MANY politicians came to know Veronica Guerin when she was Fianna Fail group at the New Ireland Forum in 1983-1984 and later as a researcher for the party in Leinster House. During the Forum, all of us involved, regardless of party, came to have the highest regard for her.
And many, like myself followed her subsequent journalistic career with enormous admiration but also, in recent times, with trepidation.
For it was impossible not to worry about, as well as admire, her insistence on continuing her work of investigating and exposing organised crime despite two attempts on her life.
At the best of times, investigative journalism is stressful - especially in a small country where, in our desire to live comfortably with each other, there has been a tendency to stay quiet about matters which ought to be exposed.
But Veronica Guerin's commitment to purging our society of evils was total. She would not confine herself to the obvious and softer targets of business and politics but put her life at risk by taking on the most dangerous targets of all, the major figures in the Irish criminal underworld.
Their evident discomfort at her exposure of their activities was a testimony - ultimately, a tragically fatal testimony - to her success.
Her death challenges our society to review the inadequacies of our criminal law procedures. They have not merely enabled our most vicious criminals to remain at liberty but, as detailed in The Irish Times last Thursday, have made it possible for them to move into legitimate businesses involving leisure, fashion and transport. They can now own public houses and rent suites in the best Dublin hotels.
Our criminal law is not geared to tackle organised crime or corruption in the planning process. As Jim Cusack has pointed out, changes are needed on the evidence of accomplices and the introduction of tapped telephone conversations as evidence. The law of defamation should also be changed to facilitate the work of investigative journalists writing in the public interest and without malice.
Moreover, the absence of any action so far on the evidence of planning corruption gathered by a Newry firm of solicitors raises a question as to our ability to grant immunity to witnesses who may have had some involvement in corrupt acts.
Without such arrangements it may well be impossible to root out the corruption which seems to have crept into a small section of our politics and a small part of our public service in recent decades.
OUR State has been remarkably fortunate in the standard of honesty that has prevailed in its public life. The corruption we inherited from the pre Independence period seems to have been confined to local authority posts: bribes equivalent to £35,000 in present day terms were reported to have been paid for one dispensary doctor appointment.
Once this had been eliminated in the mid-1920s through the establishment by the Cumann na nGaedheal government of the Local Appointments Commission, the problem seemed to have effectively disappeared until after the enactment of the planning legislation in 1963.
The danger is that, unless the reemergence of a limited amount of corruption in planning is exposed and punished now, it could spread rapidly, destroying the ethos of our public life in the same way as has occurred in such countries as Italy, Spain and France.
And once that happens, it is very difficult to recover the priceless element of the integrity of the public sector. This is an area to which, even before changes in the defamation law, our investigative journalists could usefully devote more attention.
Investigative journalism does not have to be confined to crime. There are aspects of public administration which are free of any such element but involve incompetence or maladministration. Some of these emerge from the work of the Public Accounts Committee, the reports of which merit more sustained attention than the one day a year publicity they receive when the committee's reports are published.
This problem owes a good deal to the theory of exclusive ministerial responsibility for the acts of the Civil Service. As ministers are not to blame for acts of maladministration of which they could have known nothing, their theoretical responsibility has no practical meaning. However, it seems to have the effect of protecting from appropriate disciplinary action officials who have failed to do their jobs properly. This encourages an unduly relaxed attitude.
Public enterprises could also benefit from closer scrutiny by journalists with the appropriate skills, who could analyse their annual reports and accounts.
I was struck last year by the fact that I seem to have been the only person to comment on how the Aer Lingus report obscured its financial performance both by combining two periods of nine and 12 months into a single accounting period of 21 months, and by omitting all the data on its performance previously published in its reports.
THE latter omission was justified in the report on the specious grounds of commercial confidentiality; specious because most of this suppressed information was available to its competitors and, indeed, to any interested party aware that most of this information has to be communicated by Aer Lingus to the International Air Transport Association in Geneva.
The target of this suppression, which obscured the important fact that the company's share of traffic to and from the State had fallen from 65 per cent to 45 per cent, was clearly the Oireachtas and the Irish public.
Two other points:
Firstly, it is important that the investigative work of the print media should be paralleled by RTE and that TV investigative journalism on Irish issues not be confined to British stations. That is why the present RTE Authority, of which I am a member, has from the time of its appointment encouraged investigative journalism by its news and current affairs staff.
Secondly, it is equally important that we preserve the excellent Irish journalistic tradition of avoiding exposures of the personal lives of public figures where these are not matters of legitimate public concern.
However desirable it may be that everyone in public life has a spotless private life, it would be wrong and totally counterproductive to follow the British practice of homing in on the private lives of politicians rather than on their public performance.
We owe it to Veronica Guerin to encourage and facilitate the work of investigative journalists, to whose vigilance and professionalism we owe much of the quality of the public and business life of our community.
And in Veronica Guerin's case, much of our knowledge of the character and scale of organised crime in Ireland.