GRAHAM TURLEY HAS extended his condolences to the husband of slain British MP Jo Cox, saying she was “just doing her normal day’s work as Veronica was”.
“It’s absolutely horrendous,” Veronica Guerin’s widower told RTÉ’s Today With Sean O’Rourke this morning.
Turley passed on his condolences to Brendan Cox, the husband of the 41-year-old Labour MP who died after she was shot and stabbed outside a library near Leeds yesterday.
“I can just say what happened to me is very similar but in a completely different way,” Turley said.
“Brendan now has a huge mountain to climb with two kids. I had one. Just trying to get on with life and all the media speculation and all the hype that’s going to be around him for the next few days, few weeks, and few months, which happened to me.
It puts you in no man’s land. You’re just doing your normal day, just being a husband and a father and then all of a sudden your life is turned upside down in minutes.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of the Irish journalist and mother-of-one, who was shot dead by gangland criminals on the Naas Road.
Turley said the day Guerin died was “a total haze”.
“I had to identify the body and that that was the first time it sunk in that Veronica wasn’t coming home,” he said.
Speaking of the recent spate of gangland shootings in Dublin, Turley said, “It looks as if nothing has changed in 20 years.”
This was going to be sorted after Veronica’s murder but 20 years down the road, crime in Dublin is exactly the same. Nothing has changed. There is a shooting every week on the streets of Dublin.
He said garda resources need to be increased and TDs “need to stop talking and get up and do something”.
Turley, who remarried in 2011, said he and his son Cathal, now 26, “did a good job” of getting on with things.
“Time is a great healer, in its own way. But there are times when you open a newspaper and things flash back at you,” he said.
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