McAuley, a native of Strabane, Co Tyrone, was born in 1965. He came of age at the height of the violence in the North and joined the Provisional IRA. He quickly gained a reputation as a willing killer. 

He was dispatched to the UK in 1990 with a mission to kill several senior figures in the British establishment, including politicians and industrialists. The following year, he and another man, Nessan Quinlivan — brother of current Sinn Féin TD Maurice — were arrested and held in Brixton Prison.

They effected a daring escape when McAuley produced a pistol and the pair forced prison officers to allow them into the yard, where they scaled the high walls by putting a wheelbarrow on top of dog kennels. Outside they shot a prison officer and made good their escape. After a period in London, McAuley is believed to made his way back to the Republic.

In June 1996, he was part of a gang who shot dead Detective Garda Jerry McCabe, and badly wounded Detective Garda Ben O’Sullivan in an attempted armed robbery in Adare.

Descriptions of the incident given in evidence suggest there was a firm intention to kill the two gardaí, irrespective of how the robbery was progressing. 

Subsequently, it emerged that the operation was not sanctioned by IRA HQ, at a time when a ceasefire had recently broken down.

McAuley and three other men were charged with murder. Amid accusations of intimidation of a vital witness, the DPP eventually agreed to push instead for a manslaughter charge.

In 1999 all four were sentenced to long terms, including 14 years for McAuley and another man, Kevin O’Neill. They served their sentence for the greater part in Castlerea open prison in Co Roscommon.

Despite revulsion at the killing of a garda in those circumstances, Sinn Féin lobbied hard for the men to be released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. 

Arguably, they had a point. Many prisoners north of the border who were guilty of comparable crimes were released but it would have been political dynamite if Jerry McCabe’s killers had their sentences commuted.

While the men were in prison, photographs emerged of them being visited by various Sinn Féin politicians. When McAuley and O’Neill were released in 2009, they were collected at the prison gate by Sinn Féin TD Martin Ferris. At the following year’s ard fheis the men were given a standing ovation.

While in prison, McAuley met Pauline Tully, who was part of a Sinn Féin delegation that used to visit regularly. A relationship struck up and she became pregnant while McAuley was still serving his sentence. She subsequently gave birth to a second son. They married but within a few years of McAuley’s release, the union was in serious trouble.

By Christmas Eve 2014, McAuley was no longer living in the family home in Co Cavan as Ms Tully had sought and received a barring order following a previous assault. He was due to spend Christmas with her and the children, but when he arrived at the house he had already been drinking. 

Over a three-and-a-half-hour ordeal, he stabbed her 13 times and repeatedly assaulted her. At one point he brought the children into the room to say goodbye to their mother. She was eventually rescued, and a year later McAuley was sentenced to 12 years, with four suspended.

While he was in prison on remand for the assault charges, a frequent visitor was Jonathan Dowdall, who the previous year had stepped down as a Sinn Féin councillor. During the trial of Gerry Hutch for the Regency Hotel murder, it emerged that Dowdall had visited McAuley 14 times around this period.

Dowdall told the court that McAuley was acting as a broker between the Hutch gang and dissident Republicans in the North. Following his conviction for the stabbing and assault, a number of Republican figures distanced themselves from him.

In December 2015, days after the sentencing, Tully gave an interview to Marian Finucane on RTÉ radio. Her purpose in speaking out was to highlight the scourge of domestic abuse and provide some solace to others who were living with it behind closed doors. At one point, Finucane asked her what she had expected by marrying a very violent man.

“I was reared in a republican family, I was a member of Sinn Féin, an elected councillor for Sinn Féin, I would have agreed with the republican cause, so I’m not going to start condemning different aspects of it or saying anything about it,” she said.

“I’ve known people involved in the conflict all my life...just because they’re involved in a war situation doesn’t mean that they’re on a personal level violent. I’ve known many people who are not any way violent to their spouses.”

Finucane asked whether this was true even of those who had killed people. “We have a lot of soldiers all over the world go out and fight wars for different countries for different causes and it obviously has an effect, but it doesn’t mean that they come back and mistreat their families.”

The response on one level was entirely understandable, albeit the inference that McAuley was a solider is highly questionable. Undoubtedly, there are individuals who joined the Provisional IRA for ideological reasons, in pursuit of the organisation’s aim of violently imposing a 32-county socialist republic on the island. 

Others would have joined up after witnessing or being the victim of state violence in response to the IRA which was often indiscriminate and brutal. Removed from the circumstances of the conflict many such individuals would have no predisposition to violence. 

There were, however, others like McAuley who were just thugs who were put to use by the Provo leadership. And thereafter, all that mattered was they did their bit for the cause. 

Just as some paedophiles within the organisation were simply relocated, so also the likes of McAuley was considered a hero until such time as his propensity for violence began to cause embarrassment.

Pearse McAuley was released from prison in 2022. He was living in a house near Strabane when his body was found on Monday. It is unclear how long he had been dead but the PSNI has indicated it does not consider the death suspicious.