The Trib (26 page)

6 July 2008

L
ast week, the BBC's former economics editor, Evan Davis, claimed that UK journalists could have done more to warn the public about the credit crunch that triggered Britain's current housing price crash and general financial turmoil.

‘I do ask whether we did our best to warn people of impending problems during the upswing of the [economic] cycle,' Davis said at a radio festival in Glasgow.

Such a question could never apply to RTÉ's George Lee, the station's economics editor, who has been predicting an economic Armageddon twice nightly on the TV news for as long as anyone can remember. Often accused of turning glum into a fine art, his nearest TV equivalent is
Dad's Army
's Private Frazer who was always howling ‘We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed,' at Captain Mainwaring in the BBC comedy.

His pessimism did not go unnoticed. ‘George Lee could tell you that you'd just scooped the Lotto jackpot and still leave you wondering how you were going to pay your mortgage,' one commentator wrote at the height of the boom. ‘Why can't he enjoy the good times like everybody else?' His tendency to see clouds where others see silver linings has brought him to the attention of political satirists as well. Today FM's
Gift Grub
and 2FM's
Nob Nation
have both milked great humour from Lee's instinctive glumness.

But it seems Lee was right all along. Educated at Coláiste Eanna in Dublin, he graduated from UCD before getting a scholarship to study for an MSc at the London School of Economics. He then joined the Central Bank, from which he moved to the ESB as a treasury economist. While there he started writing an economics column for the fledgling
Sunday Business Post
. Bitten by the bug, he jumped when offered a chance to join the newspaper full time, even though it meant taking a 40 per cent pay cut. He is the first to concede the transition was difficult. ‘I can put my hand on my heart and say that the communications learning curve was one of the hardest things I have ever done in terms of learning,' he has said. ‘I had to change from writing about economics for people who understood economics to writing about economics for people who really did not care a hoot, but you had to interest them in it because it was important to them.'

When the newspaper ran into rocky times, Lee left for a job with Riada Stockbrokers, but journalism beckoned him back when RTÉ offered him a job on its
Marketplace
programme in 1991. This turned out to be another challenge. ‘TV was even harder than print because you have people's attention for a mere fifteen minutes, or one minute and forty-five seconds. Every week I had to present three minutes of the history of the Irish economy – really difficult for somebody like me.' After three seasons on
Marketplace
, Lee moved to the newsroom, and in the years that followed he was a regular fixture on RTÉ's nightly news. He became a household name in 1998 when a story he worked on sparked one of the country's most high-profile libel trials.

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.

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

S
ecurity 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 deceased'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.'