Media Slammed Over Prisoner Coverage

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Irish Voice News

Media Slammed Over Prisoner Coverage

September 3, 2008

By Paddy Clancy

THE chairman of the Parole Board has hit out at the media for its coverage of the release of criminals. He was particularly scathing of coverage of the release last January of Wayne O’Donoghue who was at the time Ireland’s most high-profile killer.

He was freed from Portlaoise Prison after serving three years of a four-year sentence for the manslaughter of his 11-year-old neighbor Robert Holohan.

On Tuesday of this week, Parole Board Chairman Gordon Holmes said he was horrified at the media coverage of O’Donoghue’s release.

He said the coverage was not in the public interest. Holmes added that he hoped the new Press Council would help deal with such issues in the future.

Holmes was launching the annual report of the Parole Board for the year 2007. He conceded O’Donoghue’s release was not part of the report –- since it happened this year –- but he cited it as a perfect example of unacceptable coverage of high-profile prisoners when they finished their term in jail.

“If persons who have served their sentence and are released back to the public are then going to be hounded by the press it is going to make the rehabilitation all the more difficult,” he said.

Holmes referred to another case where the Parole Board recommended that a person who had been convicted of killing three soldiers in the Lebanon serve the remainder of his sentence in his native Northern Ireland. The prisoner had already served 25 years in jail in the Republic.

“Nonetheless, our press — and unfortunately not just the tabloid press –- proceeded to enquire from the relatives of the deceased persons their opinion as to what had been done,” Holmes said.

“If this is going to happen in every case, and particularly in high profile cases, then the press are going to defeat the rehabilitation process and make it all the more difficult to encourage prisoners to get back into society.”

Within hours of O’Donoghue’s release last January, media attention was so intense that it became the story.

The case divided the media and the people of Ireland. The trial jury accepted that death was unintended when O’Donoghue gripped the child in a headlock during a dispute. They acquitted O’Donoghue of murder and found him guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter.

Although an Appeal Court upheld the verdict of the jury and the sentence, there was still outrage in some quarters, led mainly by the tabloids which claimed that O’Donoghue had been punished lightly.

When he emerged at 7 a.m. from prison there was a pack of more than 40 reporters and cameramen waiting at the gate. He read a prepared statement, but his apology was later rejected by the Holohan family.

O’Donoghue escaped from pursuing media by switching cars but reporters then called to his family’s rented home where his father told them. “He’s gone. You’re never going to see him again.”

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