Podcast Corner: The Witness tells the incredible life story of a young Irish criminal
Joey O'Callaghan, The Witness podcast.
A podcast that more than lives up to its subtitle, The Witness: In His Own Words finds Joseph ‘Joey’ O’Callaghan telling his incredible life story. There’s little interjection from his interviewer, Ian Malaney, and, in the four episodes released to date, not much else to distract from his story, bar some explanatory lines from journalist Nicola Tallant.
The series was produced by the team behind The Stand with Eamon Dunphy, an interesting move for one of the most popular shows in the country.
O’Callaghan was the youngest person to ever enter the witness protection programme in 2005, when his testimony helped convict two men for a murder.
By the end of episode four, we still don’t know this, however. Instead, we are treated to a start-to-finish telling, from O’Callaghan’s childhood in Ballymun and Blanchardstown to how he came to be recruited in drug-running by ‘The Milkman’ Brian Kenny - with a nickname like that, you can imagine how his business was conducted.
The fact it’s O’Callaghan telling his own story, of the dark depths associated with drug dealing, stands at odds with other true crime shows. The lack of narrator means you listen to every fact he reveals as if it’s another clue to what’s coming next. The listener hangs on his every hard-worn word.
“Once I started delivering the heroin, once I started taking the drugs, the threats and all that began,” he explains on episode three, ‘The Cottage’.
“It wasn’t like it was just threats… I’d seen his actions, what he was doing to other people and then what he started doing to me. I’d seen him burn cars, I’d seen him chop people up, I’d seen him hit people with hammers. He put guns to my head. The first time he put a gun to my head, I can tell you exactly where I was.”
O’Callaghan’s voice increases in emotion as he says all this.
Unlike other shows, The Witness doesn’t need any production trickery to get across how devastating this all was for O’Callaghan. It’s all there - you just have to listen to the words.
