The Trib (27 page)

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.'

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

D
on'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 have 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.

Speaking through an interpreter, the skeletal teenager's father explained that his wife died four years ago from either TB or HIV. Living in frugal circumstances Woyamo, a subsistence farmer, has struggled to provide for his children from their meagre resources, and the recent crop failures have left them depending on false banana as their only food.

Medical staff at the stabilisation clinic say that Taricka is extremely lucky that his father brought him to the centre when he did. As well as being severely malnourished, staff believed he may also have TB. Although he is at death's door, the staff are confident they can treat him and he will survive. Taricka is just one of thousands of children that are showing up at clinics like the Yirba Health Centre. Mothers, who are struggling to survive themselves, carry sick children on foot for distances that can take over eight hours to walk.

TB is extremely common at the Belela Health Centre, a health worker explained, ‘Usually children under five are vulnerable to malnutrition but because the situation is so bad here we are getting children of all ages with malnutrition.'

The World Health Organisation has funded a drive to treat children with TB but it is still extremely common. An aid worker, who has worked in Ethiopia for eight years, said he was shocked to see the condition of one girl at the Belela Health Centre. The girl has just arrived with her mother and her pain is easily visible as she weeps. Her neck has burst open with mucus and there is scarring all around her neck.

An aid worker explains, ‘She obviously has pulmonary TB which has caused lymph nodes in her neck to swell up and burst. I have never seen a case as severe as that where her neck has burst open. She will have to be rushed to hospital immediately.'

Elsewhere in the Boricha area, women queue to have their children weighed and their height measured in a screening area at the Derara Health Centre. The reality is harsh. If the children are deemed malnourished, they get medical attention and food. If they are not malnourished they return home. The likelihood is that they will end up coming back in a few weeks, malnourished.

An aid worker at the clinic explained, ‘Community volunteers place the children in a plastic container that hangs from a weighing scales and then they lay them on a bench where they measure the children's height. We have a very scientific way of monitoring the children. Each height has a median weight. If a child is less than 70 per cent of their median weight, they are deemed severely malnourished. If they are between 80 and 90 per cent of their median weight they are deemed mildly malnourished.'

Inside the health centre, medical staff assess the appetite of the children, they check the levels of edema or swelling of their bodies. After that they assess the children's appetites by seeing if they are able to eat and keep therapeutic foods called Compact BP100 and Plumpy'nut down.

Plumpy'nut, commonly known as ‘Plumpy', is a high-protein and high-energy peanut-based paste that has been used as a famine relief food for children over the last eight years. It can be eaten without any preparation from its foil wrapper so parents can be given supplies of it, through an out-patient therapeutic (PT) programme, to take home with them for their malnourished children.

The global food crisis that has caused Irish consumers to pay more for their goods at the checkout is also affecting Ethiopia as the cost of therapeutic foods like Plumpy'nut has multiplied in recent months.

With drought and famine on one side and rising food prices on the other, Ethiopia is really suffering. Last week Paulette Jones of the World Food Programme (WFP) stated that the WFP needs to raise $147 million to tackle Ethiopia's needs. But other aid agencies claim the necessary money is not arriving as donors are concentrating on the situation in Burma and China.