Veronica Veritas?...the full story ?

by Mags Glennon

Having endured weeks of hype and hoopla about the movie ‘Veronica Guerin? this writer trundled along to the cinema reasonably confident of a somewhat accurate portrayal of the issues surrounding drugs, crime and gangsterism in Dublin in the mid 1990s. The media had praised the film to high heaven, in retrospect this should have been a warning as to its content and message. As a thriller it is not bad. Cate Blanchett as Guerin puts in a good performance, while the leading male role is criminal John Traynor, played by Ciaran Hinds.The problem is that most of the content is fiction, but viewing it will ensure that people unconnected with happenings at the time will take their knowledge of the period from celluloid, not reality. In the film ‘Michael Collins’ a car bomb explodes in Dublin Castle, killing a number of detectives.The incident never occurred, but it has gained a certain ‘reality’ by its inclusion in the film. There have been cases of examination students mentioning it in essays, for example. But ‘Michael Collins’ was guilty of just one or two such ‘improved history’ episodes; with ‘Veronica Guerin’ it is hard to know where to start. The implications are more serious too, after all the Collins events took place over 80 years ago, while the consequences of the Guerin murder are still being played out today, affecting the very lives of Dublin’s young people.

The film opens with a portrayal of John Gilligan’s gang selling heroin in the flat complexes. Gilligan was and is a scumbag, but he wasn’t a heroin dealer. His fortune was made from the import of an estimated £28 million worth of cannabis in just two years. Perhaps the scriptwriters, aiming for a middle class audience, did not feel this crime serious enough? Similarly the characters of ‘The Monk’ and ‘The General’ are depicted as being heavily involved in smack dealing, again a storyline not backed up by the evidence. Both were serious criminals and the money from their robberies did fund drug dealing, but through their accomplices and relatives. By naming the wrong people as the heroin dealers those who were responsible are left off the hook.

We meet Veronica Guerin, bored by her frivolous role reporting on pointless human interest tales, being introduced to the underworld of poverty and heroin addiction. Cue to scenes of ragged and dirty urchins in the flats. Apart from the syringes, the scenes could have been from Frank McCourt’s Limerick of the 1930s. However my memory of the children in the flats in the mid 1990s was of clean youngsters dressed in the cheap fashions of the day, all whizzing about on roller blades. Similarly the drug dealers are strange characters with bizarre 1970s hairstyles and sideburns. Working class culture, dress and behaviour are filtered through a prism that reflects what the middle class imagine their lifestyle to be.

Guerin meets anti-drugs activists from the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) and joins them on a small march to report on it. This is a pivotal point in the film, as a coffin is laid at the door of the drug dealer she joins in the chanting "Pushers Out!". We are asked to see this as the point where she takes sides, standing with the protestors and against the pushers. Veronica, the peoples friend. In real life Veronica Guerin wrote a story that seriously libelled a prominent member of CPAD. A man had been arrested in the West with a large quantity of drugs. He had the same name as the anti-drugs activist. Guerin wrote the story, despite denials from several sources that the accused was the man she thought he was. She and her publication were later forced to pay out a large sum to the CPAD activist libelled. A friend of community anti-drugs campaigners?- perhaps not.

A large part of the film revolves around her relationship with the police. The police are the all time good guys of the movie. Mostly the cops sit about in the station drinking coffee and there is no portrayal of the police taking any action to stop the open dealing, which is all accurate enough. However neither does it show the treatment meted out to community activists by the police; the dozens of malicious arrests on spurious charges, the beatings in barracks, the mothers left under psychiatric care after police questioning. The anti-drugs struggle was characterised by police and establishment ‘spin’ turning respected local activists into ‘Republican vigilantes’ with hit lists’. It was clear whom the state viewed as the real enemy, but none of this is shown in the film.

Most ludicrous of all is the ending. After the savage murder of Guerin a closing sequence intersperses the grief of her family with scenes of the political and social consequences of her death. The government passes laws to strengthen police powers, tighten the bail laws and seize the assets of dealers. Gilligan and his henchmen are put away for a long time. The anti-drugs campaign kicks off on the streets, complete with banners bearing Guerin’s name as crowds storm flats to drag out dealers. The heroin trade in Dublin is destroyed. Police, politicians, and communities united to end drug dealing.

Balderdash! The anti-drugs campaign was motivated and carried out by communities, for communities. The death of Veronica Guerin had a negligible effect, if any at all, on it. Before her death, campaigns were already active and strong in Dublin’s Southern suburbs and the South Inner City. The campaign in the North Inner City, the main area focussed on in the film , moved onto the streets a full two months after she died. The event which kicked it off was a police attack on the community in Summerhill, when the riot squad savagely batoned the people off their own streets as they protested againstdrug dealers. The resulting anger at the police assaults on women and children led to angry public meetings and massive marches on both the pushers and the local Garda barracks. Not a single banner ever had Guerin’s name on it, and neither were pushers pulled from flats by lynch mobs.

Police powers were increased and longer sentences introduced for drug dealing. There is now a minimum provision of 10 years for possession of drugs valued at over 12,700 euro (£10,000). It has been implemented a handful of times in the hundreds of such cases since it was introduced in 1999. Serious importers caught with up to half a million euro worth of heroin routinely get off with sentences of less than 5 years. Despite a referendum to restrict bail laws arrested dealers still waltz out of custody to deal death for another year before their trials are held.

Both the government and the Gardai admit that the importation situation has deteriorated in recent years, as the availability of drugs is not being affected despite seizures of massive quantities. Noel Ahern, the minister with responsibility for drug prevention, has said "The price of some of these drugs seem to be getting more reasonable, rather than more expensive, plenty of it is still getting in," he said. A senior Garda admitted "If we make a massive seizure, you might think there would be a shortage and price would go up. But it doesn't, there seems to be so many suppliers,using many different trafficking routes, that the supply is always there." Seizures of herbal cannabis, for example increased by over 10,000% last year, from 128kg in 2000 to 13,208kg in 2001. The most recent National Advisory Committee on Drugs report estimates there are 12,456 heroin addicts in Dublin, with another 2,000 outside the city. The number of female heroin users rose from 3,117 in 1996 to 4,176 in 2001, a rise of 34%.

Veronica Guerin was a journalist for ‘a rag’, as she calls the Sunday Independent in the film. She may have been brave, but she was also foolhardy. Until her death no one, least of all herself, I would imagine, thought such a murder would take place. Sensible profit motivated criminals keep the head down and don’t provoke the establishment by slaughtering its spokespeople. Thus drug dealers are no real threat to the social stability of the governing class. After all the trade merely kills off the more vulnerable of the working class, it does not impact on the families of the establishment. Hence the savage crackdown on the community activists, the lessons learned in clearing their areas of drugs just might be applied to other political issues. Pat Rabbitte, now leader of the Labour Party, was a government minister at the time and he spoke cryptically of "putting out the bush fires out there". So the police were sent out to smash the political activists and state money was thrown at middle class social workers to research the ‘drugs problem’, produce reports and hold pointless conferences among themselves in nice hotels.

Gilligan’s gang reaped the whirlwind and most are locked inside Portlaoise prison or hiding out in Europe. Eight years after Guerin’s death the drug scene is run by a dozen small young gangs in Dublin. Stroll around the South city any afternoon and you will encounter a dozen zonked out junkies. Inter gang murders are running at one a week. Narcotics such as heroin, cocaine and ‘E’ can now be bought in most towns, and even villages, in Ireland. A survey of Cork teenagers found that 46% of respondents use cigarettes daily; 51% drink weekly; 24% smoke cannabis weekly and 13% took solvents and glue. Cities such as Limerick and Galway have developed a hard-core heroin problem in recent years and the presence of the drug is also evident in rural areas, such as south Monaghan, Cavan, the East coast and the southern counties of Leinster.

The comfortable Hollywood conclusions of ‘Veronica Guerin’ rest uneasily with the reality of drugs in Ireland in 2003. Don’t bother going to film, it will be on TV by Christmas anyway.

FOURTHWRITE, PO BOX 31, Belfast BT127EE