On my Christmas wish list is the book, Veronica Guerin: The Life and Death of a Crime Reporter by Emily O’Reilly, writes columnist Andy Winter. It is a biography of Guerin, a journalist from the Ireland’s Sunday Independent newspaper. It questions the ethics of her journalistic methods for gathering information.

I met Veronica Guerin at a lunch in early 1996. There were four or five of us at the lunch. We were all attending a conference in Dublin looking at drug treatment, comparing what was happening in East Sussex, Normandy in France and Dublin.

Guerin had just spoken at the conference, talking about the illegal drug trade in Dublin. It was a fascinating account in which she named names, the drug barons who appeared to have no visible means of income but who were enjoying extravagant lifestyles owning very large houses with several state-of-the-art Mercedes and BMWs. She spoke about how, as a trained accountant, she “followed the money” and how she had directly confronted those who were the main beneficiaries of the drug trade in the Irish Republic. For two years she had been writing articles about the criminal underworld in Dublin. In her reports she used pseudonyms and street names for these criminals in order to avoid Irish libel laws.

She had been calling on the Irish government to agree a law allowing the state to confiscate assets from individuals if they could not explain how they had accumulated such fabulous wealth. It would have specifically targeted drug barons who were making vast fortunes from the drug trade in the Irish Republic.

Veronica herself directly confronted drug barons, even doorstepping them at their homes, challenging them to explain how they came to have such large homes and expensive cars when they appeared to have no obvious means of income.

At the lunch we asked whether she was afraid for her safety. She seemed blasé, dismissive of the risk even when we mentioned her young son. She told us she had already been subjected to violence. Two years earlier two shots had been fired into her Dublin home. Then in January 1995 two gunmen had forced their way into her home and pointed a gun at her head. They fired one shot. The bullet missed her head but hit her in the leg. Rather than this serving as a deterrent, she continued to write about the drug barons.

In September 1995 a convicted criminal called at her home, threatened to kidnap and rape her young son, and to kill her if she wrote anything about him. Even then she continued her work. In June 1996, when travelling back from a court hearing after pressing charges for assault against a major organised crime figure, John Gilligan, as she pulled up at a red traffic light she was shot six times in the head by a passenger on the back of a motorbike. She died at the scene.

Two days after her killing she had been due to speak at a conference in London. The topic of her presentation was to have been Dying to Tell the Story: Journalists at Risk, covering the very issues she had spoken about over our lunch just a few months earlier.

I didn’t stay to the end of that lunch. I had found her increasingly annoying, not least her reckless, cavalier approach to her own safety and that of her family. I felt that she relished the danger, notwithstanding having been the victim of potentially lethal violence just a short time before. Perhaps it was bravado that covered real fear. When I heard that she had been murdered I was shocked yet not surprised.

Her murder outraged Ireland and led, almost immediately, to what became her legacy: the Proceeds of Crime Act 1996 which the Irish government introduced within a week and in direct response to her murder. This gave the newly formed Criminal Assets Bureau the power, separate from criminal proceedings, to seize assets derived or suspected to have been derived from criminal activity unless it could be explained, as Veronica Guerin had suggested, how the subject had come by their fabulous wealth.

The UK has a weaker law, allowing the authorities to seize assets only after an individual has been convicted of a crime and the assets could be shown to be the proceeds of that crime.

In 2003 a film of her life, entitled Guerin, was released with Cate Blanchett playing Veronica. I’ve not seen the film yet but watching it and reading the book have both been added to my to do list for 2024.

Andy Winter is a former councillor who worked in social care and homelessness services for 40 years