The Trib

by David Kenny

  In January of that year, Lee and Charlie Bird, RTÉ’s chief news correspondent, reported that National Irish Bank had defrauded customers, opened bogus accounts and knowingly facilitated the targeting of high-net-worth customers for the purpose of tax evasion. Between NIB’s defensive strategies and the libel action taken by one of its former employees, Fianna Fáil TD Beverly Cooper Flynn, who sold bogus non-resident accounts, Lee and Bird’s work triggered a High Court investigation and Supreme Court challenges. The ensuing High Court inspectors’ report was damning of NIB. Flynn later lost her libel action.

  The year after the NIB scandal, Lee made a name for himself again when he described as ‘Thatcherite’ Charlie McCreevy’s third giveaway budget, which made it financially more attractive for both partners in a marriage to take paid employment. His comments in the hours after the budget had been announced played a huge part in the subsequent ‘tax individualisation’ controversy which followed it, one of the most embarrassing setbacks of McCreevy’s career.

  Since then, Lee has erupted into righteous indignation on a regular basis, demonstrating he has a social conscience and claiming that economic policy should serve the people and not the other way around.

  For all his concern about the health of the economy, four years ago Lee was in danger of going into recession himself when he lost two-and-a-half stone after being struck down by a mystery illness which was later diagnosed as Chronic Urticaria – a condition which made him ultra-sensitive to certain foods.

  ‘I thought I was never going to be able to eat anything again. I still have to be careful about what I take, although it’s impossible to be sure what’s in anything or how I will react.’ One imagines that was a particular worry when he travelled to China earlier this year to film an acclaimed and thought-provoking series for RTÉ.

  Because of his approach to his job, Lee does have a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way, even Bertie Ahern. Frustrated at having lost his chance to become Taoiseach in 1994, Ahern was asked to speak on RTÉ, but first had to sit through Lee commenting favourably on what the new Minister for Finance, Ruairí Quinn, was doing. ‘Wouldja listen to him!’ Ahern is reported to have raged through gritted teeth. ‘Wouldja just listen to him!’

  Lee’s friends say that what keeps his fire burning is his concern for a public often flummoxed by the financial gobbledygook churned out by banks.

  ‘I know that a lot of financial products can damage people because they don’t know what they are taking and they don’t know what they are getting into.’

  Now that his time has come, you can be sure we’re going to be hearing a lot more from George Lee. Earlier this year, it was reported he had been paid an advance of €100,000 for a book on the rise and decline of the Celtic Tiger which publishers promise will explain ‘how a decade of easy gains and soaring expectations seduced people into unrealistic notions of what they are worth and what they are due’.

  It sounds like the perfect marriage of book and author.

  CONOR MCMORROW

  The Wayne O’Donoghue interview

  In 2006 Wayne O’Donoghue was sentenced to four years for killing his eleven-year-old neighbour, Robert Holohan. McMorrow obtained this exclusive first interview with Wayne in prison.

  30 April 2006

  Security is tight. An electronic metal door slides open. Visitors pass through an airport-style metal detector. Then, more heavy metal doors and iron gates. The eerie silence of the prison corridor is interrupted by the sound of footsteps and the rattle of keys.

  From a window, Padraig Nally, the man who was sentenced to six years for the manslaughter of the Traveller John Ward last year, can be seen working in the prison garden. A prison officer points in the direction of the visiting room.

  Inside, the most talked about twenty-one-year-old in the country can be seen through the glass panel door.

  Wayne O’Donoghue smiles as he introduces himself. The face of the student that was splashed across every newspaper in the country is not as recognisable now. He has grown a beard. His hair is a little shorter than it was during last December’s trial and he has put on weight. The weight gain has been propelled by his medication – anti-depressants that help him cope with the events of the last sixteen months.

  He is wearing a navy fleece top, as he has been out working in the prison garden where he spends most of his day. It passes the time. Wayne O’Donoghue lives his life between his cell and the prison garden. But no matter where he is, his mind is constantly focused on one day – 4 January 2005.

  ‘I never stop thinking about what happened. I think about it 24/7. I just keep thinking why did this happen to me? Why did it happen to Robert? It was just a normal day like any other day. I had spent the morning studying for college and I had been visiting my girlfriend earlier as well.

  ‘When Robert came to the house it happened. It all happened so quickly. He threw a handful of pebbles at my car and one of them hit me on the back of the neck. That’s when it happened. It was over in seconds.’

  At O’Donoghue’s trial, the court heard how he caught Robert Holohan in an armlock, put his hand to the boy’s throat and the young boy died from asphyxia due to neck compression. The former engineering student thinks constantly about those seconds when Robert Holohan’s life ended and his own life changed irrevocably.

  ‘I think about the Holohan family a lot, as they have lost Robert out of all this,’ explained O’Donoghue. ‘I cannot say how sorry I am for everything that has happened to them. I think that by getting a four-year sentence, I was treated fairly by the courts, but this is not a four-year sentence, this is a life sentence. I will feel sorry for what I did until the day I die. It will always be on my mind.’

  O’Donoghue described how Ballyedmond, like rural townlands across the country, is one of those places where children of all ages mix together, as there may not be people of their own age living nearby.

  ‘All of the kids in Ballyedmond were very close. We all hung around together like any other rural area in the country,’ said O’Donoghue. ‘My brothers and myself were very close to the Holohans. Majella would often ask me to look after Robert for a few hours because she knew she could trust me. We had been friends for about four or five years, although we were probably not as friendly in the last year, as I had got a car and I was always away in the car in town or at my girlfriend’s house. Robert had taken up horse-riding so he was doing that a lot as well, so we didn’t see as much of each other in the last year.’

  Looking back on 4 January 2005, O’Donoghue points out that he was not even meant to be at home on the day. ‘The only reason I was back at the house was because one of my brothers had bought an exercise bike and he wanted me to collect it and bring it home for him.’

  After collecting the exercise bike in Midleton, O’Donoghue decided to stay at the house, and that is when Robert Holohan called to the O’Donoghue house. While Robert’s death happened in seconds, it is what occurred after his death that has been the subject of most media and public comment, particularly after his mother made her victim impact statement in Ennis at O’Donoghue’s sentencing hearing.

  During his trial in Cork last December, O’Donoghue’s barrister, Blaise O’Carroll, described how O’Donoghue and Robert Holohan had ‘an extremely beautiful relationship’ which led O’Donoghue to build a tree house for the young boy and play hurling with him as well as drive him into Midleton for ice creams and DVDs. It was in the context of ‘this special relationship’ that O’Donoghue panicked when he realised he had killed Robert.

  ‘Had I been thinking any way logically, I would have rang an ambulance or the gardaí, but panic set in,’ said O’Donoghue. ‘I dragged Robert into the house to the bathroom and tried to get him back. I laid him out on the floor in the bathroom and even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I lifted his right hand to check for a pulse.’

  It is understood that when O’Donoghue dropped Robert’s hand onto the bath mat, a tiny trace of semen got onto the d
eceased’s hand. The Sunday Tribune has learned that detailed forensic tests carried out by a group of DNA experts in the United Kingdom found that the trace of semen on the bath mat was not that of Wayne O’Donoghue.

  By taking DNA samples from all the males in the O’Donoghue house, the experts found that the trace of semen came from another member of the O’Donoghue family and, crucially, not from Wayne. ‘That semen was definitely not mine, and I couldn’t believe when people started to say that there was anything else going on between us,’ said O’Donoghue.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when Majella Holohan got up and said that there was semen on Robert’s body, during her victim impact statement.’

  Sitting last week in the visitor room of the Midlands Prison, O’Donoghue said he understood Majella Holohan’s motivation for making her victim impact statement, but vehemently refutes her allegations. ‘I can see why Majella Holohan came out with what she said at the time, and I don’t hold anything against her for what she said. I have no problem doing my time in here, but there is no way there was anything going on between Robert and myself.’

  Refuting Majella Holohan’s allegation that pictures were taken on Robert’s mobile phone in Wayne’s bedroom at 7.30 a.m., O’Donoghue said, ‘When Robert got the picture phone working, he took a picture of a poster in my room in the afternoon. The time on his phone was not set properly and that is how it looked like he was in my room at 7.30 a.m.’

  O’Donoghue also offered an explanation to Majella Holohan’s question about her son’s body being found without his shoes. ‘When I was dragging Robert into the bathroom, one of his shoes came off. I ended up wrapping that in a plastic bag before I put the body into the boot of the car. When I got to Inch, his other shoe had come off. I was in such a state at the time that I must have been driving around the back roads to Inch at about 100 mph. The body would have been thrown about in the boot and that could be how the other shoe came off. If people think about where I dumped the body, they could see how much of a panic I was in.’

  For nearly eight days, Robert’s body lay in a ditch near Inch Strand. In that period, the young boy’s disappearance was elevated from a local tragedy to a national concern. Wayne O’Donoghue assisted in the search for the eleven-year-old. He reassured the boy’s mother that her son would be found. He also filled in a garda questionnaire and gave two witness statements to gardaí.

  When asked about the way he participated in the search and concealed the truth, O’Donoghue said, ‘I was in such a state of shock and panic throughout those days. I had not slept or anything. I can say that the night that I handed myself in, I had the best night’s sleep I ever had in my life, as I hadn’t slept in days. I knew that I had finally owned up and that it was off my chest.’

  Twelve days after Robert was reported missing, O’Donoghue eventually told his father, Ray, that he had killed Robert. His father immediately contacted the gardaí. ‘I just couldn’t keep going on not telling anyone what had happened to Robert so I told my father. There was no else in the world I was able to tell. I knew that he was the only person that would be able to take the news and know what to do. I told him everything and I broke down. He rang the gardaí and got them to come to the house so that I could make a statement and hand myself in.’

  Ray O’Donoghue locked his son into a garden shed as he feared he might take his own life. ‘He even checked my pockets, in case I had a knife, when I went to the toilet,’ Wayne recalled. ‘If I had not told him what happened, I would probably just have cut my throat with a knife as I was in such a state. I just couldn’t keep it going.’

  Members of O’Donoghue’s immediate family visit every week in prison. But since the false allegations of paedophilia, many of his friends have stopped coming to see him. ‘I can understand why they started to believe it when I was called a paedophile across the front of some of the papers. Before the allegations were made, I got hundreds of letters. Some of them were even from the wives of gardaí investigating the case saying that they believed what happened was an accident. I have not got as many letters since the allegations were made, but I still get some.’

  He is still in a relationship with his longtime girlfriend. ‘I am still going out with Rebecca and she comes to see me. She took a year out after doing her Leaving Certificate and now she is going to college in the UK,’ said O’Donoghue.

  There have been media reports that O’Donoghue has received death threats in prison. He has been made aware that he may be in danger. ‘While some people have treated me differently in here after the trial and the allegations were made against me, I have friends in here.’ When asked if he associates with any other prisoners at the midlands prison, O’Donoghue said that he knows Padraig Nally and sees him working in the prison garden most days. ‘I spend most of my time working in the garden. In the evenings, I have a shower and spend time in my cell.’

  Formerly an engineering student at Cork Institute of Technology, O’Donoghue has not furthered his education during his time in prison. ‘While there are courses inside here that are offered to me, none of them really interest me.’

  O’Donoghue believes in God and prays every night. ‘A few years ago, I was like a lot of teenagers as I would not go to mass that often. When my grandmother died in 1998, I started praying every night and I still do. I have rosary beads in my cell and I say a few prayers every night.’

  O’Donoghue was sentenced to four years in prison by Judge Paul Carney at the Ennis sitting of the Central Criminal Court in January. He had already served thirteen months of the sentence by that time and, while his case and the events of 4 January 2005 will always be with him, he is attempting to look towards life after his release.

  ‘I am not really sure what I will do as I take each day one at a time in here, but I will probably go abroad for a few years,’ O’Donoghue admitted. ‘I might go to England or somewhere and see after that about coming back to Ireland.’

  Ethiopia time to lend a hand

  The nightmare of the 1980s famine could be about to hit once again. The Tribune visited some of the worst-hit areas to see how agencies are dealing with a crisis in which six million children could die.

  25 May 2008

  Don’t read this. It’s about Ethiopia. Let it slip under your radar. Famine in Ethiopia was interesting back in the 1980s but Live Aid sorted all that out. Surely the money we all sent to the ‘black babies’ solved their problems twenty-five years ago. Surely all those babies grew up to learn from the mistakes of their parents. Surely they all know about birth control in Ethiopia by now. They don’t. Ethiopia is facing widespread famine.

  Millions of children are at risk of malnutrition and if the world does not take notice immediately, history will repeat itself. Failed rains, the subsequent drought, and the global food price crisis have triggered massive food shortages across Ethiopia. In recent days Unicef, the UN children’s agency, warned that six million children in the country are at acute risk of malnutrition.

  ‘I am deeply concerned about the food security situation in Ethiopia, and the consequent increasing numbers of malnourished children, as a result of the drought,’ said John Holmes, the UN’s Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs.

  ‘We will need a rapid scaling up of resources, especially food and nutritional supplies, to make increased life-saving aid a reality. In addition the rising global costs of fuel and basic staples are posing hardship for Ethiopia’s people – especially the poorest.’

  Visiting Ethiopia last week, the Sunday Tribune witnessed children with distended stomachs and skeletal chests – the trademark signs of acute malnutrition. Tens of thousands of children need immediate specialist feeding just to survive. Crops will fail in the coming months. So the situation is expected to get worse. As the world’s media are focused on the aftermath of natural disasters in China and Burma, Ethiopia has been forgotten.

  The Ethiopian government has admitted there is a problem, and declared a localised emergency, but their appeals for aid ha
ve been deemed woefully inaccurate and unrealistic by international aid agencies. There is a consensus among the aid agencies that they are using band aids to fix a problem that needs life saving surgery.

  Some 200 miles towards the Equator from the capital Addis Ababa, south of the town of Shashamane, which is the spiritual home of Rastafarianism, the Sunday Tribune arrived in the town of Awassa. There, the poverty becomes more and more evident. At night the town is completely dark. Much of Ethiopia’s power supply is generated by hydro-electricity. The previous two rainy seasons have failed, causing the power shortages, but it is the water and food shortages that have caused most ills.

  Just outside Awassa, the signs of the famine are much more obvious. It is easy to count the ribs on the scrawny farm animals as they amble around fields that are quickly transforming in colour from lush green to a putrid yellowish brown. There is no significant harvest due until September but the poor rains have already compromised that harvest long before it is due. As the people and farm animals look for food over the next few months they cannot rest assured that there is light at the end of the tunnel. There will be no bumper harvest in the autumn.

  There is some rainfall but not enough. When it does rain people and farm animals gather around the same puddles and ponds of dirty water to drink it. With nothing else to eat, millions of Ethiopians, are barely surviving on ‘enset’, more commonly known as ‘false banana’. The most important staple crop in the south of the country, it tolerates drought better than most crops and people are left with it as their only food. It does keep people alive but it has poor nutritional value and really only serves to prolong the process of malnutrition setting in.

  At the Yirba Health Centre about an hour’s drive from Awassa, fourteen-year-old Taricka Wote has just arrived with his father Wote Woyamo. Taricka is in dire need of urgent medical attention if he is to survive. He weighs 11.5 kg (1.8 stone) which is just half the expected weight for a child of his height. He is the same height as an Irish toddler, as malnutrition has stunted his cognitive development and physical growth.