Don’t fall victim to the myth of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ terrorist
The reason for the silence was, of course, that after his release from prison for the manslaughter (as we’re legally required to call it) of Det Gda McCabe, McAuley went on to stab his estranged wife multiple times in front of their children on Christmas Eve in 2014.
His victim, Pauline Tully, mercifully survived and is now Sinn Féin TD for Cavan-Monaghan. She has spoken of that night, most recently last November on RTÉ’s Upfront, and of her “absolute fear” that he would one day return to finish what he started.
For what he did to Tully, McAuley remained persona non grata in Sinn Féin at the time of his death. Rightly so. But what about Rose Dugdale? She lived to the ripe old age of 83.
Danielle Carter was not so blessed. She died at the age of 15 when the IRA exploded a one-tonne bomb at London’s Baltic Exchange, the biggest to hit the city since World War II.
Her father was a chauffeur. He’d left her waiting in a car outside the building while he went inside. It was a Friday evening, around 9pm.
He spent all night searching hospitals for her, only to find out at 5.30 the next morning that she was dead.
Danielle’s eight-year-old sister, Christine, was also in the car at the time. Two-and-a-half pounds of glass were embedded in her padded jacket. She needed 100 stitches to her face.
Christine was so traumatised that she used to run away if she heard an Irish accent. Her grieving mother brought her to Ireland to show her that not all Irish people were bad.
The bomb — as revealed in Sean O’Driscoll’s 2022 book Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber — was designed by Dugdale, then part of the IRA’s “research and development” unit.
Dugdale remained unrepentant to the end, as many stupid people do. Especially educated stupid people. The worst kind. If anyone should be sitting at the right hand of God, it’s the children she helped to murder.
It could be argued that we should be grateful that Sinn Féin has enough moral compass not to want to be associated with a wife beater with links to organised crime like McAuley, even if many do still regard Dugdale as some sort of lovable eccentric.
But it can hardly have come as a surprise that a man who had dedicated his life to hurting people turned out to have sadistic tendencies.
That was his job.
Being a violent man was regarded as an admirable quality for most of his life. It hardly makes it better because most of those savage tendencies were saved for what some consider the right cause — such as helping to kill a garda diligently doing his duty.
Republicans were indignant when, on his release, he was described in parts of the media as “psychopathic”.
But the people who so described him were proved right, weren’t they? It was the ones who gave McCabe’s killers a standing ovation at the Sinn Féin ard fheis, or who posed with them for pictures on their release as if they were celebrities who were wrong.
There were plenty of men like McAuley in the republican movement, who got a kick out of the control it gave them over other people. As long as their crimes never came to court, they still get tributes when they die.
Wife beaters. Child abusers. Drug dealers. It was all hushed up.
Feminist author Joan Smith wrote a book a few years ago after realising that many men convicted of terrorist offences also had a history of abusing and beating their wives and partners.
The wife of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a nightclub in Florida popular with the gay community, was raped and beaten repeatedly during their marriage.
French-Tunisian man Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who slaughtered 84 people, including 10 children, by driving a truck into a crowd in Nice on Bastille Day, had often been reported to police for domestic violence.
Darren Osborne, who drove his car into a crowd outside a mosque in London, killing one man, was, Smith discovered, a “domestic tyrant… with a lengthy record of violent crime” against the women in his life.
Her conclusion was that the link between domestic violence and terrorism was so clear that it should be seen as a red flag for radicalisation — since men who are habituated to using violence in the home may be attracted to terrorism, precisely because it offers another outlet for their rage.
The same pattern among paramilitaries was logged in the North over decades by the Rape Crisis Centre.
One song popular with prisoners even had the terrifying chorus: “I didn’t think my wife would be unfaithful/I always thought she’d play the game/But when they let me out of Long Kesh prison/I’ll make her wish she’d never heard my name.”
All of this was tolerated, as long as the men, like McAuley, were doing their bit for the cause. They may be monsters, went the thinking, but they were “our” monsters.
For republicans to retrospectively say McAuley crossed the line in attacking his wife is hypocritical. They know these sorts of things were going on behind closed doors all the time.
The priest who officiated at his funeral on Thursday has been criticised, hardly surprisingly, for saying that “all of us have sinned greatly and Pearse was no exception”.
Men of God may be contractually obliged to look for the best in even the worst people, but his words came across as glib. Some sins, after all, are bigger than other. Name them.
For mourners to say McAuley was “saddened” by the plight of people in Gaza simply adds to the incredulity.
They’ll be telling us he gave money to Guide Dogs for the Blind next.
But in a way, those uttering such platitudes are simply parroting the same comforting lies that people involved in violence and their supporters told themselves in the Troubles.
The truth is that Rose Dugdale and Pearse McAuley were two sides of the same coin. To see them as anything else is to fall into the myth of the “good terrorist”. Those myths kill.
“I miss the fun-loving wife that Julie had always been — the larger-than-life personality that brightened up everywhere she went, and the smile that lit up every room. All of this is now slowly fading away and it’s extremely painful for me to watch this deterioration.” Scott Brand, the husband of former Coronation Street star Julie Goodyear, who has been diagnosed with dementia.