"Her journalistic colleagues had six years to bring her down and they didn't - but of course she's easy prey now. Her record speaks for itself and unfortunately, where she is today shows that she paid the ultimate price for her courage and inexperience. Who cares whether she was 35 or 36? The point is she'll never see 40. . ." - Jimmy Guerin, brother of Veronica.

Amid the gusts of trivia blowing around the memory of Veronica Guerin this week, June 26th, 1996 suddenly seemed such a long, long time ago. Yet it is just 22 months since this wife, mother and journalist was shot dead for doing her job in the only way she knew how.

The cool, measured brutality of the act, carried out in broad daylight on one of the State's busiest carriageways, triggered a national paroxysm of shock, fury and despair. At her funeral, the true meaning of the tragedy crashed into focus with the appearance of the murdered woman's six-year-old son, her husband, her elderly mother, her sisters and brothers.

Within days, as the country came to a virtual standstill to observe a silence to her memory, Veronica Guerin was already being hailed as "the bravest journalist of her generation".

As her second anniversary approaches, what might have become the sentimental canonisation of a young woman because she was murdered has yielded to something of far greater significance. The howl of public outrage and consequent frenzy of political activity, unleashed by her death, have hardened into a legacy that is tangible and lasting.

It is a monument of which any statesman three times her age would be proud. She however, achieved it in less than six years, simply by scooping every other journalist, repeatedly. And she paid for it with her life.

For her family, there has been no respite since. Jimmy Guerin and his wife Louann have not missed a single relevant court hearing since his sister's death - "I'd never dream of leaving her unrepresented at these trials, I know that Veronica would be there if it was any of us" - despite finding themselves sitting among a defendant's family in one case, forced to listen to agonising evidence of how she struggled to get out of the car while the killer emptied his gun into her.

So while alleged killers remain to be tried, old wounds are reopened daily, families are split, and a small boy grows up without his mother who lies in a north Dublin grave, the questions of whether she shaved a year off her age (and - gracious! - never told her husband) or embroidered her CV (a crime without precedent) seem somewhat minor.

Nonetheless, the Guerin industry is flourishing, with much of the emphasis on Deconstructing Veronica. The current output includes a book by Emily O'Reilly to be serialised in a British newspaper; major articles in Magill; and a selection of scripts being hawked around Hollywood, one of which claims the dead woman as "story-line consultant".

On the other side, the Sunday Independent masthead dominates her tombstone and the paper itself has not been notable for its restraint. It has carried numerous exclusives written about - and by - Ms Guerin's husband, Graham Turley, as well as a series of lengthy articles on her life, while its sister paper, the Sunday Tribune, has been accused in recent weeks of doing the Independent's work in discrediting O'Reilly's book in advance, a book which will launch a sustained attack on the Independent's editorial staff as well as on Veronica Guerin herself.

As another June 26th looms and competing pressures mount, her brother Jimmy Guerin has spent the week fending off the media - the Sunday Independent, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Tribune. . . Some come to praise, some to bury. Who knows which in the end? The only question is, who? Who is the target? Ms Guerin? Another journalist? Another publisher? Editor? Newspaper?

For all the pain at so many levels, Jimmy Guerin remains crushingly clear-sighted about the multiple agendas, mammoth egos and huge corporations he sees grinding into gear and squaring up to each other.

"It's nothing more than an airing of different camps of journalists who are trying to get at each other. And Veronica is the stick they're using to do that". Ms Guerin was turned into a "commodity" long ago, he believes, and that process continues.

It's a theme and a word he constantly returns to in his attempts to understand why other journalists, her former colleagues, would now seek to pile ignominy on his "warm, bubbly, loving and loyal" sister, knowing how it must have an impact on her immediate and extended family.

`WHAT they don't seem to grasp is that she's not a commodity, not something owned by a newspaper, any newspaper. Many of those who sympathised with the family at her funeral and wrote glowing testimonies about her are the very same people who are working hard to bring further pain on the family now.

"I'd far rather they had stayed away from the church and had the courage to bring forward their silly allegations when she was alive and she could have been afforded the opportunity to deal with them . . ."

The week's "deconstruction" of Veronica Guerin began in a Sunday Times interview with Emily O'Reilly - designed to whet appetites for the serialisation of her book in that paper - and with the new issue of Magill. Denied serialisation rights of the book, Magill was clearly attempting to steal O'Reilly's thunder, especially on the "character" issue.

Both sets of allegations have a fair amount in common. Both claim for example, that Ms Guerin knocked a year off her age, that she rifled through a politician's private papers and that she lied about her qualifications. O'Reilly raises the old chestnut that some gardai believed she had herself shot in the leg to bolster her image.

Magill quotes someone who says she tried to sting Charles Haughey and a party colleague for money by claiming that her son had a rare disease which could only be treated abroad. O'Reilly says that she forged documents to further her career and that she betrayed contacts. She peppers her interview with intriguing adjectives like "devious", "reckless", "ruthless", "deceitful", "untrustworthy".

It goes without saying that few people of any trade or profession could survive such clinical scrutiny without some cringe-inducing anecdotes lurking in the shadows - least of all a journalist of Veronica Guerin's calibre and chequered background, someone ready and able to deploy "the rat-like cunning", essential, in the words of the Sunday Times's Nicholas Tomalin (killed in the Six Day war), to all good reporters.

And no one, it seems, ever asserted that Veronica Guerin was lily-white. They simply omitted to tell the whole truth, as they saw it, both before and after her death.

In Jimmy Guerin's view, this is an indictment on other journalists' standards, as bad as anything of which his sister stands accused: "If they were credible journalists, they would have written these things while she was alive. They didn't of course. Then after her death, they put her on a pedestal - because that's what the public demanded - while privately knifing her".

Meanwhile, journalists have progressed to knifing each other quietly but surely. A Magill source, for example, stated that the O'Reilly book contains an interview with Damien Kiberd, editor of the Sunday Business Post, which is "highly critical of Veronica".

"If this is so," writes the unnamed author of the piece, "it will be surprising, for in a lengthy article published in that newspaper after her murder, Mr Kiberd wrote of Veronica in terms of superlatives. He wrote that she `made greater efforts to check every fact in her story than any of her contemporaries operating in the trade today'. "

Mr Kiberd confirms that he did indeed give Emily O'Reilly an interview: "My contribution is in fact a mix of high praise and criticism of some of the methodology employed by Veronica. She was a superb investigative journalist - probably the best we've had in this last generation - but she also had a methodology that was questionable in a number of respects".

So why, after one incident in particular in which he feared that her own and the paper's credibility had been placed at risk, did he keep her on for seven months?

"I didn't want to chop her off. Everybody has their faults."

Although Mr Kiberd declined to discuss it, the incident concerned is probably the so-called "forged documents" issue alluded to by Emily O'Reilly. Friends claim that the documents concerned long pre-date Ms Guerin's entry into journalism and that the "evidence" against her was never proven.

In O'Reilly's interview with the Sunday Times, there was further inter-media skulduggery in her apparent "outing" of Sunday Tribune editor, Matt Cooper, as a source for her book. Clearly stung by a two-week-old article in which Cooper described the book as "very suspect", O'Reilly, notes the interviewer, John Ryan, did "something that [was] quite unsettling. . . Drawing up close to the tape recorder. . . she enunciates: `. . .I discussed the book with him in a lot of detail and Matt discussed Veronica with me. It's extraordinary then that he should forget. But then Matt is young and he works for the Independent group'. "

Mr Cooper clearly feels very stung in return. He emphasises that he spoke to her in the first place only because he understood from third parties that she was taking "an exceptionally negative approach" to Ms Guerin in the book.

"I spoke to her on the basis that what I said would not be used at all - either in attributable or unattributable fashion - and I am actually now very sorry that I met her and can only apologise to Veronica's family for having done so."

As for the suggestion that he was doing the Sunday Independent's hatchet job for it? "That is absolute rubbish. Nobody in Independent Newspapers knew that I was writing that piece. Relations between the Sunday Tribune and the Sunday Independent are not good at all. I have no great time for that paper."

Meanwhile, O'Reilly's statement in the Sunday Times interview that it was Jimmy Guerin who suggested that she had "to write the story about Veronica", is hotly disputed by him. According to him, she tried to explain by claiming that she was misinterpreted by the interviewer, John Ryan, and offered the interview tapes to Mr Guerin. John Ryan, however, in his own defence, has offered to do the same.

As for the Sunday Independent, there's the matter of a court hearing on May 18th, at which Jimmy Guerin will be "taking action to correct matters" in connection with a piece by Conor Cruise O'Brien which Mr Guerin found offensive. This is only one element of the fall-out from the ongoing battle by him and Ms Guerin's close friend, Phoenix editor Paddy Prendiville, to bring the paper to book for not removing her from the job when it and others perceived her to be in serious danger.

In fact, so concerned was Jimmy Guerin for her safety as well as that of her extended family, that seven months before she was murdered, he sought legal advice on whether she or the paper could be forced to act in the wider interest and withdraw her from the crime area. Mr Prendiville - though a "good friend" of O'Reilly - is not happy either with how she has tried to sell the book.

"I'm very disappointed with what she has done because I think her criticism of the Sun- day Independent is more than justified. . .but I also feel that she has sensationalised some fairly trivial aspects of Veronica's earlier life to construct a totally unrecognisable person."

As to the detail of the attempts at deconstructing Veronica, in her absence, it seems a fool's game to get into an analysis of them. Former members of Dublin North-Central's Ogra Fianna Fail will insist that they have absolutely no recollection of her accepting a gold watch from the organisation, reportedly presented to her after she claimed to have passed her final accountancy exams.

The damaging charge that she sought money from Charles Haughey and another, using her son and a non-existent illness as a pretext, is met with disbelief by the family. Had she needed money, she knew her mother's family would have had no problem either finding or parting with it, they say.

THEY also claim that in terms of time or plausibility, the stories don't add up. She would have had to approach Mr Haughey for money after their reported falling-out, and the time span involved would make Cathal 11 now rather than the eight-year-old he is.

And the lie about her age? An innocent ploy, says Jimmy Guerin, undertaken with others to remain within Ogra (retirement age 25) and its lively social life and weekends away for a year or so longer.

What makes this latest eruption interesting is that Deconstructing Veronica is nothing new.

Within months of her murder in 1996, the Sunday Times Magazine carried a nine-page cover story on her life and death, co-written by an Irish journalist, Maeve Sheehan (now re-employed by the Sunday Tribune). This pulled few punches, pointing up her tendency to exaggerate her involvement in important stories; implying some murky business amid rumours that the Bishop Casey interview tapes turned out to be blank; citing colleagues' scepticism about the reliability of some of her reports; mentioning the "extreme scepticism" of newspaper lawyers about her ability to produce stories strong enough to circumvent the libel laws; declaring that she was "perfectly capable of fluttering her eyelashes to get a story"; reporting that when she was shot in the leg, such was the notoriety of her rampant ambition that some colleagues speculated she had done it herself to further her career; quoting Garda sources who said that she was used by criminals for their own purposes; questioning her motives for pursuing her particular brand of journalism; suggesting that she came to see herself as a player, not just a reporter.

It also alleged that she was knowingly reckless, not only about her own safety but about that of her immediate and extended family's, including her mother's. It even pointed out that she never qualified as an accountant.

All this inside a magazine cover showing her tiny son, standing alone with bunched hands, staring into the abyss of her grave, within which was planted the headline: "The Mother Who Couldn't Keep Mum". What makes all this rather more piquant is the news that Veronica Guerin was at one stage invited to join the Sunday Times Insight team, but failed to turn up for the interview. Expect much more of the same in weeks to come.