“You’re just doing your normal day, being a husband and a father, and all of a sudden your life is turned upside down in minutes.”

Graham Turley 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.

Mr Turley passed on his condolences to Brendan Cox, the husband of the 41-year-old Labour MP who died after she was stabbed outside a library near Leeds yesterday.

She was a woman just doing her normal day’s work as Veronica was and taken down. Brendan now has a huge, huge mountain to climb with two kids. I had one,” he said, referring to Cathal Turley, who was just six years old when his mother died.

He said: “You’re just doing your normal day, being a husband and a father, and all of a sudden your life is turned upside down in minutes.”

Veronica was killed on June 26, 1996, when one of two men on a motorcycle shot her at close range while she waited in her car at traffic lights on the Naas Road in Dublin.

Mr Turley described how the reality of Veronica’s death didn’t hit him for almost a year.

He said: “It doesn’t sink in really until months or maybe even a year after the event, because you’re surrounded by a shroud of help. People just come out of the woodwork to help you and you don’t do the things you normally do.