How Joe Biden can be a true friend to the Irish

On this day in 1974, a body was recovered in quiet fields near the Country Tyrone village of Clogher, hard against Northern Ireland’s frontier. It was that of Cormac McCabe, the headmaster of a nearby secondary school, who was also a part-time officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, locally raised ‘home battalions’ of the British Army.

McCabe had been kidnapped the day before, having crossed the border to have lunch in Monaghan town with his wife and disabled daughter. Exposed and defenceless, he was the softest of targets for the Provisional IRA terrorists who abducted him, shot him in the head and then dumped him in a bog field.

Joe Biden won’t have heard of McCabe when today, forty-seven years exactly after a fellow Irishman was found murdered, he becomes the forty sixth president of the United States. There is more than mathematical symmetry at work here. Biden, who celebrates his heritage, might do well to consider what this compatriot stood for and died for if he is to become a true a friend to Northern Ireland’s struggle to find a better tomorrow.