JIMMY GUERIN DOES not remember Veronica as having had early journalistic ambitions.
‘She never thought about what she wanted to be when she grew up; we never really discussed it, even when she was doing her leaving [exams]; she didn’t give a shit.’
Jimmy Guerin found no obvious pattern to the career moves his sister took. ‘Completely inconsistent. Jumping from Jack to Billy and Billy to Jack, until she found something, and that was in journalism.’
He speaks plainly about the reasons why journalism attracted his sister.
‘An awful lot of journalism has a certain amount of bullshit, and she was able to mix it with people.’ Journalism’s erratic demands suited her too. ‘She found it much easier to work the undisciplined hours, as opposed to going to a job from nine to five – which she couldn’t hack.’
According to Jimmy, the first story she wrote was on Aer Lingus holidays, a story he believes she happened upon through contacts she had established when she was in Fianna Fáil. He describes her early stories as ‘fairly explosive’.
Veronica certainly took pleasure in her success, even, according to Jimmy, having her first few front-page stories block-mounted and put on the wall.
She began with business stories. She’d had an unfortunate time in business herself, absolutely disastrous. Then she did the story on Aer Lingus holidays . . . about fraud . . . and she knew how to track and how to chase it. When she was working with my father in accountancy, she [had to] check the invoice against the payment, against the bank statement, so she had the basic training in how to follow things. This was why she was able to delve into matters in various stories so easily . . . she knew where to go and where to look.
Jimmy believes that Veronica’s interest in crime grew out of this initial interest in the business world. In the early nineties, the Irish government instituted a tax amnesty which benefited many known criminals. This event, according to Jimmy, sparked Veronica’s first interest in the underworld.
Paddy Prendiville had known Veronica Guerin for about fourteen years before she died. When they first met in the early 1980s, he was working for the Sunday Tribune. Later he became editor of Phoenix magazine, the Irish equivalent of Private Eye. The magazine had long been a trenchant critic of the Sunday Independent’s politics in particular and its journalism in general. None the less, he had actually encouraged her to join the paper in 1994. He was also instrumental in bringing about her entry into journalism in 1990. This is what he remembers.
A group of Young Liberals had come over from England in 1983. One of them that I’d known for an age rang me up and said would I go and meet him for a drink. He had a meeting with Fianna Fáil people, with Ógra Fianna Fáil.
So I went down and in the middle of this session, one of the Young Liberals said, ‘There’s no difference between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.’ So I jumped in on my third pint and said, ‘Hold on a second,’ and then I gave my republican analysis – of Fianna Fáil being the party for the workers and the small farmers, whereas Fine Gael, at bottom, was the party for the professionals.
And suddenly I could feel these eyes staring at me. It was Veronica – I had never met her before. And she said, ‘Are you a journalist? The Sunday Tribune isn’t it?’
She rang me afterwards, and made it very clear first of all that we were frogspawn as far as she was concerned. She was fascinated by me, but she said she hated all journalists, because of what they were doing to Charlie Haughey . . . As far as she was concerned, we were all Dublin 4 types, Fine Gael blue shirts, and so on.1
But she was mesmerised by me because I didn’t fit into that, at least not intellectually. And she cultivated me and we cultivated each other for our own immediate, selfish, opportunist goals. She would tell me stories from Fianna Fáil, for example.
But she was fascinated, I’m very clear about saying it, she was fascinated by the media from the very first moment I met her. She was fascinated, and she wanted to be a journalist, but she would not admit it.
Prendiville encouraged her to write, but her first piece of work for him – an article on the Fianna Fáil TD Ivor Callely – met with some degree of scorn.
‘It was the funniest thing I’ve ever read . . . stuff like “Ivor is not only talented, he’s hardworking too.” We couldn’t use it.’
Through Fianna Fáil and through her chance meeting with Paddy Prendiville, Veronica was making her first tentative steps into the world of journalism. The political contacts she had made were already being used. Her passion for, and her almost romantic view, of the profession was also becoming evident. Until her death, she lost neither.
1 Dublin’s liberal intelligentsia, so named because of the postal district in which many of them live.