Who is Wayne O’Donoghue?
Wayne O'Donoghue
Who is Wayne O’Donoghue to you? Read the Sunday World since the story broke and you see a callous infanticidal paedophile who is now enjoying his premature freedom by frolicking about under a false name with a sexy British girlfriend. Read the judgment of Justice Paul Carney, the trial judge asked to rule on the facts of the case, however, and you see a very different story almost disappointing in its lack of salacious detail. You see a teenage boy, a neighbour and friend of the Holohan family who treated Robert like a brother, whose clumsy actions gave rise to what the State Pathologist described as ‘light injuries… at the horseplay end of the scale’ and ultimately to an unintended, accidental and horrific outcome: the death of Robert Holohan. You see someone who got scared and, as is the unfortunate temptation when fear takes over, made the mistake of trying to cover up what he had done. You see a young man confused and overwhelmed, who subsequently confessed and pleaded guilty to manslaughter, who apologised repeatedly, who served the sentence handed down to him by the Courts of Law and who has been back before the courts to defend his reputation against the libellous claims published about him in a number of red-tops.
“Judges deal with issues”, Lord Justice Wall of the English Court of Appeal said at a conference on media and privacy law over the weekend, “and journalists deal with stories”. Who could argue? Yet the difference between the two representations of Wayne O’Donoghue runs deeper than the mere semantics of the judicial and tabloid worlds. The key distinction, shown once again with the publication in January of photos of O’Donoghue and his new English girlfriend, is the prurient and gratuitous obsession with the sexual dimensions of a story where there were none.
When it comes to getting a story, the fact that one has served one’s time is irrelevant: the tabloids have hit the jackpot with Wayne O’Donoghue and they are not about to let him go without a fight. He is the classic anti-celebrity, a media-made monster plucked from obscurity by extraordinary events and ducked into the wells of public infamy. Media reports such as those in the Sunday World revel in the queasy ordinariness of his present, shadowed indelibly as it is by the tragic circumstances of his past. Photographs of O’Donoghue at college, with his arm around his girlfriend, and even having the temerity to pose with a beer, all present us with a carefully contrived mosaic intended to convey what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. It is a familiar tactic. From the bowling-loving Columbine killers right up to Adolf Eichmann’s fondness for pancakes, the public remain fascinated by the ordinariness of the criminal du jour – a fascination elements of the press are only too happy to indulge. At one level, we revel in these minutiae in an attempt to understand the nature of evil – yet when we find it looking back at us with eyes, faces and tastes like our own, we rear back, throw up the walls of judgment and disbelief and rant to each other in faux-outrage with cries of monster, devil, off with their heads. “Evil is unspectacular and always human”, W.H. Auden wrote, “and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” And, the Sunday World would add, it dates girls and has the occasional beer too.
So who is Wayne O’Donoghue to us, and why does it matter that he now has a girlfriend? In the great tug-of-war between advocates of the right to privacy and press lobbyists for freedom of expression, the failsafe defence for intrusions into personal life remains ‘service to the public interest’. This argument has won some crucial victories in recent times, vindicating the importance of investigative journalism in bringing scandals to the light. But the Wayne O’Donoghue story is no Watergate, no investigative coup, no national emergency. ‘The Big Lebowski’, a film about comically ordinary criminality, included a throwaway but telling reference to Lenin’s maxim: “look for the person who will benefit”. What public interest is being safeguarded, then, in the matter of Girlfriendgate? We know from reports in November that O’Donoghue’s family are ‘appalled’ and ‘deeply upset’ at the leaking of O’Donoghue’s new identity. Is it the Holohans, then, who are served by the publicising of ‘news’ that their son’s killer is now doing all the things they had wished for Robert? Is their grief diminished in any way by the publication of photos of Wayne O’Donoghue drinking beer with his girlfriend and being a normal heterosexual young man? Or perhaps it is the public who benefit by being put on notice that Wayne O’Donoghue is no longer single, that the Sunday World considers his girlfriend sexy, that her father is ‘of Middle Eastern origin’? And why weren’t we told what team he supports and whether she watches Coronation Street or Eastenders? ‘Child-Killer Wayne a United Fan – Sexy Squeeze Corrie Addict’. The people need to know – or at least, they might if we put it in front of them in big letters.
The questions are rhetorical, of course, but the point bears stating. The only end served by the pursuit of Wayne O’Donoghue and the investigations into his private life is that of tawdry entertainment based on the premise that the only thing that sells better than sex is child-killer sex – and if it stokes the fires of public indignation, all the better. Robert Holohan is dead. His family will grieve him for the rest of their lives and may never be able to forgive Wayne O’Donoghue for taking him from them, accidental and unintentional though it was. O’Donoghue spent three years in prison for his crime but will spend the rest of his days imprisoned by his conscience. He has had to leave Ireland to try and start a new life. All involved have been trying to come to terms with the tragedy and get on with their lives. Hunting people down as they try to do this serves no purpose of social value. Instead it is the worst kind of reality entertainment: peering into broken lives and reporting back dispatches in the gossipy vernacular normally reserved for celebrity tattle.
Since January 2005, we put ourselves in the shoes of the Holohan family, as our hearts and our media exhorted us to do. We have followed the search for Robert with desperate hope and a sense of profound empathy for the extraordinary sufferings and courage of what we were constantly reminded was a very ordinary family. But that, for all the genuine outpouring of grief, has been the easier part. Dare we now take the next step and put ourselves in Wayne O’Donoghue’s place? Dare we contemplate for a moment what he must be feeling? Can we bring ourselves to imagine the plight of his family, who asked for none of this, who suffer with him?
Appeals for empathy towards a tarred and feathered ‘childkiller’ is an altogether less comfortable proposition. And yet if we are to stop short of being the baying mob, following his every move with unforgiving reproach, that is a step we must take. What began as a manhunt for Robert has turned into a witchhunt of Wayne, where every move he makes to rebuild his life is trumpeted as an act of unforgiveable temerity in the face of a sanctimonious media and public. W.B. Yeats once wrote that his ambition in life was to “hold reality and justice in a single thought”. It behoves us as a society to attempt the same. Whoever Wayne O’Donoghue is to us, the bare facts show him to be a human being who must live with the knowledge that he killed his friend. The question is not whether he needs periodic reminders of his guilt. The question is: do we?
Native Mind 
Excellent piece. Fires me up in the same way as I suspect tabloid readers and stakeholders do when stories like this are published… only I,in exactly the opposite direction. Long live freedom of the press but give it a conscience and make it accountable for its part in the documentation (and influence) of our collective futures, to a positive end.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/1110/breaking38.html
Interesting stuff. I wonder (a) how TV3 will report this, and (b) how the other four defamation actions will pan out. This should be something of a watershed in terms of news reporting – being accused of paedophilia is pretty much the worst slur to be made in modern society, not least because it is probably the most difficult to dispel – and the sort of carefully measured hysterics from the tabloids that followed Majella Holohan’s victim impact statement are excesses that should never be repeated.
Interesting and beautifully written. HOWEVER.
Was there semen on dead Robert’s hand, yes or no?
Was it Wayne’s, yes or no?
If not Wayne’s, then whose and how did it get there?
These are the central issues, Mr. Lysaght, and no amount of Yeatsean quotation will deflect the interest here until they are fully answered. It is not some base fascination with salacious detail extant in the collective psyche of the public that keeps the interest in this case alive, as you too eagerly suggest, but rather, a profound sense that we haven’t heard the full story here, and more importantly, the perception that justice has NOT been done. We, as a society, owe it to the memory of the dead eleven year old Robert to find out precisely what happened to him in his final hours. If that inconveniences the individual who killed him, then in my opinion, that’s just too damned bad.
Thanks for your comments Father Leo.
In response to your points:
1. Yes, there was a tiny amount of semen (fewer than 200 cells) found on Robert Holohan’s hand. The sample was so small as to make conventional DNA analysis impossible.
2. Yes and no. Dr Jonathan Whitaker of the Forensic Science Service in the UK, who was engaged to aid the investigation, concluded that there were three possible accounts for the origin of the semen: that most originated from Wayne O’Donoghue; that most originated from his relative; or that the sample was a mixture of the two. His final conclusion was that the DNA profile obtained from Robert’s handswab was an even mixture. However he was “unable to statistically evaluate this observation”, rendering it meaningless. So it is not actually clear whose semen it was.
3. DNA profiles of the other male members of Wayne O’Donoghue’s family established that there were several possible individuals from whom the semen might have originated. Tests of the bathmat later detected semen stains containing millions of sperm cells, and conventional DNA tests on those sperm cells were a match with a relative of Wayne O’Donoghue’s. There has never been any conclusive evidence that the semen was solely, or even predominantly, that of Wayne O’Donoghue.
As for how the semen got there, the explanation appears to be altogether more straightforward than that insinuated by the tabloid press. Marc Scott Taylor, a forensic scientist from the US specialising in DNA transfer, said that the likelihood of Robert being the subject of a sexual assault is baseless. Taylor remarks that sperm cells are spectacularly persistent and transferable. They degrade far more slowly than other human cells and they can even be found in their thousands on clothes washed along with a semen-stained towel. That semen arrived on Robert’s hand simply by his being on the bathroom mat is highly likely, he says. “Water on the skin enhances the transfer process,” he says. “You can literally get thousands of sperm cells transferred from the semen stain to the skin. Literally just contact between the skin and that stain on the bathroom mat would transfer the cells. It can happen instantaneously.”
While I of course agree that a full investigation is required in order for justice to be done and seen to be done, the fact in this instance is that the sexual element of this case was a non-runner. The forensic evidence was overwhelmingly in favour of a completely innocent explanation for the presence of the tiny number of sperm cells found on Robert’s hand. The evidence was so tenuous and weak to support any allegation of sexual misconduct that the prosecution decided that it would harm their credibility to try and run that line of argument alongside the (substantial and evidence-based) manslaughter contention. That this irrelevant (albeit sensitive) sexual element was seized upon by the press – and perpetuated in the coverage of the sexual life of both Wayne O’Donoghue and his girlfriend – is yet another example of the tired prurience which informs the coverage of subjects of public opprobrium. The recent scandal of the defamation of Fr Kevin Reynolds is another sorry chapter in the history of media not letting the facts get in the way of injecting sex into a story to give it legs. Take into account also that O’Donoghue won his libel case against the Sunday World and Evening Herald for their ‘paedophile’ claims, and you begin to get the picture. Their ‘apology’ – a statement which read that “The Evening Herald and Sunday World accept there was no evidence that the semen found on the body of Robert Holohan was that of Wayne O’Donoghue” – scarcely begins to undo the damage done to his reputation by these libels.
The fact is quite simply that the human rights of Wayne O’Donoghue have been ridden over rough-shod by the tabloid media. His crime was manslaughter and he served out the time prescribed by law as his penalty. To dismiss baseless, libellous claims of paedophilia and sexual abuse as mere ‘inconvenience’ is callous, in my view. The publications which ran these stories knew the facts outlined above. The alacrity with which they seized upon the suggestion of a sexual element to the crime displayed complete disregard for the factual realities, the forensic evidence – and the human rights of both the Holohan and O’Donoghue families. I say again: this was no crusading sortie of investigative journalism. The facts had already been established – and the manner in which the tabloid press distorted those facts was, quite simply, prurient and deplorable.