VERONICA: MY FRIEND, MY HERO
It’s been 20 years since the death of journalist Veronica Guerin. She was best known for her determination and bravery in uncovering gangland activity in Ireland, but here, she’s remembered as a kind, caring mother, wife and friend
She fascinated me from the first time I saw her Veronica tried the patience of the city’s traffic cops
SUNDAY, January 22, 1995. It’s a day which still glows with the luminosity of a perfect pearl dangling from a chain of darker recollections. Perhaps it’s because we had so much fun that particular day, Veronica and I.
We had made one of our regular pilgrimages to our sacred stomping ground of Old Trafford, where Manchester United were playing Newcastle. An acquaintance which began in the newsroom of the Sunday Independent over a bit of banter about football had quickly deepened into a close bond of friendship.
In some ways, we were very alike — both journalists who loved the bustle of the newspaper business, both gregarious women who relished nothing more than a marathon gossip on the phone at weekends. One Saturday afternoon Veronica paused in mid-telephonic flow to wave off her husband Graham Turley and son Cathal who were heading out to watch a match somewhere in the city.
A couple of hours later, the pair returned home to find Veronica still stretched out on the sofa, cordless phone cradled between her ear and shoulder. ‘Who are you on to now?’ Graham asked her. ‘It’s the same call to Lise,’ she confessed. I could almost hear Graham’s eye-roll down the line.
But in most ways we were very different. Veronica was rooted in the northside of the city. She had grown up in Artane and had married and settled down in a beautiful home close to Dublin Airport, which had been built by Graham. It was her sanctuary, a slightly off-the-beaten-track haven where she and Graham hung out with their adorable strawberry-blonde, blueeyed boy Cathal.
‘You’re the light of my life,’ Veronica would frequently tell her son. ‘The light of my life.’
It was the one place where she would relax completely, sitting at the large round wooden table in the airy Aga-warmed kitchen at the back of the house — visiting friends and family never used the front door.
Graham would conjure up food for whatever cohort of characters that appeared at the table, while Veronica would ply them with tea, coffee, wine or beer, although she herself ate like a sparrow and drank very sparingly.
In the latter days when she was under Garda protection, the two detectives on duty outside the house would often find themselves wheedled out of their car and into the welcoming kitchen, where they would be fed, watered and expertly pumped by their charming hostess for nuggets of information about the criminal underworld.
Veronica fascinated me from the first time I spotted her zipping around the ‘Sindo’ newsroom in 1994, muttering simultaneously into her two mobile phones and talking up a storm with the lads on the newsdesk.
In a workplace populated with largerthan-life characters, this investigative journalist commanded enormous respect for the string of scoops she had produced in a hitherto short career for The Sunday Business Post, the Sunday Tribune and now the Sunday Independent.
But there was nothing of the diva about her. Slender, neatly dressed in trousers, low-heeled shoes, bright shirt and jacket, she somehow managed to be both ladylike and one of the boys, swapping pleasantries and profanities as she whizzed by colleagues.
She took no guff from anyone, was fiercely competitive in the hunt for stories and had little truck with flattery.
‘Would you ever go and shite,’ she would often chide some poor soul, the sting removed by the accompanying smile as wide as her face. Generous, warm and funny, she drew people into her energetic orbit.
But Veronica was no pack animal, like many journalists who work and socialise together. She operated solo, using her red Opel as a mobile office for meeting sources and conducting stakeouts. She was a devil for speeding, amassing tickets and trying the patience of traffic cops around the city.
She didn’t go drinking with her colleagues in the evenings. Time outside work was reserved for her other passions — her husband and son, and her beloved football team.
Travelling to Manchester with Veronica was always an adventure. She would inevitably materialise just as the boarding gate was swinging shut, silencing all reproaches with a merry, ‘Jaysis, relax, I’m here now, aren’t I?’
She would hustle on to the flight, bearing her lucky flag and a thick brick of Sunday newspapers, blue eyes alight with anticipation.
That particular morning, January 22, she had a piece in the Sunday Independent which was a classic example of Veronica’s extraordinary modus operandi as a crime reporter. She had an interview with an underworld figure dubbed ‘The Coach’, which painted a jaw-dropping, vivid portrait of a career criminal who had amassed a fortune through theft and fraud.
The Coach boasted to Veronica about how he had stayed in a hotel in Geneva with a suitcase stuffed with £980,000 — a stroke, wrote Veronica, ‘that kicked him into the big time, into the high life of chauffeurs and champagne’. The criminal told her that his haul was, ‘all in brand new crispy £50 Sterling notes. I spent days just smelling them. It was the largest amount of cash I’d ever had at one time. It was lovely.’
It was incendiary stuff and the general public was riveted by her coverage. Until now, Ireland’s major criminals had gone unnoticed and unnamed about their evil business, living a parallel and invisible existence among the decent citizenry. But now this reporter had lifted the rock and brought them into the light.
To circumvent libel troubles, she called them different names: the Monk, the Boxer, the Penguin. She exposed the vast amount of money which these crime bosses were amassing. In her piece on the Coach, the criminal revealed how he had once bought a Rolls Royce, hired a chauffeur and rented an office block on the Thames in London.
But although she relished the national buzz she created with these stories, it wasn’t just reportage as showbiz. For Veronica was a campaigning journalist, a Dub with a strong sense of social justice who could see how drugs had ravaged the capital in particular.
That year, use of heroin, which had plummeted in price, was up 300 per cent, and three-quarters of all prisoners in Mountjoy were serving time for drugrelated offences while the drug barons lived high on the hog.
‘Follow the money,’ was Veronica’s mantra to anyone in authority who would listen. But the criminals with all the money were listening and reading too, and didn’t like it one bit.
However that bright Sunday in January, there was no sign of the gathering storm. It was going to be a special day in Old Trafford, for we had the football equivalent of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets — post-game passes to the Players’ Lounge. The passes were sprung on her as a last-minute surprise, and she was ecstatic.
After the 1-0 victory to the home side, when the stadium emptied and
darkness fell, she scampered down the tunnel, on to the hallowed turf, down to the goal-mouth and kissed the ground where the previous season the unlikely figure of Steve Bruce had improbably scored two crucial headers in an injury-time victory against Sheffield Wednesday. Laughter arose from the gloom — two groundsmen were enjoying the spectacle of Veronica’s playful worship.
Inside the lounge, Veronica’s eyes were out on sticks. At one stage I had to dissuade her from slipping Paul Ince’s Man of the Match trophy into her capacious handbag. ‘He wouldn’t miss it, sure he gets loads of them,’ she protested as I dragged her away.
But then Eric Cantona entered the room, and my vivacious, fearless friend was suddenly struck dumb. He was our hero — in fact, the only time we ever squabbled was over which of us the Gallic genius would fancy more. We’d spent hours happily debating the issue.
Suddenly there he was, impeccable in a suit and walking our way. And Veronica, who nervelessly pursued wayward bishops and ruthless thugs, was stunned into silence.
I gestured to him with our hastily-bought disposable camera and he obligingly stopped beside her. She summoned up a smile. Click. We were giddy all the way home to Dublin. Nobody told us there’d be days like this.
Three days later, Eric launched his kung-fu kick at a fan in Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park.
Four days after that, Veronica wrote a searing piece on the Monk, Gerry Hutch. And the day after that, on Monday, January 30, Veronica was shot in her home.
She had been running around the house, phone under her ear, getting ready to appear on telly before joining her colleagues later in the evening at a Sunday Independent party. I was giving her directions to the southside venue when she interrupted me.
‘Feck it, someone’s at the front door, I’ll have to go, I’ll call you back,’ she said, hanging up even as I shouted at her to bring the phone with her to the rarely-used door, suspecting that she would forget to call back.
She didn’t call. For within a minute she was lying on the floor, shot in the leg and lucky to be alive.
But the bullet simply slowed her down for a little while.
On October 1, 1995, we flew to Old Trafford for Eric’s triumphant return after his ban. We stayed over in Manchester as it was a late kick-off, and shared a hotel room. Veronica was wearing a surgical neck collar, but it was the bruises on her body which were so shocking.
Two weeks earlier, on September 13, John Gilligan had used his fists on her when she turned up at his home and questioned him about his lavish lifestyle. He tore her shirt, looking for a wire. He punched her in the face, head, breasts and stomach. Later, in case he hadn’t made himself clear, he phoned her and threatened to kill her if she wrote about him, and said that he would kidnap and rape her son. Afterwards, Gilligan denied the assault and the threats.
But the skies were darkening over Veronica. She began to talk of getting into another line of journalism, politics, perhaps. But with typical courage, she wouldn’t quit until she had seen her attacker brought to justice. She would carry on for now.
In December, she was both proud and mortified to receive an award from the international Press Freedom Forum. ‘It’s only for being shot in the leg,’ she told everyone.
In early March 1996, she threw a party in the house to thank all the detectives in her protection detail. She had persuaded the authorities to stand them down as she felt she couldn’t do her job properly with detectives in conspicuous tow.
But she missed her own party. While en route to the soiree, I got a call. ‘Lise, can you host the party with Graham? I’m about to get on a plane to Florida. I’ve found Bishop Comiskey,’ she announced, a reference to a leading cleric who had left the country amid controversy.
She phoned the house to check on her guests as soon as she landed, and was reassured by the din of singing and general carousing.
The last thing I shared with her was a laugh. We spoke around 12.50pm on June 26, after she left Naas courthouse. She had just miraculously been handed a fine for a speeding offence and had kept her licence. She had asked the judge for leniency, declaring she had been behaving herself. I pointed out that doing 102mph was hardly behaving. ‘Sure last time I was caught doing 103!’ she said, and we both cracked up. Five minutes later, she was dead. And with her died the last vestiges of a country’s innocence — a belief that evil men would threaten reprisals but would stop short of assassinating a citizen, a journalist, a wife, a mother by cutting her down in broad daylight on a bright summer afternoon.
But the Veronica I chose to remember is the radiant woman on a magical day in Manchester, beaming beside her Eric.
It was the photo which stood atop her coffin. A defiant memory of all the good days that she lived.
She began to talk of trying another line of journalism