The message the State wanted to send out from the trial of John Gilligan was the timeless moral that crime does not pay. The murder of Veronica Guerin brought to a head a widespread feeling that, at least for the big-time operators, crime paid very well indeed.
The sense of impunity with which the murder was executed pointed to the existence of a gangland aristocracy which believed it could get away with anything. The long process of investigating the murder and bringing those responsible to justice was thus much more than a routine operation. It was meant to restore public confidence in the very notion of public justice.
Sadly, the results have been at best ambiguous. The clean, clear lines which separate the good from the bad remain blurred. The simple outrage which was provoked by the murder, the determination that the killers must not be allowed to win, has been complicated by the reality that the results of a murder can never be undone and that justice is never easy.
Some of those involved in the murder probably will get away with it, and the effects of the killing on media coverage of crime will be felt for a very long time to come. Society has, of course, exacted some retribution. Some of those who organised and carried out the murder of Veronica Guerin have paid for it with their freedom.
Organised crime in general has suffered the consequences of going one murder too far. The establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau, which was a direct consequence of Guerin's death, has made life significantly more difficult for some elements of organised crime.
But the courageous decision of the Special Criminal Court to find Gilligan not guilty of Guerin's murder in spite of its continuing suspicion that he may have been involved highlights the moral complexity of the war against organised crime.
The prosecution of Gilligan rested on the same shifting ground that Guerin's own investigations of gangland figures were sucked into. In order to expose some criminals, you have to collaborate with others. For both the journalist and the Garda, that ambiguity proved to be inescapable.
While she came to rely dangerously on sources in the criminal underworld whose agendas could be trusted, those investigating her death also had to rely on the self-interested evidence of self-confessed criminals. Ultimately, the court could not trust that evidence.
In their desire to restore the moral order by fingering the guilty, gardai ran up against the same problem which beset Veronica Guerin's crusade to expose the criminal underworld. Suspicion is not proof, and though the gulf between one and the other may frustrate the simple desire for justice, there is no easy way to cross it.
Against the damage to democracy which is done by the suspicion that some people literally get away with murder must be balanced the damage which is done when the desire for retribution is allowed to undermine the legal system itself. Hard as it may be to take, it is better for those who may be guilty to get away with it than for the whole justice system to be undermined.
Whatever happened in Gilligan's trial, moreover, the world, and especially the media world, was never going to be the same as it was before that day in 1996. When they shot her, Guerin's killers were sending out a message of their own. It was addressed to the media and it said "Stop poking your noses into our business".
Though no one likes to admit it, the media got the message. Since her murder, no journalist has taken the risks she took. No newspaper writes about criminals in the way she did. For all the emotive pledges to carry on her work that were made in the wake of her murder, no one really wants to take up her torch.
It is not that the public's fascination with crime has waned or that some journalists don't try to feed that curiosity. Books such as Paul Williams's The General and Gangland and Paul Reynolds's King Scum continue to tell the stories of big-time criminals. But the subjects tend to be either dead or locked up for a long time.
Veronica Guerin's weekly exposures of men who were very much at large, and had usually not even been charged with their most serious crimes, was an altogether different kind of game. No one plays it now. The most poignant evidence of the shift in attitudes is the fate of her successor at the Sunday Independent, Liz Allen. Hired from the Sunday Tribune shortly after the murder, she was clearly expected to follow in Guerin's footsteps. Instead, the relationship between her and the Sun- day Independent deteriorated to the point where she resigned and took a case for compensation against her employers, alleging constructive dismissal.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of that case, it suggests that trying to be the new Veronica Guerin was simply an impossible job. The expectation of thrilling exposes of the criminal underworld could not be fulfilled without taking unacceptable risks.
The difficulty lies partly in the contradictory nature of Guerin herself. On the one hand, her energy, passion and bravery represent much of what is best in journalism. Worldwide, she has become an official role model for journalists.
Last year, the International Press Institute named her as one of its "press freedom heroes" for the second half of the 20th century. With one movie based on her life already released and another on the way, she is up there with Woodward and Bernstein as a media saint.
On the other hand, though, she doesn't fit easily into the mold of role model. John Horgan, who heads the journalism school at Dublin City University, probably summed her up best as "a brave and intelligent journalist, but lamentably short of experience and of the skills which experience supplies". Her last months were, as he puts it, "a desperate race between her developing skills and the dangers into which her inexperience tempted her".
Nor, in any case, would many journalists want to find themselves in her situation having to meet the demands of a newspaper which kept circulation high by constantly upping the ante.
The other side of the coin to Guerin's bravery was the insecurity which drove her to extremes. Almost as ambiguous as her own situation as a star reporter with little experience and less security was the relationship between the reporter and the criminal which her work embodied. What gave her stories of the Dublin underworld their edge was, paradoxically, the way they came close to the texture of crime fiction.
Good crime thrillers exploit the reader's mixed feelings of fascination and repulsion. By drawing us into an intimate relationship with people who do horrible things, they create a kind of horrified complicity.
Veronica Guerin took this fictional device and transferred it to the much more dangerous realm of reality. The up-close-and-personal views of crime bosses which she offered her readers depended on her own willingness to spend time with these people. That process inevitably drew her into the hidden agendas of the criminals themselves.
All journalists are to some extent prisoners of their sources. If the sources are thugs and killers, the dangers are multiplied. Aside altogether from the fact that Guerin is, for both good and bad reasons, a hard act to follow, her murder itself had a deep impact on Irish journalism.
Before she was murdered, Irish journalists found it hard to imagine that any of their number might die for a story. They had, after all, been through an extraordinarily dangerous conflict in Northern Ireland in which anyone and everyone could become some psychopath's legitimate target. Though there was at least one unsuccessful assassination attempt, no journalist was killed in the course of the conflict. That alone seemed proof that such things simply didn't happen here.
That assumption is now gone and it will not return for a very long time. The ambiguous outcome to the prosecution of those suspected of being Guerin's killers hardly sends out a clear message that a journalist cannot be murdered with impunity. In any case, posthumous justice is not much consolation to the dead.
Since that terrible day in 1996, the limits of what might happen to a nosy journalist have been radically extended. There is no point in pretending that this doesn't have an effect.
The awful truth is that those who killed Veronica Guerin knew they were taking away a life that could not be replaced. Like all human lives, hers was unique, but she was also unique as a journalist. Her mixture of courage and naivety, of tenacity and insecurity, led her to do things that no one else could have done or is likely to do again. Her killers, like all murderers, have the cold satisfaction of knowing that they put out a flame that cannot be lit again.