Dublin Journalist Gunned Down Reporter Persistently Covered Drug Mafia In Ireland

Last year, a thug beat her for 10 minutes. The year before, she’d been shot in the thigh. Yet Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin kept writing about Ireland’s drug mafia.

Wednesday, her voice was finally stilled when two men on a motorcycle ambushed her car at a traffic light and shot her to death. Irish police said they suspect a criminal gang in south Dublin may be responsible for the murder.

“She said it was always at the back of her mind, but it didn’t deter her,” said Fiona Dunne of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which had honored Guerin, 33, for her courage last December.

“She was actually more worried about an attack on her husband and her son,” Dunne said of Graham Turley, a contractor, and Cathal, 7.

“It matters, what we do,” Guerin had said last December in New York at the committee’s annual dinner where she received an international press freedom award. “If I didn’t think my work made a difference, I’d probably give it up.”

Guerin, a reporter for the Independent of Dublin, had written a series of articles about the ability of wealthy Irish drug smugglers to carry on normal lives. The man accused of beating her runs a horse farm, Dunne said.

Wednesday, Prime Minister John Bruton told Ireland’s parliament, the Dail, Guerin most likely died because of her work.

“The murder of a journalist in the course of her work is sinister in the extreme,” Bruton said. “Someone, somewhere decided to take her life and almost certainly did so to prevent information coming into the public arena.”

Irish Foreign Secretary Dick Spring called Guerin “professional and fearless” and said her death was “a terrible loss for all of us.”

Guerin had seemed embarrassed at discussion of her courage when honored in New York last year. She tried to shift the topic to others who were honored with her.