Martin Cahill

Oh, the helmet went missing, and the-

And the file at one point went missing, and believed to be in the hands of the General Martin Cahill.

I'm not aware of that, no, but I am [laughs] I, I, I, that's the first I've heard of that one.

Um, but I am aware that, that the, um, that the helmet has gone missing.

And, uh, what happened was they basically got individuals from, uh, the Guard intelligence services to go and interview him and report back to the, um, investigation team.

And at that stage, uh, we were told he was quite elderly and too ill to be interviewed.

Uh, for the record, by the way, I'm confusing the file with Martin Cahill and, uh, Father Niall Molloy.

Um, but suffice to say there were, as you've just outlined there, a litany of, of failures, which has taken until now for the state to officially and in the most public way through the door apologize for.

Yeah.

I mean, so, like, uh, like Martin Cahill, The General, he, there, his, his gang...

Well, a quick recap, I guess, of who he was-

Mm-hmm

so that he had a little nest egg for when he got out of prison.

But the reason why the state, Pat, were so-- there was a chilling effect amongst the, the agencies of state was that you have to remember that Martin Cahill, the General, he was the first person that the state took on in terms, he was claiming social welfare, dole money, and this was at the height of a major investigation into him back in 1987, '88.

And his dole money was stopped, and the st- the, the social welfare inspector who was in charge of his case, a man called Brian Purcell, he was abducted from his house one night, taken to a railway line in South Dublin, and where Martin Cahill turned up, um, [clears throat] and produced a gun and shot him in the legs.

Now, Brian Purcell, of course, uh, uh, as another side of the forest here, is one of the unsung heroes in the story because he later became w- a member of CAB.

He joined CAB as, on behalf of the Department of Social Welfare when it was formed, and later became the, the Secretary General of the Department of Justice.

To understand what Veronica Guerin was walking into, you need to have a sense of Dublin's criminal underworld in the early 1990s.

And to understand that world, you need to know Martin Cahill.

Veronica and the media knew him as The General, a nickname his own men gave him.

Martin was born in 1949 in Dublin's north inner city, the second of 12 surviving children.

It was a smart move.

But on August 18th, 1994, Dublin's criminal underworld changed dramatically.

That day, 45-year-old Martin Cahill, AKA The General, was shot and killed.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army took responsibility for his murder, but no one was ever arrested or formally charged.