McCabes’ disclosures immensely powerful
ONE evening as she walked up the path to her front door, Lorraine McCabe stopped and looked at her family home with a stranger’s eye. ‘The house looked lovely’, she thought, ‘the gardens looked lovely’ – a passer-by would surely envy the family inside.
The handsome detached home, with the trampoline in the carefully tended garden, the pleasant stone façade, the shiny cars in the drive is home to a happily married couple (dropping Lorraine back to her flat after their first blind date in 1987, Maurice McCabe jumped the garden hedge with excitement and told his brother, ‘that’s the girl I’m going to marry’) and their five children. At a casual glance, it would have seemed like a haven of the most blissfully ordinary and comfortable domesticity. ‘If only you knew,’ Mrs McCabe thought to herself that day, ‘the turmoil inside.’
Her husband was under sustained, merciless and concerted attack for demanding that the uniform he treasured met the standards and ideals that had drawn him to the force. As a child he sat into a neighbourhood garda’s blue Ford Cortina and resolved there and then that he would be an officer one day.
His dad, a small-time local hotelier, had hoped his son would follow him into the business, but Maurice was – as other authority figures would one day learn – a stubborn and resolute man. He slept on a hard wooden board for months to stretch his spine an extra eighth of an inch to meet the height requirements for recruits, and he succeeded. ‘He lived for the job, 24/7’, Lorraine told this week’s RTÉ documentary Whistleblower.
On an off-duty night out if he thought he spotted a drunk driver, he’d be like a bloodhound: ‘It was a bit aggravating,’ she said quietly.
Lorraine McCabe is a soft-spoken woman, not given to dramatics or exaggeration. She wouldn’t have matched her husband’s nearobsessive determination to expose wrongdoing in the force, she said, ‘I’d have walked away’.
And yet her resolve was crucial to getting Maurice McCabe to the triumphant vindication that lay at the end of that long, dark tunnel, through the days when she worried for his safety if he was home late, or feared that he might take his own life in the darkest of times. And it wasn’t just because she shared her husband’s intense conviction that the force and the public deserved better – Lorraine McCabe’s driving passion was her husband and her family, you could tell, and whatever it took to keep them safe and make them happy, that was what she would do.
EVEN if it meant supporting Maurice when it must have looked as though his mission was doomed, his career was over, his reputation was in shreds. Even if it meant losing those friends, once pals with whom they socialised, who turned their backs in the street and snubbed her at the school gates as she collected her children from the same classrooms.
Even if it meant leaving him at the door of a psychiatric hospital, during the worst period of the siege, and driving home to Cavan to care for their five children alone.
Even if it meant nights of sheer dread, after footage of Garda colleagues stabbing a grotesque rat effigy called Maurice appeared online, when she worried he might meet with an unfortunate accident on a shift. Even if it meant giving up their privacy as a family, and allowing cameras into their home, so as to tell the truth.
It is Maurice McCabe whose name will be remembered as perhaps the single most powerful individual in the history of the Garda Síochána.
He will go into the history books as the man who brought an institution, spiralling into disrepute and dishonour, to account with his selfless pursuit of justice. He brought down two justice ministers, two Garda commissioners and a dysfunctional culture that was, literally, costing innocent lives through corruption and indifference. His near-martyrdom and persecution, the wickedness of the conspiracy that almost destroyed him, truly shocked the nation and drew the fiercest condemnation from a judge well used to dealing with liars.
History probably won’t record the name of the woman who had his back, when nobody else did and when many another would have urged him to let it go. Lorraine McCabe doesn’t come across much like a woman who’ll care, one way or another, if she doesn’t get the credit she deserves. It must have been cold there in his shadow, as the words to that cheesy ballad go, but her own warmth was enough for all seven of them. If nobody remembers the wife who stood by his side, she’ll probably be just as glad.
All she ever wanted, you couldn’t help but think, was to walk up to her own front door and know that the picture of domestic contentment it presented to the world was more than matched by the happiness, security and loving embrace of the family inside.