Work Examples

  1. Hugh Brady: Published in The Phoenix magazine, this is a profile of the president of University College, Dublin, Hugh Brady. It was partly an assessment of his achievements and partly an investigation of UCD’s finances, which are notoriously opaque and funded almost entirely from taxpayers’ money. This was the first critical evaluation of Brady’s tenure and I believe was partly responsible for UCD reducing its special payments to top academics.
  2. Declan Ganley’s Alaskan pals: Published in The Phoenix after months of writing and researching on Declan Ganley. I was the only Irish or European journalist to successfully report hard facts on Ganley, an Irish millionaire-cum-politician, and his use of Alaskan native corporations to secure lucrative U.S. defense contracts.
  3. Movie and music reviews: A selection reviews written for www.rte.ie: The Guardian (starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher); Bob Dylan ‘Modern Times’; Date Movie (starring Alyson Hannigan); The Matador (starring Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear).
  4. Mark Mahon: Published in The Phoenix, this is a profile of a young Irish film director and script-writer called Mark Mahon.
  5. FatherBob: Unpublished profile of Father Bob Abbatiello, the parish priest in Inwood, Manhattan. For a class assignment, I spent a day with Father Bob as he went about his duties.
  6. JohnDuddy: Unpublished profile of Irish middleweight boxer John Duddy and his unsuccessful campaign for a world title. Duddy has since retired without ever getting a title shot.
  7. DCU’s Cocaine Problem: A story, published in The Phoenix, about a Dublin City University study into the degree of contamination of Irish bank notes by cocaine and their attempted manipulation of the Irish media to publicize the study’s report.
  8. The Most Cunning: A Phoenix story about the former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern’s neutering of a proposed Irish parliamentary debate on the subject of the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings which remain unsolved, officially. (Note: Oireachtas is the Irish word for the entire bicameral legislature, roughly synonymous with Congress; Dail is an Irish word for parliament and is used for the lower house.)
  9. Two Little Boys: The prologue and second chapter of my first book “Two Little Boys: An Account of the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings and their Aftermath.” The book was described by Dublin’s Evening Herald as “conscience-stirring” and by the Irish Independent as “required reading for Government Ministers, senior Gardaí [Irish police] and Tony Blair.” British barrister and human rights campaigner Michael Mansfield QC, who wrote the foreword for the book, praised it for “page after page of compelling writing.”