Philip Boucher Hayes

I remember the silence as well, silence and bray.

I was heading on the dart home later that evening and nobody was talking.

Nobody was there wasn't the kind of did you hear everybody seemed to know and just complete silence as to what had happened in broad daylight that day.

She had.

And I mean, Veronica, so many people feel they know her through the work that she did.

She was first and foremost, she was a mother and a wife and a daughter and sister.

But she also had this wide circle of friends in journalism and then anybody who read her work as well.

And she impacted on so many people.

She was great.

softly spoken and dogged she was very determined and she found that through crime reporting she was exposing what was going on you say there David about the mid 1990s and that's exactly what was happening it was like it was happening before everybody's eyes but she was able to really flag it that the importation of drugs was at a level that it hadn't been before yes heroin had been coming in for years but now

massive amounts of cannabis and ecstasy was coming in as well and certain criminal figures were not hiding their wealth and this was the fact that they were in these beautiful houses driving the flash cars living the life and some of them were claiming the dole as well that it just it beggared belief in many ways and she wasn't taking no comment as a reasonable answer to anything she was asking the questions and flagging

The fact that Gardaí, and she said it herself, seemed to have one hand tied behind their back in trying to tackle these people.

She had actually been shot.

She had been shot.

Her home as well had been shot at back in 1994.

And then in January 1995, she herself was shot in the leg.

at her home one evening a gunman arrived and he actually pointed the weapon at her head and then pointed it down at her leg and shot her in the leg which was taken as a very clear warning from somebody.

Now that was over a year before she was murdered and Veronica herself spoke about what had happened to her but she also felt this duty.

She was getting information about

The criminality of such a scale that hadn't been seen before and exposing it every week in the Sunday Independent so that she kept doing her job.