Journalist’s Slaying Has Dublin Soul-Searching

On a fine summer day, Veronica Guerin had to appear in traffic court in Naas, a town just outside this inviting capital, which is legendary for its lovely Georgian squares, graceful bridges and congenial pubs and restaurants.

After Guerin, an award-winning journalist, paid a speeding fine, she was en route at 1 p.m. to discuss her next investigative report with her editor at the Sunday Independent newspaper.

She stopped her sporty crimson Opel at a red light.

Suddenly, witnesses would recall, a motorcyclist and his passenger pulled up alongside. One man got off, pulled a pistol and fired five shots, killing Guerin, 36. He then leaped back on the motorcycle and the two men sped off, leaving in their wake not only a slain wife and mother but a mystery that has stunned Ireland.

In the wood-paneled, Joycean pubs along the Liffey River, in the gardens of elegant Edwardian homes in Ballsbridge, in the lively establishments where politicians gather, shocked Dubliners all seem to be quizzing each other about Guerin’s death on June 26, asking: What has happened to their city--to their very country? How have criminals been allowed to dominate this land? What has gone wrong with Irish society?

The answers are discouraging, as was reflected in the comments of an American diplomat who sought to sum up normally sunny Dublin’s abruptly grim summer mood: “I fear that the criminal justice system in Ireland is under a great threat. The attempt to intimidate the press and authority is scary.”

Guerin had long sought to shake up this city and all of Ireland. She did not see it as a pastoral, peaceful, pleasing place--a sort of tourist antithesis to violence-racked Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. Instead, her colleagues and others say, Guerin was a digger, an investigator. She painted the tawdry side of this town, targeting those whom she depicted as really dragging Dublin down: drug barons.

Working within a tradition of stringent, often harsh and restrictive libel laws that would handcuff many a top American investigative reporter, she filled her stories with the wrongdoings of major criminals, identifying them only by nicknames. She dubbed the miscreants the Warehouseman, the Penguin, the Coach, the Monk, the Boxer. She told how they reportedly made their money and spent their time. Her stories were rich in detail.

“She walked up, right up, and asked them [her subjects] to explain themselves,” Liam Collins, a fellow reporter, recalled in the cramped newsroom of the Sunday Independent. “She printed revealing details of their personal lives, and, though she used their nicknames to avoid libel, Dublin insiders knew their identities.”

Colleagues and others say that, to her readers, Guerin and her work were not just breakfast-table amusements. She helped to explain the changes that longtime residents see here but, perhaps, have sought to ignore. Her reports were a reminder that, despite its stately charms, Dublin has its dark side.

Indeed, the city is pocked with slums and dismal housing projects as depressing as any in Europe. Many of these are home to young people from the farm who are attracted by the prospect of jobs and urban excitement.

Dublin’s allures have grown so great to so many of the Irish that the metropolitan area now is home to fully one-third of the republic’s population of more than 3 1/2 million.

Meanwhile, though, the reality is that this city can barely support all who are here. The unemployment rate for all of Ireland is high--12%. For those younger than 25, the figure is more dismal, with roughly one of every three out of work.

And with no jobs now to distract them and dim prospects, many of these young people turn to drugs, which are widely available.

In areas of North Dublin--on the streets, for example, behind Connolly railway station--the knowledgeable claim that the willing can find heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and Ecstasy. On Pearse Street next to Trinity College--home to one of Ireland’s most treasured manuscripts, the Book of Kells--gaunt young junkies queue outside a methadone clinic.

“It is easy to get drugs into Ireland,” said Mike Burns, a veteran journalist and media consultant. “We have hundreds of miles of coastline with thousands of pleasure yachts visiting every year. We don’t have any navy to speak of, so smuggling in drugs is relatively easy.”

Tim Ryan, a political biographer, said: “In the last 20 years, drugs have become big business in Ireland, focused on Dublin. This has spawned the ‘godfathers,’ or drug barons--maybe just a half-dozen--who control the trade.”

And, Dubliners seem to agree, the 10,000-member Irish police force has been hamstrung in its efforts to deal with this drug-related organized crime. The police, analysts say, are understaffed, underfunded and undersupported by the courts, which frequently release major suspects on bail. The authorities also must deal with political complexities--reports, for example, of drug dealers allied with paramilitary forces involved in the sectarian battles of Northern Ireland.

“It’s a strange little island,” Burns said. “Up north, they’ve got the strongest police force in Europe. Here in the south, we’ve got the weakest--unarmed, living in the 1920s.

“It’s a revolving door,” he said. “Everyone gets bail. The system is loaded in favor of the criminal. They know it and take advantage of it. They get picked up for a crime, get bail and commit another on the way home.”

In part, observers say, the state of law enforcement in Ireland is a result of its history and its relatively brief existence as an independent state. Sipping a whiskey before dinner, a Western diplomat observed: “The Irish Constitution was written with the hundreds of years of British oppression in mind. Therefore, the rights of those arrested were given precedence. There was an ingrained fear of wrongful conviction.”

As Ryan put it: “The Labor Party here has always made civil rights an important part of their platform. They are part of the ruling coalition with Fine Gael. And some legal experts worry that those rights could be endangered in the current climate.”

There is another political factor, a diplomat observed: “There has been the view here that there were political criminals--the Irish Republican Army--that were somehow outside normal law. Well, when you have a cultural outlook like that, it is easy to see how criminals might be viewed as somehow not all bad.”

That, of course, was not the case for crusader Guerin.

No matter the risks to herself or her family, she stuck to the crime story--which, of late, journalists say, has started to include a campaign of intimidation, with almost monthly killings by unidentified hit men of criminals-turned-prosecution-witnesses.

Friends say that 2 1/2 years ago, a shot was fired at the home Guerin then shared with her contractor husband and young son.

Eighteen months ago, she was shot in the thigh at her home by a hooded intruder, who was believed to be acting at the behest of a criminal chieftain.

So who killed Guerin? Who would be so bold as to commit so rare a crime here as a daylight “hit” of a prominent journalist? Her newspaper has put up a $150,000 reward to try to find the answer.

But “every dog in Dublin knows who did it,” a female Irish journalist said at a recent embassy dinner party. “Remember, Dublin is a small village. Everybody knows what’s going on. But they don’t have the evidence.”

What authorities now may have, though, is a new public pressure for change, generated by Guerin’s death.

Opposition politicians have urged Prime Minister John Bruton to declare a national emergency to attack the republic’s “criminal crisis.” Bertie Ahern, the opposition Fianna Fail leader, called Guerin’s killing “one of the worst murders in the history of the state. It took a journalist to shock us all into seeing what we are up against.”

Irish newspapers have insisted that the government take quick, stern measures to bring criminal overlords to justice. Some have noted the irony that in more than a quarter of a century of violence in Northern Ireland, no journalist was killed there solely for the content of his or her reporting.

The Irish Times, the country’s leading newspaper, said: “The country is anguished, as not in living memory, over the murder. . . . There is palpable anger in the streets, on the airwaves. Its extent and its intensity are without precedent. And it shows this state and this society at a dangerous pass.”

Ordinary Dubliners also have signed condolence books at the Parliament building and in the lobby of the Sunday Independent, where Geraldine Herbert, a civil servant, said: “I feel simply terrible about this. Justice has broken down. What kind of government could allow this to go on?”

One card, placed with hundreds of floral bouquets left outside the Parliament on Kildare Street, read: “Politicians. Your negligence is Veronica’s death.”

As for Bruton, he has declared that “nobody who orders a crime in a democratic society can be allowed to be untouchable.”

Since the slaying, the government is promising to draft a new anti-crime bill that would, among other measures, beef up the police force, strengthen cooperation among law enforcement agencies, enable the courts to seize criminal assets and strengthen bail.

But Bruton’s call for reconvening Parliament on July 25 to take up the measures has been criticized as being too little, too late. Many here wonder if the government is really up to reforming the criminal justice system.

“I am pessimistic, very pessimistic,” one editor said privately.