law, and the Constitution is not the Constitution. In this process, poor David Trimble and the SDLP were knowingly and deliberately sacrificed so that the gunmen of Sinn Féin-IRA might be kept in countenance. Moreover, the two sovereign governments of Ireland and Britain even covertly connived to do another deal intended to have secured the early release of the butchers of Jerry McCabe.
Yet the Belfast Agreement probably makes such a release illegal. So maybe it is time for my friends in the Garda Representative Association to seek a judicial review of the Government's proposals to release the men who were imprisoned after the murder of Jerry McCabe. That they were found guilty merely of manslaughter, following gross intimidation of witnesses, should not distract us from what really happened in Limerick. As Mary Harney said, "It was unfortunate that those before the courts were not convicted of murder instead of the lesser charge of manslaughter". Those men now repose in luxury in the most courteous confinement known to man. It is more than stomach-churning: it is simply amoral.