Connect/Eddie Holt: There is "an amoral and totally ruthless generation of young criminals trying to recreate the situation there was before Veronica Guerin was killed," the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, said this week.
Drugs statistics and recent gangland murders suggest he's right. Nonetheless, in invoking Guerin, McDowell ensured his comments had added, almost mythic charge.
Seven years after her murder, the legacy of Sunday Independent reporter Veronica Guerin remains contested. She is the best-known victim of Irish gangsters and is an iconic figure - internationally, the iconic figure - of Irish journalism.
Her murder was horrific and grotesque, and the political undercurrents which surfaced because of it have, like gangland drug dealers, never gone away, you know.
The politics of print, however, and now the politics of film, encase her legacy. Within days of her murder, she became the intensified focus for both critics and supporters of the wider agenda and methods of Independent Newspapers. Her editorial superiors should have reined her in, claimed critics. We tried but she was irreversibly headstrong, replied her bosses.
This dispute continues and, while lightly addressed in the new film Veronica Guerin, it remains, as it always will, unresolved. Indeed, given the ambiguity of the film, in which Guerin's editor is seen trying to dissuade her from writing about crime, while a subsequent scene shows a Dublin bus advertising her reports, the ambiguity is magnified.
Mind you, there is little ambiguity in the film's depiction of unnamed Dublin journalists who are not central to the unfolding story. In a bar, which looks suspiciously like Middle Abbey Street's The Oval having a grotesquely bad hair day, hacks and hackettes act as a darkly cynical chorus. Perhaps this is fair but the degree of spite and jealousy directed at Guerin seems preposterous.
She shot herself in the leg for publicity, spits one character. It should have been in the balls, retorts another, a remark which bizarrely combines sarcasm, sexism and an arguably unintended compliment. She should use any insurance money to take a course in journalism, sniggers a third.
The film announces itself as being "based on a true story". Known events - or, at any rate, reported events - are recounted with adequate faithfulness.
The principal characters however, especially the criminals, never quite transcend the caricatures that newspaper reporting made of them. The thugs are certainly nasty and menacingly well-performed but the script ensures that most of them remain curiously one-dimensional.
Then again, caricatures carry dramatic impact and once established, are difficult to forego. For decades, Hollywood's constant escalation towards the ever-more-sensational has taught film audiences to expect black and white characters. Consequently, caricature is inevitable. White hats and black hats worked in westerns and they work in contemporary crime stories too.
Critics of Independent Newspapers (now Independent News & Media) maintain that pressure was applied on Guerin to produce, like Hollywood, consistently sensational stories. Part of their argument contends that if readers respond enthusiastically to particular types of stories, they should be given more of the same.
Furthermore, they argue, given that Guerin's personal politics did not accord with the corporate and editorial politics of her employers, she was unlikely to be given much space or prominence as a political writer. This was especially so since she had little record in political journalism.
However, as there are gangs involved in drugs, there are gangs (called parties) in politics. There are gangs too in journalism and gangs involved in making movies.
It's ironic then, since Veronica Guerin is typically portrayed as an intrepid, lone she-wolf hunting down criminals, that her reputation and legacy should be so contested by ideological gangs.
Like party politics, the politics of print and the politics of film inevitably produce polemic and PR. The thugs who planned and carried out the murder of Veronica Guerin are the only real villains of the story.
Nobody sane disputes this but clearly, the story is not as simply black and white as the disproportionate focus on this, albeit dominating, aspect of it might suggest.
Norman Mailer once complained of "journalists munching nuances like peanuts". Beyond her brutal murder, there are nuances to the story of Veronica Guerin.
Her legacy to Irish journalism, paid for with her life, will be sullied if time and PR erode those nuances. They remind us that few stories are black and white, despite 'dramatising' media attempts to make them so.
They also remind us that Veronica Guerin was a person, not a caricature, and that this State acted appropriately against drugs dealers only after they murdered a high-profile, middle-class woman: celebrity murder, perhaps. Before that, they had murdered scores of anonymous, mostly poor kids. That's more than a nuance - it's at the nucleus of the big story.