It started with an email on a Tuesday evening in February, 2023. The timing wasn’t great. I was severely jet-lagged from a two-week trip to Los Angeles, and about to have surgery on my hand, but the woman was compelling.
“I would like to speak to you,” she said. “You will be aware of my sons.”
It was a five-hour drive to Lisheen. Trish O’Donovan was sitting in her kitchen with her husband, Mick. I had only ever seen her smiling before in photographs or on TV, but her face was strained and soon her voice began to crack.
“I don’t know where to start,” she said. “It’s breaking my heart.”
But start she did with people and places and a story that didn’t make sense. What had happened to Lydia Heaphy; what had happened to Sanita Puspure; what had happened to Monika Dukarska; what had happened to Aileen Crowley; what had happened to Mark O’Donovan and Shane O’Driscoll; what was happening to her son Gary.
“They’re messing with his head,” she said. “You’ll see it in the emails. They’re trying to push him to the point where he’ll just walk away.”
Then she handed me a raft of documents, the nuts and bolts of one of the greatest scandals in the history of Irish sport.
Credit to : Irish Independent