I return again to the judgment of the Special Criminal Court in the Paul Ward case. The judgment addressed the issue of the motivation for the murder of Veronica Guerin in the following terms.
"As for motivation for the crimes: an incident had occurred between Ms Guerin and [a named man] it seems in or about January 1996, in which she had had an encounter with him and he had struck her. She reported the matter to the police and [the named man] was charged with assault.
"This enraged him because on imprisonment, on foot of a likely jail sentence, grave harm would be done to his cannabis empire because he would be prevented from purchasing supplies and arranging for the importation of the product into Ireland.
"It is also probable that he perceived himself as being hugely important in the criminal world and it would be a source of great annoyance and humiliation to be sent to jail as a petty criminal. It is also probable that his managers would have been also greatly annoyed by that turn of events.
"The end result was that a plot was hatched to murder Ms Guerin and thus the prosecution which she had initiated against [the named man] would have to be dropped, as it was dependent on her evidence."
Thus the first court that has had an opportunity to view the evidence concerning the murder of Veronica Guerin has concluded that she was murdered because she was likely to give evidence in a criminal case against the person suspected of being the prime instigator of the murder. In other words, she was not murdered because of anything she had written or might write.
One can argue that she would not have found herself in the situation whereby she was to be a witness in a criminal trial had it not been for her journalistic activities.
Of course. But she wasn't murdered principally because she was a journalist.
Thus, the murder of Veronica Guerin, however atrocious, however brutal, however shocking - and it certainly was all these and more - as far as the Special Criminal Court was concerned, was not an attack on democracy. Neither was it an attack on the freedom of the press.
Both these contentions were widely asserted at the time by the then Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, and by other politicians.
But it was not just politicians who jumped to that conclusion, in spite of some very obvious indications that her murder had nothing to do with her work as a journalist, except in the incidental sense alluded to above (such indications were widely reported in the newspapers the day after her murder).
Nineteen editors, including every one of the editors of Irish daily, evening and Sunday newspapers, issued a statement the day after her murder, which asserted: "Veronica Guerin was murdered for being a journalist. She was a brave and brilliant reporter who was gunned down for being too tenacious in her investigations of organised crime in Ireland. "We view this assassination as a fundamental attack on the free press, which is essential to the democratic process."
Well the three judges of the Special Criminal Court, who heard the evidence in the Paul Ward trial, did not think Veronica Guerin was murdered because she was a journalist.
They did think she was a brave and brilliant reporter but they did not think that she was gunned down for being too tenacious in her investigations of organised crime in Ireland.
Nor did they see it as an attack on the free press. And how could they since they had persuasive evidence that the attack on her had nothing to do with a press, free or otherwise?
The murder of Veronica Guerin could certainly be characterised as an attack on our system of justice, in that its apparent intended purpose was to cause the subversion of a criminal case.
But that was not what was claimed at the time and, for some reason, an attack on our system of justice is perceived in less emotive terms than attacks on democracy or on freedom of the press.
But because we characterised Veronica Guerin's murder in these hysterical terms, we responded to it in hysterical terms and thereby did grievous damage to the quality of justice in society.
The response to Veronica Guerin's murder was not the only factor that caused us to do grievous damage to our justice system.
Political wimpishness on the part of the then government, political opportunism on the part of the then opposition and generalised hysteria about a non-existent crime wave were also considerable factors.
But the wrong-headed analysis of the significance of Veronica's murder, coming so soon in the aftermath of the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe in Adare, Co Limerick, was the spark that ignited mass political hysteria and caused us to do the damage.
The damage was done primarily by the change of the bail laws and, secondarily, by the provision under the Criminal Justice (Drug Trafficking) Act 1996, under which a person can be detained in Garda custody for up to seven days.
The rush to change the bail laws has now been ridiculed by the reality that no changes can be made to the bail regime for at least another year, which will be three years after we were told there was an imperative to change the bail laws immediately.
Once they get around to introducing the necessary regulations you can be certain that bail will be refused increasingly in cases where the defendant is entirely innocent. In addition, the denial of bail will arise where gardai simply want to put someone away for a while but lack the evidence to do so through conventional means.
As regards the seven-day detention, we should know now (if we did not know before) from what was revealed in the Paul Ward case, how dangerous it is to give the Garda such powers in circumstances in which they are unsupervised.
Politicians and journalists have a responsibility to keep their heads while others are losing theirs. Otherwise "the politics of the last atrocity" will get out of control and led us to excesses which we will have cause to regret later.
We did it after Veronica Guerin and we did it all over again in the aftermath of the Omagh atrocity last August. The British did it (through the Prevention of Terrorism Act) with disastrous consequences in the wake of the Birmingham bombing in 1974.