The last time I came face to face with Emily O'Reilly, she was the one interviewing me. It was on her Radio Ireland morning show, at the height of the general election, and we were discussing the cannabis legalisation campaign that UCC law lecturer Tim Murphy and I were running at the time. I remember it as being one of the toughest live interviews I've ever done.
When we meet again, almost a year to the day later, she still hasn't forgotten our (rather frosty) encounter. In fact, a question she hit me with on air 12 months ago has just come back to haunt her. "I remember asking you if you felt responsible for Veronica Guerin's murder because of your stance on the illegal drug trade," she smiles apologetically. "Sorry about that, I'm always a little cranky in the mornings."
As it happens, I didn't feel the least bit responsible for Guerin's death (and said as much at the time). Ironically, however, the reasons for our interviewing roles being reversed on this particular occasion are not so much to do with Veronica Guerin's murder, as with an alleged assassination of her character. Certainly there are many who feel that O'Reilly has just done to the late Sunday Independent crime reporter's reputation what Albert Goldman attempted to do to the reputations of Elvis and Lennon.
Even before O'Reilly's controversial new book, Veronica Guerin: The Life And Death Of A Crime Reporter, was published, the accusations were flying in from all quarters. Her charge sheet included allegations of insensitivity, sloppy research, lazy journalism, begrudgery, mudslinging and peddling gossip and innuendo as truth. Basically she was accused of doing a hatchet job on Guerin, born out of bitter vindictiveness and professional jealousy.
O'Reilly's book certainly pulls few punches. Her portrayal of Veronica Guerin is far different to the sanitised and one-dimensional 'brave and courageous reporter' or 'devoted wife and mother' images so widely and regularly promoted by the Independent Group. Instead, Guerin is described as a manipulative, unscrupulous, naïve and somewhat irresponsible character, a wildly competitive and ambitious reporter who would do almost anything to get a story or heighten her profile. Her past before entering journalism is also explored. Hardly surprising then that O'Reilly found herself at the receiving end of some serious media flak . . .
OLAF TYARANSEN: There's been a fairly hostile reception to your book so far. In fact, both you and the book were getting really bad press before it was even published. Did you expect the backlash to be so severe?
EMILY O'REILLY: Up here (taps forehead) - yes. Down here (indicates heart) - no. As I said on a few occasions before, when I told people I was doing it so many people warned me off, you know - "Don't do this", "You'll be damaged if you do", "Don't do it", "People won't want to know", "The Indo will go down on you like a ton of bricks" and so on and so forth. And . . . they did! They were right! (laughs). But do I regret doing it? Not for a moment. Not for a moment. Even though the last few weeks have been at times painful, difficult, all that sort of stuff.
Did you feel, in any way, that because you yourself were a journalist you were somehow immune to criticism? That other journalists would go easy on you?
Well if I did - boy, was I ever wrong! (slaps table and laughs). In a number of cases I was surprised. In one particular person's case that they didn't ring me and they didn't read the book before rushing into print. In another case that they didn't contact me about a particular thing they were doing - that would have been hurtful on a personal level. But, yeah . . . certainly I found out who my friends were. Or actually, more who they weren't! (laughs).
But what has amazed me about this whole thing - even if you take me out of the equation - is just the . . . bloodbath. Between journalists. And not just with me - I mean, there were individual journalists having goes off each other and so on. And I remember thinking about a week ago that if all the journalists involved in this, writing about it or whatever, got together in a room then there would have been blood on the floor. There would have been fistfights. It got very, very nasty and a lot of people have been very damaged and hurt in it.
Predictably enough, most of the worst criticism came from Middle Abbey Street. Do you think there was a directive given from on high ordering your character assassination?
I don't think that the Independent needs to do that from on high. I mean it's incredible that . . . (pauses). I mean, there have been voices - Hot Press, the Evening Echo, The Irish Times. There have been voices raised on my behalf. And very often raised, not so much based on what was in my book - some of the people involved hadn't read the book - but just saying, "Hang on a sec. What are we doing here? Look at the way we're operating here!" But I've no doubt that there probably was an overall Public Relations strategy in this. Do I think individual journalists were told to go out and do a hatchet job on me? No, I don't. But you just breathe it in the air really (shrugs).
Is there anybody you're not talking to as a result of the whole experience?
There is one person, yes, I would definitely not want to have any contact with again.
Anybody I know?
No! (laughs). But there is someone. Not so much for anything they said but the manner in which a certain thing was done. Em, I think there might be one or two people who wouldn't want to talk to me. Paddy Prendeville (of Phoenix - OT), for example, has obviously made that plain.
Wasn't he a good friend of yours prior to all of this?
Yeah, a very good friend of mine. He was at my wedding and various celebrations over the last few years and so on. But actually, I do put Paddy apart from all the others. I mean, I think he was desperately, desperately fond of Veronica, I think he loved Veronica very much - and I mean that very much in a platonic sense. I remember at one point, I was discussing something I was going to put into the book with him. And he asked me not to put it in. And I didn't. And he was the only person who directly asked me not to write a certain thing. And we had a very unpleasant falling out at that point. And he said to me, "Emily, you're looking on this as a journalist and I'm looking on it as a friend of Veronica's, and if it was happening to you I'd do it for you." So, in that instance, I can overlook a lot. But nobody else falls into that category as far as I'm concerned.
Did you read his review in the Phoenix? He fairly savaged you.
I didn't read it. I was advised not to (laughs). I was walking down Grafton Street the other day and I saw the newspaper seller outside Bewley's, and he had Phoenix on display. And I just saw 'EMILY O'REILLY'S HATCHET JOB' on the cover. And I thought two things - "God that's a bit clichéd now", and then I thought, "no, I don't want to read this". And then I met somebody who had read it and they advised me not to read it. So I just didn't read it, you know.
He basically praises you for damning the Sunday Independent and damns you for damning Veronica Guerin.
Well, funnily enough, when Paddy was talking about this book first, he went on the Sunday Show and he said that he had lost two friends out of this - Veronica and me. And that was pretty painful. I walked out of a room when I heard him saying that. But somebody said to me that they thought that when Paddy read the book that he might have thought differently. I said no, I thought he'd gone too far down a road, you know. He wasn't gonna come back from that. I don't believe that my book is a hatchet job on Veronica. It certainly wasn't intended as that.
Well, one of the things he mentioned was about the . . .
(Interrupts) God, you're gonna tell me what's in this bloody article, aren't you? I've been avoiding every bloody magazine shop for days! (laughs).
He said that your report of Veronica leaking a document from the New Ireland Forum to the Sunday Tribune was untrue. She had been instructed to pass it on by a senior politician at the Forum and Prendeville said that he had told you this when you interviewed him for the book. He called your version of events "a good illustration of the book's dishonesty."
No, listen. Paddy told me that she had leaked the document, end of story. He did not say that it was on the instructions of, say, Charlie Haughey. I do not believe that if Charlie Haughey had been leaking a document he would have handed it to Veronica Guerin and said "here, give this to Paddy Prendeville" - or to any journalist. But Paddy certainly did not say that to me. And if he had said that to me I would have written it in the book.
Do you think there's a lot of clouded judgements around at the moment?
Obviously I have to try and rationalise this to cope with it. I think there's huge guilt, you know, and I think I'm being kicked in the head by a lot of people over the guilt bit. I think there's public guilt about Veronica - that she was the one who was going out and doing this stuff. I think there's certainly guilt within the Gardaí - I believe they used her. I think there's guilt in the Indo - they couldn't say that or else they'd be landed with a flipping compensation bill as long as your arm, for a start. And I think there's guilt amongst her friends. I don't believe, in the case of a lot of those friends, that it's a justified guilt, but I do think that they are sort of using me as a way of working through that or something. Or actually as a means of not having to face up to what happened.
When did you first decide to write the book?
I decided to write the book very shortly after Jimmy Guerin wrote his letter to The Irish Times, which was exactly a month after her death. I was very taken by the letter and I met Jimmy within days, I would say. And then I followed the debate within Phoenix really and then decided, yeah, I wanted to write about this. And I actually must dig out the original brief that I sent to the publishers because there's nothing in it about Veronica other than, "look, I want to look at this newspaper and look at the issue of their responsibility towards her". So it was at that point I decided to write the book.
Gene Kerrigan suggested in last week's Sunday Independent that your book was practically finished late last year and a lot of the nasty stuff about Guerin was just tacked on at the last moment at your publisher's insistence.
Well, in a crude sort of a way he's correct. My premise was that Veronica's life was obviously in danger, which it obviously was, and that the Sunday Independent have a responsibility towards her. And I was interested in not just exploring that issue but also exploring the nature of the Sunday Independent and what was it about the nature of the paper that would have fed this whole thing, that would have used her work in the manner in which it did and published the stuff that she wrote and whatever.
I had written the first draft of the book and anything I had said about Veronica was stuff I'd taken from the papers at the time she died, the odd biographical detail, and I tracked her work, just from clippings. Damien Kiberd had given me an interview alright and he had told me the Aer Rianta story (to do with Guerin allegedly forging documents to impress a client - OT). But there was nothing else. So then somebody said - as an editorial judgement - "you really do need to flesh out her life a little more, explain how she became a journalist". It was then that I discovered a lot of stuff that I hadn't known before. And then what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to write a lop-sided book? Was I to say the Independent are awful people and Veronica is a saint? Or do I say, well the Independent is an awful newspaper but Veronica was a very complex person, you know, and huge issues arose in relation to her and the manner in which she behaved, her whole psychology, whatever.
Even so, some of the stuff was pretty unbelievable. For example, the suggestion that she had shot herself in the leg to heighten her profile.
It has been written, and the Sunday Tribune screeched that I had written that she'd shot herself in the leg. I didn't. Now they haven't read the book or, if they have, they obviously just didn't want to believe the evidence with their own eyes. What I said was - and they couldn't dispute this, the Guards can't dispute it - that senior Gardaí suspected that she had done it. This was based on the ballistics evidence which I've detailed in the book. And the individual that I spoke to said he had ruled it out because she'd have wanted to be mad to do it. But I know for a fact that even senior Gardaí that I've spoken to this last week still suspect that she may have done. And that's what I wrote. And the point in writing it was that I found it incredible that Gardaí who dealt with Veronica every day virtually, some of those who suspected her capable of this complete madness would have continued to deal with her. And that was what I wrote.
And it was interesting that Justine McCarthy also railed about what she thought I had written and she went to a guy called Cathal Cryan, who was a local Garda in Coolock and was very friendly with Veronica. And Justine wrote: "If Emily O'Reilly had spoken to Cathal Cryan he would have told her this was never seriously considered". In other words, she couldn't get him to say "this was never considered". All he could say was "it was never seriously considered". What does that tell you?
How friendly were you with her?
I'd known Veronica about 11 years. We'd meet on and off. I suppose the last two or three years before she died I would've met her no more than three or four times. We had lunch about six months before she died - that was at another point when the Indo were trying to get me to work for them. And we had lunch in Cook's Café and I remember bringing her a bunch of flowers to congratulate her, belatedly, for the International Freedom Forum Award that she'd won. And we had a very nice lunch and we got back into her car and she dropped me off at the gates of Leinster House. And that was the last time I saw her.
There's been a lot of criticism of the fact that while her younger brother Jimmy was interviewed for the book, you didn't speak to any of her other siblings or to her husband, Graham Turley. Why didn't you?
Well everybody's accusing me in hindsight, I could equally do that. At the time that I started writing this book there were lots of people busily doing stuff in relation to her - there was a documentary here, a film thing there and whatever. And it emerged that there were two camps within the family and people who talked to the Jimmy camp weren't too welcome in the other camp and vice versa. And Graham Turley, as everybody reminds me, had gone on The Late Late Show and had asked that a book not be written about his wife.
And Veronica's siblings, apart from Jimmy, were obviously very close to Graham, because they came out with statements hostile to Jimmy, because Jimmy was saying things they felt he shouldn't have said. So was I to assume that they would go against Graham's wishes and co-operate with the book when he had made it clear he didn't want one written? And I chose not to contact them. It was obviously a mistake. I regret it now because it means I have to defend the whole bloody thing! And then people have said to me: "You could have tried harder". I mean, I did write to Graham, by the way, and he didn't reply to me. And what was I supposed to do then? Was I supposed to doorstep him? Was I supposed to plague him with letters? Was I supposed to follow him around the place?
That sounds like the kind of approach Veronica would have taken.
Yeah! I wouldn't do that. So if that's considered sloppy or lazy journalism then so be it. It's not my style.
Why did you contact the family after the book was finished?
I didn't contact the family. Mrs Guerin rang me, looking for a copy of the book. That was another lie that appeared in Magill, that I had, in a last-minute dash, attempted to get an interview with Mrs Guerin. I really didn't do that. She contacted me, we had several conversations and she wanted a copy of the book but I didn't have one. And, anyway, it wouldn't be the wisest thing to do.
Would you have had a problem with Veronica's style?
Would I have a problem with her style? Well, in certain respects, no, not at all. I remember one time, the Pat Tuffy story, and he'd done this famous interview and I wrote a note to him asking for an interview and Veronica squatted in his garden and she got the interview (laughs). But in other respects, I did, absolutely. I had problems, problems insofar as what she did was unbelievably reckless, problems with the fact that on numerous occasions she brought her son when she was door-stepping people, putting him in a potentially vulnerable position. I mean, that is absolutely wrong.
People have suggested that there might have been extenuating circumstances.
What I find hilarious is that - well, not hilarious, it's all desperately sad - but what I find interesting is that people are trying to excuse that by saying: "Well maybe she had childcare problems". I mean, for God's sake, the woman was on a very good salary from the Sunday Independent, she had loads of relations around the place. Don't tell me that she had to, out of necessity, bring Cathal along. It's simply unrealistic.
Are you saying that she put her career ahead of her child's safety?
Ah look, that's not for me to say. I mean, I think Veronica was a pretty mixed-up individual. I think she loved Cathal dearly. Perhaps she didn't herself realise the consequences, perhaps she felt impregnable, perhaps she felt that, no, there couldn't be any danger. But why did she bring the child? Was it to disarm the people she was interviewing? If somebody opens a door and sees a male journalist there - woh! Sees a female - less worried. Sees a female with a child - 'ah, come on in sweetheart, would your little fella like a cuppa?'.
Well, that wasn't quite John Gilligan's reaction.
No. Well, Gilligan threatened the child with rape, kidnap and murder, as we all know from the Sunday Independent blasting it out. I just find it unimaginable, that . . . (pauses). Maybe this is just me being a coward but in my own life, if my children were threatened, I mean, whatever about me, perhaps I might want to continue on whatever I was doing but my husband would say, "If you wanna do this, go somewhere else. But don't threaten our children". I mean, I dunno. I'm not holding myself up to be a brilliant mother - and I'm not by any means - but I think you just don't bring your children into that kind of situation.
How do you think that Graham Turley feels about an issue like that being raised now?
Well you'd have to ask Graham that. Like, Graham has suffered an awful tragedy and I'm not gonna say anything about him, to be honest. I'm not sure that he knew necessarily that this was happening.
He did once run into the Monk having a chat with Veronica in their kitchen though.
Yeah, but the thing was that Veronica was a hugely persuasive, charismatic individual and Graham was obviously very much in love with her and if she assured him that everything was all right then I'm sure he went along with that. He trusted her and her judgement. And that was it. I mean, a lot of people were hugely influenced and charmed by Veronica which was, on the one hand, a fantastic plus in her, not just in herself but in her journalism because she could obviously get people to open up to her who wouldn't necessarily open up to other journalists. But it was her downfall as well in that she got so intimately involved with very bad people.
And was encouraged to do so, you seem to be suggesting, by the Sunday Independent.
I don't think they pushed Veronica to do all this stuff at all. I don't say that they put pressure on her but I'm just saying that they continued to publish this stuff, knowing that she was in danger. And their excuse - their very, very limp and awful excuse - is that "well, if we had stopped her she would have gone somewhere else". Like, so what? She might still be alive now. Where would she have gone? They could have put out a blanket edict to the other Independent newspapers saying "don't publish this woman's stuff". At least they would have done the right thing.
Is that not something that's easier said in hindsight though?
Well people have accused me of speaking in hindsight but, I mean. she was being threatened. Her news editor had heard the threats himself, she'd been shot in the leg, there had been shots through her window, she'd been beaten up, her son had been threatened. I mean, what more clues did people need?
How hard did you try to talk to the Independent?
I contacted Jim Milton who's the PR chap. I wrote to Aengus [Fanning, Editor] directly - I think. I spoke to Willie Kealy. And they all wrote back and said "no".
They'd seen the advance publicity blurb for the book, stating that it would be an attack on the paper.
Basically yeah, that was their excuse.
Gene Kerrigan described it as a "reason" as opposed to an excuse.
Well I don't blame them for not talking to me on one level (laughs). I mean, why should they talk to this woman who's gonna write a nasty book about them? But I actually think they were wrong not to as well. I mean, in terms of their own thing, perhaps they might have said something to me that would've made me feel differently about it. But anyway, it's too late now. What's happened has happened.
What's your opinion of Irish journalism generally? Or of Irish journalists?
Oh God! I mean, it's funny. I know a lot of politicians are treating this with great glee. They're being very sweet to me but I can see that they're also thinking, 'well now she knows what it's like to get it in the neck!'. But I think I've got it in the neck in quite a different way from the way politicians get it in the neck. I did feel, the first week or so, completely disillusioned with it. I mean, Niall Stokes in his editorial last week said something like "sometimes I wonder if I should be in this job at all?". And that was certainly the way I felt.
It was the hunting in the pack. It was the complete jettisoning of journalistic standards. I mean, imagine writing these articles about this book without even reading it, imagine judging it without even reading it, imagine judging me and my motivation and everything without even talking to me! I'm a very accessible individual, I'm not some prima donna cow that nobody could come to. I'm friends with most of these people. So it was quite extraordinary and, yes, I did feel hugely disillusioned.
Why did people respond in that way?
I think there are a number of things. I think the competition within the Dublin journalism rather than the newspaper market is a huge factor in the whole thing. It's just the nature of journalism now. I think it's screechy, I think it's desperately biased. I think newspapers decide to strike attitudes about issues. For no reason, it's like "we'll be on Michelle Smith's side" or "we won't be on Michelle Smith's side" or "we'll be on Emily O'Reilly's side" or "we won't be", without any critical examination of the evidence either way.
People decided "Emily O'Reilly is doing a hatchet job on Veronica Guerin - end of story!" And then they filled out screeds of stuff just about that. And they told lies about what was in it! I mean, there was worse stuff printed about Veronica in the Independent newspapers than I have in my book (laughs).
Like what specifically?
Like that story about her approaching Haughey for money, claiming that her son was sick and needed medical treatment. That doesn't appear anywhere in my book but it has appeared in some of the papers. And you're thinking "Jesus, this is supposed to be the cream of Irish journalism - what am I doing in this profession?" Actually, overall I think this has been a wonderful experience for me in terms of assessing what I'm at and what I want to do. My whole evaluation of media and whatever. And I might possibly go off in a completely different direction. I think I'll always be writing all right, but I just don't know. It's certainly opened my eyes to stuff.
Would you admit that you were naïve about it beforehand?
I find that I'm far less critical of people now, I'm greyer in my judgements of people. And that might make me superficially a tamer journalist but I think I'm a better journalist because of it. But I think what people have discovered is that it's the screechy journalists who get the space and the high salaries. The screechiest get the most money. You become a polemicist and you attack people viciously and everyone wants to read it and your editor is saying "great" and they pay you loads of money. I can't do that!

And just a point I want to make very strongly about Gene Kerrigan's piece. He accused me of being cruel. And I think coming from a newspaper that trades in cruelty, that's really rich. I'd like to know where Gene Kerrigan's voice was when John Hume was described in his newspaper as having "blood on his hands". I'd like to know where Gene Kerrigan's voice was when Veronica Guerin wrote - against the wishes of the Gardaí - that Imelda Riney had been raped in front of her young son before she was murdered. Think how Imelda Riney's husband and family felt about that! Or when a reporter wrote that a woman who had been murdered, and whose son had found her body, wrote that she was a lesbian - apparently incorrectly and causing devastation to the family. Where was Gene Kerrigan's voice then? Isn't it amazing that the only journalist or the only piece of journalism that he writes about in those terms - and I would absolutely deny that there's anything inaccurate in my book - is about a book which fundamentally is an attack on the newspaper that pays his wages?
Why did Vincent Browne refuse to be interviewed for the book?
I don't know. He was to the fore in asking me not to write the book, you know. I mean, I meet Vincent occasionally for lunch or a drink or whatever and, over the last year-and-a-half, since I told him I was thinking of doing this, he has begged me not to do it. He himself had a very negative view of Veronica. And also he felt "it won't do you any good" and "it's not worth a book" and "you'll be damaged" and so on and so forth. And then of course he attempted to get the serialisation rights for the book and, when he couldn't get them, he went off and did what he did in Magill - an article I haven't read and don't want to.
So you really are consciously avoiding all the negative press?
Well, that one I didn't want to read because that one really, really annoyed me. Talk about hypocrisy, you know. This was a journalist I admired. To tell me not to do it, then to try and get the serialisation rights, then try to beat it to the post! There are certain things I've avoided. I just glanced at the Kerrigan piece, got the main points, put it away. I don't want to read Paddy's stuff. I probably won't read the review in the Tribune. I don't need it. Like, okay, I've got the message. Right. And of course it does upset me but I have to get on with my life at home, with my kids and my husband and just try to rise above it.
The Sunday Times has already bought the serialisation rights for a fairly hefty sum. How well will you do financially out of the book?
Well, now, thanks to all the publicity I think I'll probably do very well indeed. I'd like to thank Gene Kerrigan, Vincent Browne, Matt Cooper, Sam Smyth, Paddy Prendeville and all these people who are going to give me very nice holidays this year (laughs). I think the book will do really well. Jesus, if it didn't sell after all of this, I'd be very surprised.
How did you feel about Veronica Guerin's abilities as a journalist?
Oh, she was wonderful. She had courage and, above all, an energy that I don't think any other journalists in this country had. She'd just go after stuff. And go and go and go and go - way beyond the point where most of us would have stopped.
John Traynor's affidavit, which is quoted in the book, claims that she was incredibly pushy and didn't mind publishing untruths. According to his version of events, she was practically blackmailing him for information, threatening to falsely expose him as a drug dealer if he didn't give her what she wanted.
Well, you know what I believe? I firmly believe that in a few years time, some wonderful documentary maker or some other journalist - it's not gonna be me, I've done my bit - is gonna say "let's look back at the Veronica Guerin story. What was that book all the fuss was about?" And then they'll explore the whole thing and then other things will come out. Yeah, I think perhaps Veronica played one off against the other, I think she used possibly coercive methods - I don't mean physically coercive, obviously - in order to get information. I don't believe all of Traynor's affidavit but I know a lot of people who knew Veronica much better than I did and had worked with her and they all said, "Yeah, that would have been her style". And whatever about doing that to a bloody politician, you don't do that with criminals!
How do you feel about the argument that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead?
I would challenge anybody to start a biography of Veronica Guerin - an absolutely valid subject given the profile that she had - and I defy anybody to go and research her life and not come up with the same dilemmas that I came up with. Within a week! They have two choices, they can say "I'm going to ignore all that and just do the heroic thing" or else they can say "I'm gonna write it warts and all" and be candidates for the abuse that I've suffered. Or they can go back to the publishers and say 'no, I won't do it'. That's a form of censorship.
What about the accusation that the book wasn't sufficiently well researched?
People say I was lazy and didn't do my research. A lot of people should be down on their bended knees that I didn't write what I knew. And I know I've been criticised for saying this but dammit, you know, I've been hung for the relatively minor stuff I have in it.
Is there not a problem suggesting that there's more serious stuff out there, without substantiating it?
Well look, it's open to any journalist to go out and find out.
What's your feeling now about the Guerin Principles, in the light of your experiences in relation to the book?
There's one that says that people should be free to write without intimidation or whatever - well I've been hugely intimidated over this. I've been bullied, I've been abused. I actually sometimes feel as if I've been physically battered in relation to this. Somebody said in relation to the Gene Kerrigan thing that it was the most brutal piece they'd seen about anybody in a long time. And I asked myself "why is this happening to me when all I've done is examine the huge issues surrounding somebody's awful death?". Journalists do that every day of the week. So I think the Guerin Principles are a joke, as it seems the way they apply is that you're free to write and say what you like about anybody with one exception and that is a journalist working for the Independent group.
Do you think that Veronica would have had any qualms writing the kind of book you've written if it was about someone else?
Not in the slightest (laughs). I think she'd probably be cheering me on. She's probably up there saying: "oh well, oops, I've been found out a little bit. Oh well, I've outed enough people in my time". And I think that if Veronica was working for a different paper and the same thing had happened to her, I don't think the Sunday Independent would have waited for a week to go by before they would have rushed into print with far worse stuff than I've written. They don't have any qualms about it. Look what Anne Harris did to her old friend Aine O'Connor! Hardly dead a week and yet she rushed into print with all this old stuff about how they'd fallen out because she'd betrayed a friendship or something. And all this stuff about her relationship with Gabriel Byrne - I mean, Aine O'Connor was dead hardly a week and she had a partner who was not Gabriel Byrne and she had a child who was the child of that partner. How did they feel about that? And they're lecturing me about caring for the dead or the memory of the dead. How dare they!
How do you respond to allegations that you were jealous of Veronica's success and your book is born out of simple begrudgery?
This was something else! I mean, how do I say it? The more I say it, that I'm not, the more I seem to be . . . (pauses). Look, just open the front page of the book. (Picks up copy of the book from table and begins to read): "Emily O'Reilly is the Political Editor of the Sunday Business Post. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she has been Journalist Of The Year and Woman Journalist Of The Year. She is the author of two books; Candidate: The Truth Behind the Presidential Campaign and Masterminds Of The Right. Emily O'Reilly lives in Howth, County Dublin, with her husband Stephen Ryan and their four children." That's not bad! Why would I be jealous of anyone else? Not to say that I'm not jealous of other journalists' scoops but, Jesus, so are you! So is everybody! That's the nature of the game. But to say that I've written this book to attack someone who's dead because I was jealous of their achievements - that's just obscene. n
*Veronica Guerin: The Life and Death Of A Crime Reporter, by Emily O'Reilly, is published by Virago (#8.55).