Liam Collins

One of the things that appealed to Angus about her was that she wasn't a trained journalist as such.

She was a story getter and she operated from her car and her mobile phone.

When you look back on it, the people who were buying cheap cigarettes out in Moore Street, some of them from the Independent, didn't realise that this was the bottom of the food chain that led to Gilligan.

But higher up, there were all sorts of cannabis to heroin.

You know, that's where the money was.

It was a kind of a theme.

I don't know how it developed, but everyone was so busy around Christmas and, you know, at the time.

There was an awful lot of socialising going on around that time and we would be invited here, there and everywhere.

So the Christmas party was put off until the end of January.

So we all had to troop out to a restaurant that he favoured and I think Paddy Cole would be there to play a few tunes on the clarinet and Angus would join him.

But we had kind of assembled at the restaurant when word came through that Veronica had been shot.

I think it was a Tuesday evening, probably, and I think we adjourned to the pub to... And it was an air of shock that something like that could happen.

I mean, people kind of forget that, you know...

journalists, reporters went through the troubles where there was an awful lot of people killed and blown up.

And yet no journalist up to that point had been killed either for their writing or even accidentally.

So it was a great shock to discover that one of your own had been attacked in her home in such a manner.

Yes, probably.

Yeah, I think they have.

I was a reporter, firstly, but then I was the stand-in news editor on a Saturday night and when the news editor, Willie Keeley, was away.

So, as you say, newspapers were booming.