The Regrettable Legacy of Veronica Guerin

The murder of Veronica Guerin two years ago next month (June) was a heinous crime. It caused deep shock not just among the family and friends of Veronica, but throughout the country. This was because Veronica had become known nationally from the time of the previous attempt on her life in 1995 and because there seemed something especially awful about the calculated murder of a young, beautiful mother in the prime of her life and career.

While shock and outrage were understandable—and appropriate reactions to her killing—the official response in the form of a panic package of anti-crime measures was barely understandable and not at all appropriate. This criticism applies not just to the politicians who opportunistically sought to glean a political edge from the public outrage over the killing, but to the many media commentators who wilfully ignored the realities of crime in this society.

The mythologising of Veronica Guerin was another unfortunate by-product. She was portrayed as being personally and professionally without the flaws with which all of us are afflicted, leaving her true reputation as a person and as a journalist, vulnerable to scornful deconstruction.
The then Taoiseach, John Bruton, with perhaps characteristic overstatement, described her murder as an attack on democracy here. Others saw in her murder, threats to the very fabric of the state and many commentators saw it as an assault on the freedom of the press.

Her killing was represented as merely the most outrageous manifestation of a crime wave that was about to engulf society and requiring the most drastic remedial action. In the wake of her murder, promises were made to build more prisons at whatever cost to the exchequer, to enact laws at whatever cost to civil liberties. Her murder engendered a response to crime generally that could have done far more damage to this society than the very crime wave it was calculated to confront.

The reality is, and was, that there has been no crime wave— certainly not for the last 15 years, over which time reported crime has remained at more or less the same level. As for serious crime (serious assaults against persons and the use of firearms in connection with crimes against property), the level of reported crime has declined. The murder rate has oscillated significantly but the absolute numbers are so low, especially by any international comparisons, as to make any commentary about trends in this regard meaningless. And a huge proportion of crime here is directly related to drugs and poverty.

The relationship of crime to drug abuse was highlighted in a report published last year by the Garda Research Unit: “Illicit Drug Use and Related Criminal Activity in the Dublin Metropolitan Area”. This report revealed that two thirds of all detected crime in the Dublin area was committed by drug abusers. By far the most obvious anti-crime measure would be to deal with the drugs problem and the underlying causes that give rise to it—i.e. deprivation.

Research to be published this month (May) confirms the very clear connection between crime and deprivation. This research is published in a book “Crime and Poverty in Ireland” edited by Professor Ivana Bacik and Dr Michael O Connell, both of Trinity College, Dublin. A random sample of 2,000 records of cases heard before the Dublin District Court showed that nearly three quarters of all defendants (73.3 per cent) were from the most economically deprived areas of Dublin. The authors of this research comment: “One might be forgiven for suggesting on the basis of the data that the Dublin District Court system appears to be there for people from deprived areas.”

It is evident that the greatest possible impact on both the drugs and crime problems can be made through dealing with deprivation, to which both of these phenomena are directly linked.

Regrettably, this obvious reality was obscured in the reaction to the murder of Veronica Guerin, although, ironically, she herself had come to appreciate in the months before her death that crucial connection.

Her murder did not represent a threat to the fabric of society or democracy, nor to the freedom of the press. It has become more apparent in the two years since that atrocity, that her murder was motivated in the main by considerations, at most, only tangentially associated with journalism. The person most publicly linked with her murder, John Gilligan—and we should emphasise that we have no evidence that he was in any way involved—clearly had a motive to have her murdered, independent of any of Veronica's journalistic work. She was about to give evidence against him in a criminal trial.

In any event, Veronica's modus operandi was very different to normal journalistic practices, which seek to maintain a distance between the journalist and the subjects of inquiry.

Veronica Guerin had great strengths as a journalist—she had remarkable energy, extraordinary resourcefulness and great persistence. She kept in touch daily with a wide variety of contacts and was voracious in the pursuit of journalistic scoops. Her journalistic achievements were remarkable by any standards: her series of interviews with Bishop Eamon Casey, her investigations into Aer Lingus Holidays, her exposés of political corruption, her revelation of the delay in the handling of the Fr Brendan Smyth extradition application—all of these were outstanding achievements in journalism.

But that very hunger that drove those achievements at times led her into recklessness, personal and journalistic. The hagiographic depiction of her, journalistically and personally, in the immediate aftermath of her death served neither truth nor Veronica herself. Like all of us she had her flaws—the record of her business and journalistic dealings which we recount in this issue of Magill establishes that. But she also had great qualities. Apart from the journalistic ones already mentioned, she was a warm, affectionate person and there was a great personal generosity about her.

She can be remembered by her relatives and friends with true pride, accepting her flaws, while acknowledging her gifts. Regrettably, the political legacy she left—in terms of the atavistic response to crime—is far less happy than the memory or her.

Vincent Browne