Veronica Guerin

I just watched two movies about Veronica Guerin, the Dublin journalist who helped squash the thriving drug trade in that city during the mid-1990s by exposing the drug kingpins that no one else dared name. The Jerry Bruckheimer film Veronica Guerin, starring Cate Blanchett, got all the kudos, but the thinly fictionalized 1999 movie with Joan Allen, When the Sky Falls, is the better film. Less style, more substance. Even though the names are changed, you won't have any trouble guessing who the main players are: "The Commandant" is "The General" Martin Cahill (played by Brendon Gleason in The General, a must-see), the little guy who looks like a chimp is John Gilligan, etc. Both films are powerful testaments to the power of words and the importance of never backing down from a threat when the soul of your community is at stake. Veronica Guerin had a lot to lose. She was a young wife and mother, Ireland's best-known journalist, and a woman who loved life. But she wasn't going to watch Dublin become a giant crack house without a fight.
Yes, I admit it, I'm an IRA and "Troubles of Northern Ireland" movie junkie. We all have our organized crime obsessions. The same people who would call me a freak for watching The Boxer a dozen times tune into The Sopranos every week. So get off my back, ya wee wankers.