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Violent end of a secular saint

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

A religious affairs correspondent with a background in accountancy, the 36-year-old journalist had made the switch to crime reporting two years earlier, and in that short time established a formidable reputation for exposing the government’s ineptitude in dealing with Ireland’s escalating drug problem. Disguising the identities of criminals by giving them colorful nicknames, Guerin avoided conflict with Ireland’s libel laws while giving enough away in her articles to make it clear whom she was writing about. She had started naming names and was getting closer to identifying the real drug kingpins when she was murdered.
“Veronica Guerin,” Joel Schumacher’s film version of her life and death, follows that trajectory from her career switch to her murder, opening with the mob hit at a traffic light on the Naas Dual Carriageway and deftly reverting two years in flashback to explain why the drug demimonde of Dublin so desperately wanted her dead. Schumacher’s film is a tough, unflinching analysis of corruption in Ireland, and of Guerin’s relentless drive to bring to justice the thugs who made millions from their narcotics trade with little police intervention. In the title role, Australian actress Cate Blanchett, the ice-cool English monarch in “Elizabeth” and French Resistance heroine in “Charlotte Gray,” shows her impressive range, effortlessly mastering the Dublin accent in a cast where she is the only non-Irish actor. Ably supported by Oscar winner Brenda Fricker as her anxious mother and Barry Barnes as her long-suffering husband, Graham Turley, Blanchett’s portrayal of Guerin is admirably nuanced in the hands of a director from whom we had previously expected characters drawn in very broad strokes indeed. On the opposing side of the law, Ciar

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