NEXT Friday will be the fifth anniversary of the death of the journalist Derek Dunne, who died of cancer on October 25th 1991, at the age of 35. Derek was one of Ireland's finest campaigning journalists in the 1980s.
Writing mainly for Magill, In Dublin and Sunday Tribune, he played a major role in opening up to public scrutiny some of the great scandals of the past few decades, most significantly, the Sallins train robbery case.
Derek and I were friends for several years. I wash his editor at In Dublin, where he wrote many stories about criminals of various kinds. Derek took a broad view of the concept of criminality, including, in his definition, many things which respectable society contrived to ignore or define as necessary evils. He took a particular interest in wrongdoing by the State and, specifically, its police force.
Like all the best journalists, Derek was a deeply politicised human being. His heart was on the left, though he was in no way dogmatic. He was a republican and made no attempt to deny it. His journalism was always driven and informed by his views but he was a scrupulously fair reporter, bending over backwards to give both sides of a story a decent hearing.
And yet, in the last three or four years of his life, Derek Dunne found life as a journalist increasingly difficult. With Magill gone, and In Dublin gone soft, he was unable to find a permanent home for his inquiring ethic. He made a living writing for various magazines and newspapers on a casual basis, but no newspaper seemed anxious to offer him a job.
In the opinion of many of those who were close to Derek, the insecurity and stress of his professional condition had a great deal to do with the onset of the illness that killed him.
THE death of Derek Dunne tells us at least as much as that of Veronica Guerin about the state of "investigative journalism" in the Ireland of the 1990s. In the public discussion that followed this summer's murder, an impression has been conveyed that a criminal element in Dublin's underworld is threatening a vigorous newspaper industry determined to expose untruth wherever it may be found. However, the greatest resistance to campaigning journalism comes not from the underworld but from the owners, managers and controllers of Irish media.
If this were not true, Derek Dunne would, 10 years ago, have found himself being offered embarrassingly large amounts of money to do what he did best. He might even be alive to tell the tale.
The truth is that, despite all the lip service to "investigative journalism", Irish media wish their journalists to be selective in their appetite for truth. People like Derek Dunne are regarded as unmanageable. They hold strong opinions, with which proprietors and editors are not often in agreement. They seek to turn the scrutiny of the media not merely on those wrongdoers whose crimes are obvious and manifest, but also on those whose doings are not universally condemned.
They direct the same close attention at the policeman who takes short cuts as at the drug baron who presents an uncontroversial front of evil to the world. They do not accept the prevailing consensus. In more than a decade as a reporter and editor, I came across many people like Derek Dunne who had to seriously circumscribe their campaigning instincts in order to continue eating.
There is, then, a need for more precision. Great journalists like Derek Dunne and Veronica Guerin are motivated by an appetite for truth, which seeks out wrongdoing, wherever it appears, without selectivity or bias. But this is utterly different from the motivation of the media organisations with which they may find work, whose appetite is more likely to be for increased audience or circulation.
There is a great difference between a desire to tell the truth about what is happening in society and a desire to "investigate", selectively, certain "sexy" and potentially sensational elements in order to steal an edge over the competition. While there are many journalists around who wish to do the former, media outlets are mainly interested in the latter. Crime expose's sell newspapers; expose's of injustice, as a rule, do not.
And this at least partly explains why reporters of the calibre of Veronica Guerin are pushed into the front line. Journalists who do not have staff positions make a living as best they can. Those without regular outlets must forage in the freelance market for whatever work is available.
Crime is virtually the only area of investigation in which the risk is borne entirely by the reporter, rather than editors, management or proprietor. The investigation of crime is the job of the police, and reporting it should not require journalists to take personal risks. But if a journalist with strong investigative instincts wishes to make a living doing what he or she does best, sometimes the" only option besides physical risk-taking is poverty.
THE murder of Veronica Guerin raises questions other than those relating to the crime situation, but these have been largely ignored in a media discussion placing great emphasis on truth. Veronica's brother, Jimmy Guerin, raised a number of these questions in a letter published in The Irish Times on July 27th.
Pleading that the lessons of his sister's death be absorbed and heeded by those who run our newspapers, he urged proprietors and editors to examine the dangers to which they were exposing journalists, and made a number of suggestions about what might be done. That the brother of the dead journalist should raise such questions was surely newsworthy, yet it received a minimum of attention.
This aspect of the affair has also been pursued by the editor of Phoenix magazine, Mr Paddy Prendiville, who was Veronica Guerin's best friend, but his efforts to initiate a debate have met with a similar lack of success. Two weeks ago, at the NUJ sponsored seminar in memory of Veronica, he posed a number of questions about the circumstances of his late colleague's employment by Independent Newspapers and what he called the "process" by which she came to be in the firing line.
These questions related mainly to why she was not taken off the crime story after the earlier shootings. Although by far the most pertinent contribution to the seminar, this did not receive a single line in any of the newspaper reports on the following day (two RTE radio programmes did carry interviews with Mr Prendiville.)
I fail to see how this reluctance to pursue what is a legitimate avenue of inquiry can be reconciled with rhetoric about the media's commitment to freedom of expression. Why are Irish newspapers so reluctant to delve, other than selectively, into issues relating to Veronica Guerin's death? Does it come back to the process I have outlined, by which managements contrive to dictate which areas of Irish society their newspapers will inquire into? And if so, in Jimmy Guerin's words, "Where are the journalists?"