`Passionate, urgent . . . and a bit off the wall'

De Mortuis nil nisi bunkum? The flood of words - accusatory, selfjustificatory, diversionary - which has swirled around Veronica Guerin's memory since news of this book first appeared isn't much of a credit to our profession. The air is full of the noise of axes being ground. Some of the tomahawks may return like boomerangs upon those who have dispatched them, but in the meantime the issues will not go away and have to be identified and addressed.

The first thing to be said about this book is that it is a more balanced piece of work than has generally been alleged or implied (often by critics who did not do its author the elementary courtesy of reading it first). It is also a book which bears in places an uncanny resemblance to its subject: passionate, urgent, and occasionally a bit off the wall.

The distortions which affect it arise from the quite disproportionate effect that the Sunday Independent exercises on discussion about journalism in Ireland. It is certainly the largest-selling newspaper in Ireland. Even Emily finds it "compulsive reading", and admits to having written a letter to Aengus Fanning and Anne Harris after Veronica's death which was "not entirely true".

On the other hand, it is only 10,000 or so copies ahead of its stable mate, the Sunday World, which rarely attracts such opprobrium. And, although the Sindo sells some 320,000 copies a week, there are almost a million papers with different titles sold each Sunday.

It is a paper which, as Kenneth Tynan once famously remarked about a French play he was reviewing, divides its public into two classes: those who hate it, and those who loathe it. Those who loathe it do so at least in part because its sales figures say some things about the Irish psyche that they do not want to confront or at least wish were different.

But not all of the sins laid at its door by this book are unique. "Newspapers like the Sunday Independent," we are told, "do not want anonymous journalists on their staff." Name me one newspaper that does.

Those who write for it (there are fascinating insights here from John Waters and Eamonn Dunphy about the culture of this particular corner of Middle Abbey Street) seem to support each other almost like an encounter group; some of them, uniquely, appear to have become embittered by success.

But are they killers? Hardly. Do they bear some measure of responsibility for what happened? Yes, but they are not by any means the only ones. It has to be remembered that the fumes of righteous anger can sometimes obscure even the 20/20 vision with which hindsight is generally endowed.

I should declare a personal interest. Emily O'Reilly talked to me during her research for this book. I told her what little I knew about Veronica, which doesn't appear in these pages, for the very good reason that it was either insignificant or irrelevant. But I am puzzled by chronological aspects of what happened which aren't completely explained.

There are two modes of writing about as controversial a subject as this. One is to go to the core sources first, leaving the more peripheral figures until later. The other is to assemble the dossier first, and go finally to the core figures for responses and key quotes.

Emily O'Reilly seems to have adopted the latter mode. With the benefit of hindsight, it can now be seen as a serious mistake.

She may have defended her hesitation on the grounds of Graham Turley's published desire that nothing be written about Veronica. But that is not a reason for not asking, as Veronica herself pointedly established on many occasions, and with far less promising sources. It is not impossible that other members of the family other than her brother, Jimmy, tackled by a journalist as serious and credible as Emily, might have had second thoughts.

That is all water under the bridge now, however, and even in the absence of such co-operation Emily has written a valuable, if flawed, book which puts us all on notice about the need to address the stresses and strains of our calling as well as celebrating its successes. Veronica's life and career provide us with parables about both.

It is clear, indeed, from this account that the structure in which she was embedded as a writer for the Sunday In- dependent was by no means the first, or the only, such structure to fail to give her the support she needed.

Her relationship with the Sunday Business Post ran into the sand after the paper declined to defend in court a story of hers, which the editor believed was true, because of an allegation that she had - before she became a journalist - forged someone's name on a letter. A valuable opportunity for taking stock - all the more critical since it occurred so close to the beginning of her journalistic career - was missed.

Her one-year stint with the Sunday Tribune is a period on which her then editor, Vincent Browne, has been uncharacteristically silent. Emily tells us that there were two radically different versions of the story of the successful pursuit of Bishop Eamonn Casey, one of them Veronica's and the other Vincent's. We aren't told either.

At one stage during that period Veronica came to ask me for advice on how to write, on how to present the information she had gathered in an appropriate journalistic form. It was evident that her efforts in that department had displeased someone mightily. Yet one of the sanest voices in this book is that of Alan Byrne, Veronica's news editor at the Tribune; if she had been surrounded by more people like Alan, her story might have had a happier outcome.

At this stage certain things about her were, or ought to have been, obvious: she was a brave and intelligent journalist, but lamentably short of experience, and of the skills which experience supplies.

For her to become a trophy journalist in the war of attrition which was then in progress between the Sunday Tribune and the Sunday Independent was the worst thing that could have happened to her.

From then on it was a desperate race between her developing skills and the dangers into which her inexperience tempted her. There certainly seems to have been a gradient: Tony Gregory, who knows as much about the scene as anyone, told Emily that he thought Veronica's articles were getting consistently better. She was becoming more conscious, above all, of the major pitfall in the path of all investigative journalists, the failure to identify the agendas of your sources.

Where then does responsibility for her death lie? The book's message is a confused one, for the author apparently believes both that Veronica died "because she had entered too far into the [criminals'] world and she was now a dangerous irritant that they had to eradicate", and that she died "because nobody took it upon themselves to force her to stop".

The verdicts are in conflict. So are the reported statements from Fintan O'Toole that (a) it is pointless to argue retrospectively and argue that someone should have stopped Veronica, and (b) that she should not have been offered merely the option of taking a break from crime reporting after she was first shot, but that a break should have been mandatory.

What leaps out of the documentation, however, is the statement by the editor of the Sunday Independent, made publicly just after her murder and not criticised by anyone at that time, that if she had been prevented from doing what she wanted to do, she would have taken her work somewhere else. If this is really a reason for putting your better judgment in cold storage, what and where is the management culture that encourages journalists to think like this?

In fairness - and this is where we have to guard against hindsight - neither Aengus Fanning nor anyone else believed that she could be in mortal danger. Not a single journalist has been deliberately killed (although there was at least one non-fatal murder attempt) in 30 years of carnage in Northern Ireland.

That judgment call (there was, of course, always the threat of the Sunday Times at Fanning's shoulder) was now, we can see, wrong. But it also indicates the extent to which journalists (and the Sunday Independent is no way unique in this) can allow themselves to become insulated from the desperation and depravity of an underclass which has become marginalised to the point where it believes that all the rules are for other people to follow because they have been created in other people's interests.

There is another element of the picture, however, which is almost totally lacking, and is indispensable if we are to come to any firm conclusion about where responsibility lies. This relates to Veronica's income and working conditions.

We aren't told at any stage how much she earned from any of her employers, what the terms of her contracts were - whether she had a contract at all, even - what security she enjoyed (or lacked) and the pressures that all this brought in its wake.

There's an old argument here, of course: journalists in permanent, pensionable employment become fat and lazy (round up the usual subjects). But does the corollary hold true, that journalists who never know where their next mortgage payment is coming from will for that reason always be at the cutting edge of their profession?

In this context, one revelation in the book that stopped me in my tracks was that Veronica took her infant son with her on potentially dangerous assignments. This is unconscionable, and many will share Emily O'Reilly's view that she should have been sacked for it. But why did she do it? Was it to disarm her interviewees? Or was it because there were child-care problems she wouldn't admit to or couldn't solve?

In a profession increasingly characterised by rampant casualisation, and its accompaniment, the growth of female labour, is the guilty party always so readily identifiable?

I get the strong impression that Emily O'Reilly set out to write one kind of book but, as her research proceeded, came to the honest conclusion that she had to write a different one. Being the kind of person she is, she then determined that her evident affection and admiration for Veronica should not be allowed to obscure the warts she was in the process of discovering.

This, and indeed the passion which lies behind her own writing, led in turn to some overcompensation and distortion. But it is, when all is said and done, a book which celebrates Veronica's achievements as it underlines her shortcomings, and leaves everyone who values journalism as a craft, and not just the Sunday Independent, with questions to answer.

We can remember Veronica Guerin's courage and her commitment without ignoring her recklessness and her purblind ambition. Above all it is still appropriate, and necessary, to mourn her death, and to hope that we live in a society which can find and bring to justice the men who killed her.

Veronica Guerin: the Life And Death of a Crime Reporter, by Emily O'Reilly; Vintage; 190 pages; £6.99 (UK price)

John Horgan is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Dublin City University