Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said the late journalist Veronica Guerin should never be remembered as a “tragic figure” but as “a vibrant, exuberant young woman”. Speaking at the Truth and Transparency event in Dublin on Friday, Martin said the journalist murdered by gangland criminals on June 26th, 1996 was a “force of nature who touched the lives of many people and in her far too brief life changed her country and made it better”.He recalled how they had become friends when they were both in Ógra Fianna Fáil. He said she could have had a career in politics or political journalism but she had been “too original to follow an expected route [and] her route to journalism was far from standard”. “She did not go through the normal routes of a relevant degree followed by a training place and rising through the ranks. She was rapidly seen by everyone as a person driven to tell stories which others couldn’t,” he said. Martin highlighted how she “wanted to go deep into parts of Irish society which had a huge impact on communities” and went after gangland criminals and “paramilitary bosses because she was determined to expose them and to show their victims that they were heard”.He said she had “gathered information on some of the darkest reaches of society and brought them to light with some of the most-read Irish journalism of the 20th century”.In his speech at the Convention Centre Dublin, Martin said Guerin’s murder ultimately led to the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab).“The reaction from the Irish people was as close to full national unity as it is possible to have,” he said. “Fury that something like this could happen quickly became more focused on a determination that a new response to criminals had to happen.”The Taoiseach noted that “professional journalism is under real pressure” with the spread of unreliable news and “increasingly intolerant and authoritarian governments happy to undermine independent journalism”.He said he was “determined” that would not happen in Ireland but added that it was “the job of journalists to persuade the public of the worth of their work and it is on this that their success will be determined. But equally it is clear that there needs to be foundational support to enable the profession to do the work which would otherwise be ignored by the instant-hit online mentality.”