Gangland Geometries: Space, Mobility and Transgression in the Veronica Guerin Films

Abstract

The Celtic Tiger boom years (1995–2007) witnessed a disproportionately high percentage of Irish films that addressed themselves to Dublin’s representation as a ‘gangland’. Of these, fewer than five productions, all released in the period between 1998 and 2003, were based upon or alternatively contain as a supporting character, the notorious underworld figure of Martin Cahill. The General (Boorman, 1998), the BBC’s Vicious Circle (Blair, 1999) and Ordinary Decent Criminal (O’Sullivan, 2000) each falls into the former category, as Cahill, or a thinly disguised version of that real-life character, inspires their narratives. The remaining two films, which have garnered significantly less academic attention than the Cahill adaptations, are When the Sky Falls (Mackenzie, 1999) and Veronica Guerin (Schumacher, 2003). Rather than adopting the gangster as their central trope, these films explore Dublin’s criminal underworld through the journalistic perspective of Veronica Guerin (or, as in Mackenzie’s film, her fictional incarnation Sinead Hamilton). Given the global outlook of these films, I consider the impact of genre upon the sense of place conveyed, specifically in terms of how the city becomes constituted by interlocking, yet discrete, social worlds. Enabled by the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Cresswell, 2010), this chapter will examine how the Guerin/Hamilton character is shown to transgress the boundaries between these spaces and, in doing so, exposes the fault lines of gender/class in Dublin’s landscape.