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(Photo of Ed O’Loughlin)

"The nice thing about studying at Trinity was the liberal attitude towards students and learning. And the joy of coming here every day – to a beautiful place in the middle of the city"

(...Continued from page 60) wasn’t pure excitement all of the time anyway, there is an awful lot of downtime, a lot of boring stories that you don’t want to do which you have to do. When it starts becoming less exciting, everything kind of looses its shine.”

Luckily for him, O’Loughlin had another plan afoot – this time a novel written based on his experiences as a reporter in Africa. “The backdrop is real. The characters fictional,” he asserts.

O’Loughlin had written the novel and already had it accepted for publication by Penguin before arriving back in Dublin last year. And even though the book had already received critical acclaim, he had no idea that a nomination for a Booker Prize was just around the corner.

“I found out about an hour before the official announcement was made,” O’Loughlin recalls. “I was walking back from the shops in Phibsborough when I received a call from my editor in Penguin telling me. So, I was very pleased, I hadn’t been expecting it at all.”

These days, O’Loughlin is much more likely to be found strolling in north city Dublin and he maintains that he is just as happy in his new, more settled life. He is married (“a Queen’s graduate, I’m afraid!” he jokes) with two daughters aged nearly three and 15 months. “When you have family you can’t be on the road all the time. You can’t abandon them. My wife wouldn’t allow it anyway. So you have to make the decision, and for me, it was just the right time.”

But the lust for travel has not left him completely, as O’Loughlin tells me that his next literary work is in the pipeline and ‘vague plans’ are being made to take his family to Canada, where he was born and still has relatives, for research purposes.

In the meantime, plans are to stay in Dublin. A time, perhaps, to catch up with some of his peers from Trinity many of whom he is still in touch with, and many of whom also went on to have successful careers in journalism. “There is Dave Nally B.A. (1986), who went on to become the head of current affairs in RTÉ; Tom Butler B.A. (1988), who was Labour party press officer and Mark Little B.A. (1997) – I published his first article ever. “Actually, we were in the same College band – played our first gig right here”, as he points to a darkened corner of the noisy canteen. “I think we did manage to win the first and only Battle of the Bad Bands. We were officially the worst band in Ireland for a year – that was back in ‘86.”

“The nice thing about studying at Trinity was the liberal attitude towards students and learning, he concludes, leaving no doubt that he left college with many happy memories. “And the joy of coming here every day – to a beautiful place in the middle of the city.”


"I had a great time here. It was a great four years. Studying arts is a very relaxed way to transit from school into juvenile adulthood"


Trinity Today | 59