The Government has responded in the only way it can to the demands for clarification on the release of persons who have been convicted of the murders of members of the Garda Siochana. Under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, prisoners both North and South who meet the agreed criteria and whose organisations refrain from violence are eligible for release. It is impossible to apply one yardstick for those who have killed gardai and another for those who have killed members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
This is not to say that there are not differences. The gardai are, by and large, members of an unarmed force. They serve a community in which social and historical circumstances have enabled them to be universally accepted. But both forces represent the legally-established policing service of their respective states. The fact that the Garda is an unarmed force is a happy by-product of history. The RUC sought to become an unarmed force in the 1970s and were shot down in cold blood as easy targets.
It is impossible not to sympathise with the members of the Garda who feel that they are to be deprived of an important protection. There is also the sense of duty to those who have died and to their sorrowing families. All murder is ghastly but some of the gardai who have died have been shot in circumstances of particular callousness. It must be gall and vinegar to their surviving colleagues and to their families to contemplate the release of their killers back into society, perhaps in some instances to public celebrations by their political supporters.
Yet the spokesmen for the gardai know that they operate in a climate which has to address a wider set of political realities. Nobody in government or in officialdom pretends to like the prospect of freeing men who have murdered gardai. And nobody in their hearts will deny that there is a substantial risk in what is being done. There is always the possibility that such men, once released, will revert to violence, perhaps with one or other of the splinter groups now emerging. Nonetheless it is a calculated risk for peace. If it succeeds - if it leads to a permanent and complete cessation of violence - it will save lives in the future, some of them very possibly the lives of gardai.
It is important for the gardai and their families also to understand the limitations of the release provisions. Persons who engage in violence after the coming into effect of the Agreement will not be eligible for early release. It might even be argued, paradoxically, that for the future, gardai will have a stronger measure of support from the law. There will be no further amnesties for many a long decade if the peace process fails. Anyone foolish enough to engage in violence against police officers - whether Garda or RUC - in the future will embark upon their sentences in the knowledge that they fall outside the terms which have been agreed for this release programme.
There remains the outstanding case of those charged with the murder of Detective McCabe in Co Limerick. Nobody has yet been tried, much less convicted, in this case. Sinn Fein and the IRA continue to insist that these men must be freed. Yet at the time of the murder the IRA denied responsibility and it is understood that the robbery in which Detective McCabe was shot was not sanctioned by the organisation which was at the time on ceasefire. The Government holds to the position that this case falls outside the terms of the Agreement and that justice must take its course without intervention. If the words of the Agreement have any meaning, it cannot hold otherwise.