Reading and listening to the details of IRA thug Pearse McAuley’s cowardly and sickening attack on his wife Pauline Tully in the aftermath of his sentencing earlier this month was stomach churning.

In particular, the thoughts of their two young children bearing witness to what went on in the kitchen of their home in Kilnaleck, Co Cavan last Christmas Eve doesn’t bear thinking of. I hope that they are getting all the support and counselling required in dealing with what they saw that morning.

Ms Tully is a brave woman, and her children are blessed that they still have their loving mother to try and help them rebuild their lives together while McAuley reflects on the sad, sadistic life he has led over the past 30 odd years in the confines of prison.

I listened intently to Pauline Tully recount graphically what happened to her on 24 December last year in a gripping interview with Marian Finucance on RTÉ Radio 1. How lucky she is to be still alive.

Just days after he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for this brutal assault, it wasn’t the time nor the place for Marian Finucane to interrogate Ms Tully in any great detail about her former husbands’ role in the 1996 murder of detective Garda Jerry McCabe.

But, in fairness to Marian Finucane, she needed to touch on it. And she did by reading out listeners’ texts, which I’d say reflected what most listeners were thinking: “How could she have married this man, considering his past?”

Ms Tully, a former Sinn Féin councillor, while not going into any great detail on the comments, did make some reference to “soldiers” involved in “war”.

On the Clare Byrne’s radio programme, which immediately followed, another Sinn Féin member and general election candidate Louise O’Reilly also mentioned “war”, while dodging calls for her to condemn the murder of Detective Garda McCabe.

Later that day, she changed her mind with a tweet condemning the murder.

Detective Garda McCabe and his colleague, Ben O’Sullivan, who miraculously survived the cowardly ambush, were riddled with bullets by McAuley and his fellow “soldiers” as they escorted a post office van delivering social welfare payments to the post office in Adare.

To most, this was a brutal criminal act carried out by thugs. Yet, as we will see in the next general election, there are some people in this country who agree with the view that McAuley and company were “soldiers” involved in a war in Adare, Co Limerick, on 7 June 1996.