On February 8th, 1996, the IRA ended its first ceasefire with the bombing of Canary Wharf in east London. The entire IRA returned to "active service". In Munster this meant preparing weapons buried in isolated countryside for use in the North and Britain, and the preparation and carrying out of fund-raising robberies.
The Limerick unit was under the direct command of Kevin Walsh, who was also senior in the IRA's southern command and close to the IRA's brigade staff and army council. He had regular contact with the IRA's southern commander, a Belfast man in his 40s living in Tallaght, in west Dublin. In early 1996 Walsh told him he intended to carry out an armed raid of cash being delivered to post offices in east Limerick. The southern commander gave his consent and the preparations for the Adare raid began.
The movements of the cash delivery van were watched. The gang identified cars for the robbery and getaway, as well as safe houses where they would gather beforehand and hide immediately after. They would meet at Walsh's family home and afterwards go to Patrick Harty's home at Clonolea near Toomevara, Co Tipperary.
Harty, who was jailed for 18 months for refusing to give evidence against the McCabe accused (but freed yesterday at the end of the case), kept a safe house for the IRA. He had family connections with the organisation and was a cousin of Patrick (Pakie) Sheehy, a leading local IRA figure who had carried out several robberies and had been involved in a mid-1980s bombing campaign in England. Sheehy shot himself dead after a heavy drinking bout on New Year's Day 1991.
Walsh and his associates had a record of several well-prepared and ruthlessly executed robberies - most of them successful - to raise money for the IRA and finance their own operations. All the money went to IRA use and none of the men had any signs of affluence.
In a previous robbery in June 1994 at Kilmallock, in Limerick, Walsh's team had stolen £94,900. He had fired an AK47 assault rifle at gardai as his gang escaped. Walsh was also involved in an attempted robbery in May 1988, when his close IRA associate, Hugh Hehir, was shot dead in another armed confrontation with two armed detectives. Hehir and Walsh, armed with assault rifles, had a firepower advantage over the gardai, but were faced down, and Hehir died in the exchange. Walsh escaped across fields, hijacking a lorry and then a car. He was arrested later but there was no evidence to bring charges.
Garda intelligence led them to believe that the money raised in the Munster robberies was passed on to the IRA's southern commander. He delivered it to the IRA's finance officers, who used Sinn Fein offices in Dublin. One of the senior IRA finance officers was also in Sinn Fein.
Walsh decided to carry out his latest robbery in the early summer of 1996. The target was the delivery van which would normally carry around £100,000 to outlying post offices in the east Limerick area around Adare.
The security van's only protection - and the only real obstacle in the IRA unit's way - was the escort of two Garda Special Branch officers, armed with one Uzi machine pistol and a handgun. The officers with the security van delivering cash to Adare on June 7th were Det Gardai Ben O'Sullivan and Jerry McCabe, both aged 52.
The escorting of cash deliveries is routine, boring work. In their unmarked and unprotected squad car the officers would not pose a great threat to a six-strong IRA gang armed with AK47 assault rifles. It could be predicted, given the weakness of their situation, that the two officers would offer little resistance when they were surrounded by men in combat uniforms armed with high-powered automatic rifles.
What happened in the minute or so at around 6.50 a.m. on that morning has proved difficult to explain.
Two cars, one a four-wheel-drive vehicle and the other a saloon, arrived simultaneously in the Main Street, behind the squad car. The four-wheel-drive crashed into the back of the squad car, apparently to jolt and unsettle the officers.
Immediately three of the gang jumped out and moved towards the gardai. As they did so, gardai believe, Walsh opened fire with his rifle, shooting Det Garda McCabe dead and badly injuring Det Garda O'Sullivan. It was sustained, aimed firing, and Det Garda McCabe was hit eight times. However, the shooting also endangered the two other armed raiders on the far side of the car and one narrowly missed being hit by bullets passing through the car.
Gardai can only surmise what was going through the minds of the gang members. They had brought a large number of industrial plastic ties which are often used as improvised handcuffs. It would appear they set out with the intention of overpowering rather than murdering gardai and security staff.
Had the raiders intended to shoot the two officers to remove any threat, they had succeeded - there was clearly going to be no further resistance from them. The raiders could easily have taken £100,000 in bags of cash from the security van and left unhindered. Instead, eyewitnesses said, they seemed to show signs of panic and jumped back into their vehicles and sped off.
They abandoned the four-wheel-drive and their second saloon car about a mile from Adare. Still apparently in a state of panic, they failed to set off two incendiary bombs which would have burned the vehicles and destroyed any forensic evidence.
The gang had breached the strict IRA rule not to kill gardai or members of the Defence Forces, a rule applied only because the IRA is aware that political reaction to such killings inevitably brings down massive searches by gardai and the arrest of its members.
("General Order No 8" of the Provisional IRA's handbook of rules, known as the "Green Book", tells IRA members it is "strictly forbidden to take any military action against 26-County forces under any circumstances whatsoever.")
As the gang fled into hiding, the IRA immediately began a public relations exercise trying to deflect blame. Some journalists were briefed by Sinn Fein figures that the IRA was not involved. An IRA statement was issued saying: "None of our volunteers or units were in any way involved in this morning's incident at Adare . . . There was absolutely no IRA involvement".
The Garda Siochana was in no doubt who was responsible, and within two hours of the killing the then commissioner, Mr Patrick Culligan, had informed the former justice minister, Mrs Nora Owen, of his officers' view that the IRA was responsible.
There was a muted government response despite the emphatic indications of IRA involvement. As with its predecessor, the then coalition government was trying to engage the republicans in talks about calling another ceasefire.
It was not until the following week that there was finally official confirmation that the IRA was responsible.
A massive Garda investigation was set up, and about 80 people were arrested and questioned in the following months. The investigation continued unabated until last spring, when Walsh had been arrested and the Director of Public Prosecutions gave the go-ahead for murder charges against him and the other three.
Walsh had been in hiding since the murder but had not been inactive. He is a highly regarded figure in the IRA and had been moved north to assume command of operations in the Border area around Cavan.
While he was staying in a safe house near the village of Mullagh, gardai later learned, he met Sinn Fein figures, including Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, who were then involved in the negotiations leading to the Belfast Agreement.
Walsh was seized in an early-morning raid of the farmhouse last March. He was pulling on his trousers and trying to run back towards his bedroom as the Garda Emergency Response Unit (ERU) stormed the house and pinned him down. He had a .38 pistol in a holster attached to the belt of his trousers. The pistol had a full magazine and he had another clip of eight bullets in his trouser pocket.
Leaning against the bed in his bedroom was an AK47 assault rifle with two full magazines taped together. The same rifle had been used in the Kilmallock robbery in 1994.
Gardai who knew Walsh described him as an extremely dangerous character, capable of killing gardai or anyone else confronting him during an armed raid. While it may never be known exactly why he shot Det Garda McCabe, it was known that he had been very angry at the death of Hugh Hehir. Finding himself again in a situation of armed confrontation with gardai, he may have lost control or simply decided to murder the officers in a cold act of vengeance.
Whatever Walsh's state of mind, his gang in Adare that morning posed a considerable threat to gardai and the public. Walsh's gang included some very dangerous figures, not least Pearse McCauley, who also received a 14-year sentence yesterday. McCauley had escaped from prison in England and was known to be usually armed and dangerous if confronted.
McCauley had benefited from governmental leniency during the first IRA ceasefire, when he was released early from a seven-year sentence. This was for having a handgun when he was arrested by armed gardai in Dublin in April 1993. He was free again by November 1995.
McCauley was re-arrested by gardai when London police served an extradition warrant for his return to Brixton Prison, from which he had escaped in July 1991. He was being held there on charges of conspiring to murder leading British business figures.
McCauley was again released on bail in December 1995 and immediately rejoined the IRA southern command. In February 1996, four months before Det Garda McCabe's murder, McCauley was arrested with Walsh and four other Limerick IRA men in a car in Dublin. They had apparently been in Dublin to meet IRA leaders. McCauley was again released on bail and returned to Limerick with the IRA unit.
After the Adare murder McCauley went on the run, causing the forfeiture of £48,000 in bail money lodged by a Limerick farmer and an unemployed bread agent from Donegal. Gardai eventually recaptured i him in a raid on a remote cottage near Renvyle in Connemara in October 1997 and charged him with murdering Det Garda McCabe.
Two other significant IRA figures who were present in Adare on the day Garda McCabe was killed are still at large. One, a prominent north Cork IRA figure with a long history of confrontations with gardai and convictions for firearms and other offences, was able to leave the country and travelled to Central America. It is believed he may have since travelled to South America and is still being sought there.
The other figure is a former prominent member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), who left that group after attempts on his life during one of its periodic feuds and joined the IRA as much for protection as any other reason, according to republican sources.
He lived in the Shannon area. He had occasionally lived in Holland and in the early 1990s the IRA sent him to the Continent to set up attacks on British military barracks in the Benelux countries. He later returned to the Limerick region and became active again. He may be back in Holland.
The two other men sentenced yesterday for Garda McCabe's killing, Jeremiah Sheehy and Michael O'Neill, are minor IRA figures. O'Neill was used as one of the getaway drivers and Sheehy, a powerfully built farm labourer, was present to provide muscle if the robbers needed to overpower gardai or security men.
As the gang split up and ran into hiding, the IRA and Sinn Fein set about a further damage-limitation strategy, hinting that the Limerick gang was out of control and that its Southern leadership had been censured.
In fact, Walsh appears to have been promoted to a more high-profile operational position in the Border area. The southern commander, who had sanctioned the raid, remained in position despite republican-inspired leaks saying he had been sacked.
A year after the raid the IRA did impose a new regime in its southern command, with new regional commanders, all supportive of the Adams-McGuinness political leadership, put in place. The commander was replaced by another Belfast man who is seen as even more militant than his predecessor.
Further evidence of the republican leadership's support for Det Garda McCabe's killers emerged in the final hours of talks leading to the Belfast Agreement, when the Sinn Fein leadership sought to have the accused men included in the prisoner early-release scheme.