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For years before coming to Niagara Falls I worked for the Irish Echo, an international newspaper based in New York City. And I quickly found out you can't toil long in the ghetto of Irish journalism without having to write about the "Troubles," the long-fought conflict between the British Army, their paramilitary allies and the IRA.
Most of us did it from a safe distance. For my own part, I reviewed the latest literature on the subject and occasionally met with one of the hard men, on the lam in the States and keeping his head down in one of the Irish bars that pepper the Bronx or Sunnyside, Queens.
But for others, the work got a lot more up-close and personal, not to mention dangerous. My friend and colleague at the Echo, Jack Holland, had to flee Belfast with nothing but the clothes on his back after learning that a notoriously violent IRA splinter group -- the INLA -- had put a price on his head.
Jack had written a series of articles and later a book exposing the INLA for what it was -- a criminal gang of dope-dealing leg-breakers. This upset the gang members, who had long sought to portray themselves as patriotic freedom fighters. He put himself at great personal risk to write what he did and, the truth be told, he wasn't entirely safe even after he made it to New York.
Another Irish journalist whose work I came to know in those days was Veronica Guerin, who was also drawn to that dark nexus where crime, politics and violence meet. It would prove a fatal attraction for her.
A young wife and mother whose petite good looks concealed the heart of a lion, Guerin wrote for the Sunday Independent in Dublin. Her job as a crime reporter drew her into that city's heroin underworld, where she discovered that many of the same financiers and gunmen who wrapped themselves in the Irish Tri-Colour for their supposed efforts in the North were also involved in the drug trade.
Her first target was Martin "The General" Cahill, Dublin's most feared crime boss and an INLA associate. Cahill was murdered in August, 1994, and in a subsequent article, Guerin hinted at the identity of his killer, an IRA assassin who also had ties to the drug trade.
A month later, as she tucked her 5-year-old son, Cathal, into bed, shots from a .45 caliber pistol were fired through the window, barely missing her and the boy.
Undeterred, in January, 1995, she wrote a detailed piece about a $4.4 million airport robbery in which she implicated paramilitaries from the North acting in conjunction with gangsters from Dublin. The next evening, she was home alone when there was a knock on the door. She opened it, and was knocked down by a man wearing a motorcycle helmet. He pulled a pistol and held it to her temple before lowering his aim and shooting her in the leg, a quaint Irish practice popularly known as "kneecapping."
"I have said already, and I will say it again now, that I have no intention of stopping my work," she wrote in her column a few days later. "I shall continue as an investigative reporter, the job I believe I do best."
Recklessly, perhaps, she set up a meeting with the man she believed ordered the shooting, a crime lord named John "The Monk" Gilligan. When she arrived at his country estate on Sept. 13, 1995, Gilligan savagely beat her, and said he would kill her and sodomize her son if she mentioned his name in the paper again.
Guerin decided to press charges. The police assigned her 24-hour protection but she refused it, saying that it cramped her style.
She was stopped at a traffic light in Dublin on the morning of June 26, 1996, when her luck ran out. Talking on her cell phone, leaving a message on the answering machine of a policeman friend, she didn't notice two men on a motorcycle pull up alongside her. She had just beaten a speeding ticket in municipal court. "Ha ha, you didn't get me," the tape recorded her laughing. Then came the sound of five gun shots, all but one of which hit her in the chest.
Ironically, the killing occurred just two days before she was to address a conference in London on "Dying to Tell a Story: Journalists at Risk."
In death, Veronica Guerin became a legend, a martyr and a cause celebre. Ireland's then-president, Mary Robinson, and prime minister, John Bruton, presided at her funeral. Two books were written about her, and a film is in the works. Journalists from all over the world descended on Dublin demanding justice for their slain comrade.
Police officials said the underworld had "crossed the Rubicon" in murdering a newspaper reporter. More than 150 arrests were made in what was called the largest criminal investigation in Ireland's history. Lowly street thugs took their places beside mob kingpins behind prison bars.
The trials are still going on.
In one of her last columns, Guerin quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.;
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
In Ireland, serious journalism always runs the risk of turning into a contact sport. Veronica Guerin knew this, and made a conscious decision to carry on, regardless of the danger.
The world would be a better place if we had more like her.