Sgt. Maurice McCabe, the Mullingar-based Garda, one of the two ‘whistleblowers’ who raised the alarm on wholesale wrongdoing within the Gardaí, received a Person of the Year Award at the 2014 People of the Year Awards ceremony last weekend, as did his former colleague, John Wilson.
Their courageous stance, despite serious ongoing efforts to discredit and silence them, uncovered a scandal which led to the resignation of Justice Minister Alan Shatter and of Garda Commissioner Martin Callanan earlier this year.
Former Garda colleague John Wilson, who received the same award, described Sgt. MacCabe as “one of the greatest people I’ve ever met in my life,” adding that the Garda authorities should be proud to have a person of his calibre in our policing service.
“I hope that transparency and accountability have finally arrived on our shores,” he said.
Sgt McCabe and his wife, Lorraine, in an exclusive interview this week in the Irish Examiner – one of the few newspapers or media to champion the cause of the two Garda ‘whistleblowers’ when others stayed with the official line described what happened as “taking six years out of our lives.”
As the Examiner’s Michael Clifford put it: “Every effort was made to discredit his allegations. …Everybody in power wanted him to just go away, forget about all this stuff and stop making waves.”
Sgt. McCabe told him: ”One reason I kept going was that it was still happening, even when it had been highlighted. It needed to be stopped. How the public were being treated needed to be stopped.”
“I wanted reasonable standards to be applied. Not high standards, just reasonable standards, so the public would get that at least.”
For half a dozen years, Sgt. McCabe and his wife and family had to live with the consequences of his daring to speak out about the wrongdoing he saw. Few others would support him.
“We had to live with it,” his wife Lorraine explained. “Fear was my biggest thing. The fear of being set up for something. With all we had seen you’d just never know.”
Now, everyone can see that Maurice McCabe was a courageous man who had done nothing wrong, but by December 2012, senior Garda officers called to the McCabe home to inform him of restrictions on his access to the Pulse system. After a very trying time for him, it was more than a year later before it became clear that what he and John Wilson were claiming was actually true.
Last weekend’s award came a month after the Irish Road Victims’ Association presented the two men with a special award.
And Sgt. McCabe has paid tribute to the Irish Examiner for their campaign and support, saying the true extent of the abuse of the penalty points system would never had reached the public domain, but for the newspaper’s persistence and coverage.