BBC reporter Gary O'Donoghue has revealed how his mother considered killing them both after he went blind at the age of eight. Speaking on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he told a shocked Lauren Laverne that far from holding any sense of bitterness towards his late mother Connie, he was touched that she had opened up to him.
'It made me understand how lonely it must have been for her and my father,' O'Donoghue said. The 58-year-old is the BBC's chief North America correspondent. His live reporting from the scene of President Trump's 2024 assassination attempt has been viewed more than 300 million times on social media.
O'Donoghue had one eye removed when he was a baby, and when he was playing at school the day before his eighth birthday, he suddenly realised he could not see anything. He told the show he will always be grateful to his parents, who persevered in the face of enormous odds to ensure he would be able to fulfil his dreams.
'There was no support in those days at all,' he said. 'My mother told me that at one point when they'd made an artificial eye for me the nurse couldn't manage to put it in, so she wrapped it in a tissue and said, "You try when you get home".'
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 10am and available via BBC Sounds.
