ONE TRUTH AT least did not change in the weeks and months that followed Veronica Guerin’s murder. Everybody remembered where they were when they heard the news.
It was lunchtime on June 26 1996. I was sitting in the self-service restaurant of Leinster House, the Kildare Street, Dublin, building that houses the Dáil1 and Seanad Éireann.2 It was a middle table; I had my back to the door, and was chatting away about nothing in particular to a colleague, a journalist with the Sunday Independent, John Drennan, idling away an hour until Taoiseach’s Question Time later that afternoon.3
Fianna Fáil’s press secretary, Michael Ronayne, stopped at our table to talk. A Fianna Fáil TD,4 Seán Doherty, had said earlier that morning that he would vote against the impending divorce legislation if a vote were called. We speculated on its significance. We concluded that it had none.
Another party press officer, Mandy Johnson, approached Ronayne and whispered something before moving away. Ronayne said there was a rumour that Veronica Guerin, crime correspondent on the Sunday Independent had been shot again. He was going to ring RTE, Ireland’s state broadcasting network, he said, and find out if it was true.
Ronayne left. Drennan and I looked at each other. I think I grinned in that irrational way you do when someone tells you bad news. I told John that I would go after Ronayne and that if I heard anything I would come back and tell him.
I went outside. Ronayne was sitting on a large leather armchair in the corridor folding down the handset on his mobile. He looked up as I approached. He said some words that I cannot now remember and then he said, ‘She’s dead.’
It was 1.25 p.m. Veronica had been lying dead in her car on a dual carriageway on the outskirts of Dublin for just over twenty minutes. Graham Turley, her husband, would not be told of her death until shortly after 2 p.m. In retrospect, it seemed wrong, invasive, that we should know before him.
As Ronayne and I stood there, a door to our left opened. In brisk procession, looking forward to their lunch, out came the Taoiseach, John Bruton, the Tánaiste,5 Dick Spring, a slew of cabinet ministers and TDs in their wake.
A vote in the chamber had just ended. We told them what we had heard. Bruton and Spring already knew; a message had been passed to them inside the chamber. The news rippled back through the rows of emerging TDs. For a while everyone just stood there, awkwardly, then moved away.
At this stage the report was technically unconfirmed. The lunchtime radio news on Ireland’s radio one carried a report that a woman had been shot dead on the Naas dual carriageway. Privately, the Gardaí6 were telling the press that it was Veronica. Her red Opel Calibra car and its number plates were well known to themselves and criminals.
I went back into the restaurant and told John Drennan that Veronica was dead. I walked upstairs to my office in the political correspondents’ room on the second floor of Leinster House. Already some of them had started working on the story.
The lunchtime news programme was just ending. Later I learnt that a fax had come through to the producer. It was from the Evening Herald, a sister paper of the Sunday Independent. The fax contained the Herald’s latest headline: ‘Veronica Guerin is Shot Dead.’
It was a feature of the lunchtime programme to read out the early evening paper headlines, but Veronica had been dead for less than three-quarters of an hour. She had not been formally identified. Nobody knew whether her family had been contacted or not. The producer put the fax to one side.
I sat at my desk and rang Paddy Prendiville, the editor of Phoenix magazine, a good friend of mine but an even closer friend of Veronica’s. Paddy wasn’t there; he was out on sick leave, so I called his home. He had heard the news just five minutes earlier. His voice was agitated, excited from the shock, railing about those whom he believed had murdered one of his closest friends. He said he was trying to contact some of Veronica’s family.
Bits and pieces of news began trickling in to Leinster House. Colleagues were talking to their news desks and their friends, trading information. At first the story was fuzzy, confused. Someone said it was a set-up, that Veronica had gone to meet a contact at the Green Isle Hotel that borders the carriageway. She had gone there and had been shot.
Someone else had spoken to a male friend of Veronica, who claimed that she had been terrified for weeks, scared that her life was in danger, worried about one particular individual, an alleged drug dealer, who had threatened her. The friend had said that he had never known her to be so concerned. None of the names meant anything to me nor to most people in that building on that day.
That afternoon I had nothing to do. I would not have to write about this for another two days, so I just drifted about Leinster House. At half-past four I went to the Dáil bar and had a drink. TDs came and commiserated with me and other journalists on the death of a colleague. But hardly any of my colleagues there that afternoon had known her. Even some of those who were working on the Sunday Independent had never met her. For them she was just a story they had read about when she was shot at the first time, the second time and now this final time. She was not a colleague of whom they necessarily had any memories, or with whom they had shared journalistic experiences.
Journalists are, to some extent, a community, but Veronica had been a latecomer to journalism; she had no history. She also worked almost entirely alone.
I had known Veronica Guerin for eleven years, our relationship had always been friendly, but it would be unrealistic to describe us as close. I had met her first in 1985 when she was working as a part-researcher, part-public relations consultant for Fianna Fáil.
In 1986 I got engaged and Veronica met me and gave me a bottle of champagne. We met up sporadically over the next ten years. On the last occasion we had met, about three months before she died, I had given her flowers, belated congratulations for a journalism award she had received. Later we walked back to her car, the red Opel in which she would one day die, and she left me at the gate of Leinster House.
In the years that followed our first meeting, I had noted her career path, her stories. Before and after her death, Paddy Prendiville filled me in on other aspects of her life. I had never met her husband or her child, never been in her house. But we still had a lot in common. We were about the same age; she was a year or two younger. We were both mothers and we had the shared experience of women in high-profile positions in the media.
Later I realised that I didn’t know her at all. Neither did most of the people she had befriended during her six years as a journalist.
At four o’clock on the afternoon she died, a fat bundle of the Evening Herald was placed beside the cash desk in the restaurant in Leinster House. The headline read: ‘Veronica Guerin is Shot Dead.’ In its simplicity it was devastating.
At half-past four, tributes were paid to Veronica by the Taoiseach and the party leaders in the Dáil chamber. I sat in the press gallery. The journalistic part of my brain detached itself and paid attention. The rest of me was floating in some other mental space.
The Taoiseach talked about press freedom and praised its role in our democracy. It was a rather novel view from a man whose leadership style was perceived as being defined by media paranoia, by an overriding imperative to keep information about his administration away from the press.
Mary Harney, the leader of the Progressive Democrats, stood and said that Veronica had been shot twice in the face and three times in the chest. Afterwards, somebody said that the detailing of her murder in that way was gratuitous.
I learnt later that Veronica’s face had been unmarked. All the bullets had lodged in her upper body – below the neck. But Harney’s description gave me nightmares; I worried about how the undertakers could make her whole again, make her presentable to her husband and her child. I thought about the police and others who had to view her body in the car. I heard that her colleague, crime correspondent Paul Williams, had become physically sick on the Naas Road when he went to view the scene.
The rest of the evening passed in a haze. At five o’clock I listened to a radio interview with her editor, Aengus Fanning. He was shocked, he said, devastated. He had never met a journalist with Veronica’s drive, with her sense of ‘mission’. He denied that there was anything he could have done to have stopped her pursuing the stories she did.
Even though there had been shots fired through her window. Even though she had been shot in the leg. Even though she had been beaten up. Even though her young son had been threatened with rape, kidnap and murder.
In a newspaper exceptionally well staffed with editors and line managers, supported by legal, public relations and other ancillary advisers, and with the financial might of the O’Reilly media empire behind it, Veronica alone had controlled her destiny.
That was the Sunday Independent line then; it remains the Sunday Independent line to this day. I later discovered that many people who had worked very closely with Veronica in other newspapers shared Fanning’s view. Veronica was, and was permitted to be, a law unto herself.
I did not leave Leinster House until after six o’clock, even though I had no work to do there. Because hardly anybody there knew Veronica, I could not talk to anybody about her.
The next two days passed in a similar, Veronica-saturated, media haze. I read most of the pieces in the papers, heard most of the news bulletins and tributes. My local butcher sympathised with me. My next-door neighbour gave me a hug. A stranger came up in the bank and said, ‘Aren’t you lucky you only write about business?’
On Thursday morning, the day after her death, RTÉ radio presenter Joe Duffy read out a listener’s suggestion that flowers in memory of Veronica should be placed outside Leinster House. This would be a beautiful, midsummer reminder of her, and its location a reminder to those whom the caller judged to be partially responsible for her death.
Shortly after lunchtime on that day, I walked out past the Leinster House gate, towards Molesworth Street. There, lying against the railings, were four bundles of flowers. When I came back less than an hour later, the number had grown. By teatime, the bank of floral tributes stretched the length of the railing.
Some were garden flowers wrapped in plastic, others Interflora-delivered bouquets. Two were dedicated to Orla Guerin, Veronica’s journalistic namesake who, in 1994, had run for election to the European Parliament on the Labour party ticket. Her name was frequently confused with that of the crime reporter. Veronica would have been amused.
Aengus Fanning was interviewed again. Once more he was asked if there was anything he could have done to prevent her death. In that interview, as in others, it was stated, and accepted as part of the public articulation of Veronica’s death, that there was nothing he or his newspaper could have done.
She had requested that Gardaí protection be removed in the wake of two earlier attacks. The public had to understand: this was a woman – a journalist – apart; a woman with a mission, someone that no one and no organisation could deflect. The paper, its editor, its management and its owner should not be held to blame.
That day, Aengus Fanning wrote his own tribute to Veronica Guerin in the editorial page of his sister paper, the Irish Independent. It was appropriately sombre and in touch with the country’s mood, but it was curiously detached in tone and content. It could have been written by anyone; by the editor of another paper perhaps, by someone who barely knew her.
Most notable was the apparent absence of self-blame, even self-doubt on the part of Fanning. There were constant references to the solitary nature of her work, to her own detachment from the ‘normal’ workings of, and relationships with, a newspaper. There was absolute acceptance on Fanning’s part that nothing and nobody could have stopped her from doing what she did.
Throughout this period, Independent editorial and management executives were being advised by the Independent group’s corporate public relations consultant, Jim Milton.
Fanning wrote:
This is Irish journalism’s darkest day. For the first time, a journalist has been murdered for daring to write about our criminal underworld and daring to chronicle the lives of the brutal people who inhabit it.
It is a blatant and terrifying attack on a free press and on freedom of speech, freedoms which we take too often for granted.
As the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Opposition leaders said yesterday, the murder of our colleague Veronica Guerin is nothing less than an attack on democracy.
If newspapers, television, radio and other media were to be deterred from doing their duty in the public interest by threats, intimidation and murder, it would indeed be time to draw down the blinds on our democracy.
But this, I am convinced, is not going to happen. Veronica Guerin is irreplaceable, to her family, to her colleagues, to Irish journalism, to Independent Newspapers and to the Sunday Independent, but I believe her brilliant, short career will be an inspiration to thousands of others all over the world, and that the ruthless forces in society who care nothing for life and liberty will be routed in time.
Veronica Guerin’s calm courage was of an entirely different order from that of thousands of journalists in war zones from Belfast to Beirut.
For a start, she always worked on her own, tenuously linked with news desk, family and friends by her mobile phone.
It was the sheer solitariness of her chosen method of work, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, that marked her out from others.
Not for her the camaraderie of reporters sharing risks and the reward of the story. Veronica, self-deprecating, attractive, wryly humorous, was entirely on her own. She was armed only with her pen, her notebook and her courage when she confronted some of our most dangerous criminals, when she probed into the darkest corners of our underworld and came back with an unending stream of exclusive stories.
It struck me more than once that her bravery was of the type that drove isolated French Resistance fighters to take on the brutal, terrifying power of Nazi Germany, working alone without the comradeship and support of colleagues-in-arms.
I and some of her close colleagues often analysed her work and concluded that the only way she was able to carry on was by calmly facing the fact that she might at some time pay for her courage and her convictions with her life.
But to talk to her about the risks she was taking was unrewarding. She made little of them, and never showed the slightest fear, though I know she was frightened at times. ‘Don’t be daft,’ was a typical reaction when the question of danger to her life was raised.
But she knew, deep in her heart, that her work was always going to be dangerous, that nobody but she could do it, that she had to do it alone, and that without the freedom to move about, it would not be possible.
After the gun attack on her home early last year, the most comprehensive security precautions were put in place on the north County Dublin home she shared with her husband Graham and son Cathal, who is due to start school next September.
For a time after that, she was under 24-hour Garda protection but she found this irksome. She knew that to do her work effectively she needed the liberty to move freely and quickly. If she didn’t have this freedom, I am certain she would have given up journalism.
It was no more than her democratic right and she insisted upon it, but she has paid a terrible price, as have her family and her colleagues.
On Friday I had to write my piece for the Sunday Business Post. I thought about writing a ‘The-Veronica-I-knew’ piece but decided that I was too far down the queue.
Instead I called on the Justice Minister, Nora Owen, to resign. She did not take her cue and rush to hand in her notice but picking on her had assuaged my need to hit out at someone. At this stage, the criminals were just anonymous men, their identities barely hinted at in newspaper articles that had been thoroughly vetted by the lawyers before publication.
At this stage also, I knew little about Veronica’s work or how she had gone about it. At this stage, I was making black and white judgements about everybody out of ignorance.
I had rarely read what she wrote, because I didn’t take a great interest in crime. I just assumed that, in an increasingly prosperous and increasingly secular country, crime would flourish. I assumed that there were a lot of people cashing in on the ‘Celtic tiger’ through criminal means. As an area of journalistic or intellectual interest, crime did not excite me. My lack of interest was no aspersion on Veronica or on the quality of her journalism; it was simply a reflection on myself.
I did something else that Friday afternoon. I wrote a short letter to Aengus Fanning and to his deputy Anne Harris. I commiserated with them on Veronica’s death and told them that she had often spoken highly and fondly of them. This was not entirely true. On the last few occasions we had met, Veronica had scarcely spoken a word about either. She was professionally neutral about both. Besides, she hardly ever saw them, though she appeared to be closer to Anne Harris than to Aengus Fanning.
But I wrote this letter because I was thinking about what must be going through their minds at that time. I imagined that they must be feeling guilty in some private way and I wanted to comfort them and say that they should feel OK about their relationship with Veronica. I sent the letter by courier.
Months later Aengus Fanning wrote back. He said the letter had meant more to them than any other that they had received. I found that curious; I also found it unsettling, because by now little seeds of doubt had been sown in my brain about the Independent’s behaviour towards its journalist. Later, much later, little seeds of doubt would be sown in my brain about Veronica herself.
Days passed. Veronica was buried in a graveyard close to her home. The nation mourned. Discussion of her death deepened and widened, but not in the mainstream media. There seemed to be separate, public and private, views on the nature of, and reasons for, her death. In public, the picture was of a brave young woman, a mother, fearless, willing to risk her own life in the pursuit of truth, impervious to pressure to quit, the brightest and the best.
In private, though, other questions were raised, about Veronica, her motivation, the level of risk any journalist is justified in taking, her methodology, and – very much in private – the way the Sunday Independent had handled her death, the way the Sunday Independent had managed Veronica in the two and a half years she had worked there.
When I started this book, the latter issue was my focus. Some months on, the book I began to write had changed. Veronica’s story, I had discovered, was as grey as the skies under which she now lies.
1 Parliament.
2 Senate.
3 The Taoiseach is the Irish Prime Minister.
4 Teachta Dála, member of parliament.
5 Deputy Prime Minister.
6 Irish police force.