NO matter how useful Veronica Guerin's sources were to her, she kept herself strictly independent of them.
"Sure, I have good Garda sources and good sources in the crime world, but they don't want to talk to me to give me a goods story. They, too, want to influence me and what I write. The State, the guards, the church - they all try to do it, and what we as journalists have got to do is say, `I'm not going to be influenced'."
"The only thing that will influence a good reporter is the story." She was aghast at the idea that journalists might treat the church or any power structure sensitively.
"Hypocrisy can only survive if it's in control. If people are questioning it, that's when it starts to feel it's in trouble. What do they think? That we'll all cover it up and the issue will go away? Do they think they're untouchable? The media won't let go, because that's what our job is."
The media were becoming more and more consumer driven, she said, and there was a danger that investigative journalism could suffer. But it need not - and should not.
Asked if she felt the media participated in - rather that merely observed - social and political debate, she said: "I'm sure we do and I'm sure we should be leading it. With regard to the hypocritical power structures in society, it's just because governments have not had the guts to stand up to them before that they have been allowed to influence what we think, how we behave."
Talking about the journalist's role in covering the Catholic Church in 1990s Ireland, she insisted journalists had a duty to "expose" the stories others would prefer not to be told. Often, they had to do so in the face of determined secrecy and even a hostile public. "If there are lies, it's our job as reporters to highlight them", she told me.
"I'm not anti church, but I am a hungry reporter and if there's a good story there, I go and get it. Or if I think there's a wrong or an injustice I'll seek to highlight I'm not anti church but I do he church has some gall if it that because it's the church it can mislead and be a law unto itself. It can't and that is what my job is to make sure that it doesn't."
She added: "If there's a powerful body that has governed or influenced huge aspects of our society and that body has been hypocritical, it is any reporter's job to highlight that hypocrisy. It's not that it's `fair game'".
Talking about her coverage of the Bishop Comiskey affair and, her attempts to track down the bishop in the US, she said: "If I am to be really honest about the circumstances of my going to the States, I would have liked to have spent a few months out there persuading him to talk to me - it was an editorial decision and I will stand over it. Was it right? Was it wrong? I did everything ethically correct . . . and I came back and got hell. I was on Questions and Answers and was portrayed as if I had gone into the wards checking every bed. And the abuse I got, the letters. But it doesn't matter. I think it's important and it's justified.
