Veteran journalist set to tackle TB saga (Part 2)

VB: Since you left Alcan, you've been back with RTE, and you did a series on murders.

CO'S: Oh God yes. I enjoyed the murder series greatly. We did 13 of them. But of the first six that we did, I had covered three of those murders as a newspaperman. I'll tell you for instance, the Shan Mohangi one [Mohangi was a South African student at the College of Surgeons in Dublin. His girlfriend's body was found cut up in a flat on Harcourt Street in the early 1960s] I was convinced that Shan Mohangi was innocent. I won't tell you who I think was the murderer because he's still alive.

Along with another reporter, Liam Mac Gabhann, I toured the town in a taxi looking for the body with Mohangi and the other fellow that I thought had done the murder.

Another murder I had covered involved Nurse Cadden in Hume Street [she was convicted of murdering a woman during an abortion]. I had interviewed her at a time when the gardai had suspected her of the murder, indeed of several murders.

VB: You attempted to interview Charlie Haughey, what happened to that?

CO'S: Fred O'Donovan suggested that he and I do a series of interviews with various people for RTE and he said that we should approach Charlie Haughey, whom he knew well. He insisted that I make the contact with Charlie, which I did.

I wrote to Charlie and Charlie rang me then and said why don't we come and have lunch together and we'll discuss this. So we went into a restaurant in Malahide and Charlie was sitting there waiting for us and he said "What, O'Shannon, what makes you think that you have the intellect to do a programme on my life and career?" I said: "What makes you think that you have the intellect to be able to answer the questions I put to you, Charlie?"

He had grown up in Donnycarney, I had grown up in Marino, I had known him as a youth around Marino in the early '40s and as the best boy in, not just his class at school but in the school (St Joseph's, Fairview). I had known him as a young politician when I was with The Irish Times and in the early days in RTE. I have watched him bloom and blossom.

So we talked with Charlie, Fred O'Donovan and I, and he said: "I suppose you're going to say to me, the Irish public deserves this, I have a duty to the Irish public." I said, "I'm not going to say that at all to you, Charlie. It would be an utterly fascinating programme in fact, two programmes, I want to take it from your youth right up to now including everything."

So we talked and eventually he said: "Well, let's look at it like this. This is not the time to do it." I mean he was going to have to give evidence in one of the various tribunals. I said: "I understand that but when will the time be that we could do it?"

"That will become apparent at the time", he said, and he went on to say we should proceed with the project as though we were going to do it.

He then wrote to me saying exactly the same thing. We arranged to have a further lunch in Howth but then Terry Keane did her thing with Gay Byrne on the Late Late Show and he cancelled and that's the last we ever heard of it. I wrote to him twice and got no answer.

I was then told by P.J. Mara, whom I met casually somewhere or another: "Noel Pearson and Tony Cronin are doing this, you're not going to get this, Cathal." So I met Noel Pearson and asked him and it seemed to me that he had been talking to Charlie in much the same way that I had and had got just about as far.

VB: You've been ill over the last while but have obviously got better. What are you planning now?

CO'S: What I had hoped to do, yes, I got ill but they managed to do surgery which will make me survive. You know it seems to me that half of the people I know and worked with have had cancer of something or the other and the cancer I have, fortunately was operable.

VB: What was it?

CO'S: Cancer of the oesophagus, that they have taken out my oesophagus, well, most of it. They have to take part of your stomach out as well.

VB: Did it frighten you?

CO'S: It never occurred to me that I had cancer, never occurred to me for one moment. So when this particular surgeon said to me: "I'm afraid it's going to be the surgery again, Cathal," because I had had some surgery for a different thing altogether, I said what is it? He said: "Well, it's a tumour."

I always felt all my life that I was indestructible and even cancer wasn't going to kill me. That's the God's truth. I'll tell you what it does do, I went to confession for the first time for many many years but a priest said to me in there: "I'll tell you what I'll do, Cathal, and it's a serious operation, I'll give you the blessing of the sick, would you like the blessing of the sick?" I said yes, that would be great and, before I knew what it was I was getting, he was giving me extreme unction.

VB: Did confession take a long time?

CO'S: We sat there and talked for about 20 minutes, that's about all. He was a man who spent 25 years on the missions. Really, it was more philosophical the sort of talk we had and I'm not ashamed to be the coward in the fox hole, there's no such thing as an atheist in a fox hole. I'm certainly not the atheist in the fox hole. I've always believed in the Catholic Church but I don't want to go into that, so that it was no great burden for me to unburden myself to this decent man.

VB: So, what now?

CO'S: There are a number of things which I have already put to RTE. There are at least four more murders that I want to do and I want to do an hour-long programme about tuberculosis in Ireland. I don't mean Noel Browne, I mean what TB did. As I was growing up in Marino, I have a picture of my confirmation class, and there were 38 of us in my confirmation class and 11 of those got TB. Next door to me my neighbours got TB.

A family further down the road in Marino, there was a girl who used to be put sitting in the window in a bed, we watched her die. TB was the most common thing in the world. It's wiped out bloody families around our way. It's a great story, a bloody marvellous story.

VB: Ever think of writing memoirs?

CO'S: No. I'm a better man as a raconteur, telling stories. There was a time when I thought I would get down to do it but I'm lazier now than I was and I'm older than I was and I just haven't got down to it. I don't think I'll ever do it.