TV review - Veronica Guerin: A Legacy

Documentaries dealing with the legacy of a prominent and good person tend to leave a warm glow. They’re like obituaries come to life – not just concerned with a life well-lived but with what the person has left behind – and there’s a satisfaction in watching and admiring that.

And as we see in Veronica Guerin: A Legacy (RTE One, Monday), the Dublin crime journalist lived every minute of her life to the full, very much on her own terms, with good friends and colleagues, a loving husband and young son. The interviews with them are warm and paint a picture of a tenacious, fearless journalist.

She loved her job, breaking big stories, fearlessly door-stepping drug kingpins and writing about them, revealing their great wealth and flashy lifestyles to an astonished public.

That's what led to her death. As a Sunday Independent journalist in the late 1990s, Guerin was well-known, not least because, at the time, that paper made high-prolife names and faces of their journalists.

Before she was murdered in broad daylight on June 26th, 20 years ago, Guerin had, in separate incidents, been wounded in a shooting, been shot at in her home and been assaulted by drug dealer John Gilligan. She knew that – as her friend, broadcaster Matt Cooper says in Legacy – businessmen might sue you but "when you're dealing with criminals, they're going to hurt you".

All this is well known, but is given fresh energy here through vivid reminiscences from friends and colleagues. The tone and style is intimate, beginning and ending with her husband Graham and son Cathal talking about her as a wife and mother – and most affectingly how they remember the day she was killed.

Cathal – named, it is suggested, after Charles Haughey to whose family she was close – recalls that on the day, as a six-year-old, he was taken to his grandmother’s house by a family friend to be minded. “There was Lego there, nana never had toys and I wasn’t allowed to watch TV.”

Shamed into action
Guerin's murder revealed a criminal underworld that considered itself untouchable and prompted a shamed government to act – to put through emergency legislation that led to the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). That's a clearly defined, powerful legacy.

In her career, sniffing out stories, Guerin – an accountant’s daughter – started with the “follow-the-money” principal, and so the CAB, an organisation with the power to seize suspected ill-gotten gains, should have provided that warm-glow ending to the film.

But director Sharon Dalton’s exploration of Guerin’s legacy goes further, looking at the current situation, which, if Guerin were still alive, she would surely be all over – and the warm glow quickly dims.

News footage of recent drug-gang killings on the streets of Dublin is shown. Felix McKenna, the former CAB chief, says: “In 1996, we caused massive disruption to organised crime, and 20 years later, the Criminal Assets Bureau is still causing massive disruption. But long-term, these people need to be convicted of major crime. They need to be sent to prison and they need to be kept there.”

Guerin’s husband Graham says: “We had all these promises from the ministers at the time, and it was all going to be done and dusted. Twenty years down the road, we are back to stage one.”