The undiscovered Donal

12 April 2012

Donal MacIntyre is striding along a London street and chatting to ES on the telephone when a kerfuffle breaks out at his end of the line. Shouts of 'You're a marked man, mate, you're a marked man!' can be heard in the background. Donal breaks off the conversation to bellow, 'If you think you're so tough, have a swing at me, go on!' then politely turns back to the receiver. 'I'd better get off the phone now.' He sounds unfazed, but this sort of thing goes with the territory: he's just been recognised by the sort of miscreants he makes television programmes about.

Donal is Britain's best-known and most recognisable investigative reporter. In the course of his TV career, he's posed as a bouncer to investigate drug dealers, tracked down gorilla poachers and infiltrated the Chelsea Headhunters, a vicious gang of football hooligans. (The conversation had been interrupted by two Chelsea fans.)

Unless you're a football hooligan, you will probably find Donal, 37, to be both likeable and attractive. With his buttery brogue, washed-denim eyes and blondish chest hair poking out above his black sweatshirt, he looks like he ought to be occupying a daytime-television sofa.

What is it that drives him instead to risk life and limb? It isn't the money (though there's quite a lot of it: he's just signed with Channel 5 to be its resident investigative reporter on a three-year, £300,000 deal, and then there's the freelance contract with the BBC, reportedly worth half a million, on top). It's his own childhood experiences of violence and abuse at school that make it impossible for him to walk on by.

Brought up in a small town near Dublin (he won't say which as relations still live there), he and his non-identical twin brother Des were sent to the local primary school, a latter-day Dotheboys Hall, run by the Catholic church, and employing a form teacher known to the whole community as 'Butcher'. 'He was 6ft 2in and had hands like shovels,' Donal recalls. Those hands would regularly cane, strap and punch his six-year-old pupils; a boy who stammered had his jaw forced open and a duster stuffed into his mouth; another child was punched so hard that his eardrum broke; a third was locked in a drawer and forgotten about. (He was rescued when his parents came to search for him that evening.)

'I still remember watching the kids when they were made to write their name on the board for the first time. They were so terrified you could hear the chalk going rat-tat-tat on the blackboard because they couldn't stop their hands shaking.'

Hardest to cope with for Donal was not being hit himself but watching assaults on his twin. He will never forget the beating Des received when he sneezed while practising his handwriting and his pen skidded over the page. 'He was punched, thrown across the room, slapped and then made to stand outside for four hours. The impact has never left me. It is the most difficult thing I have ever had to endure. When you have a twin, they are the most important person in the world to you - more important than your parents. We had our own telepathy, our own language. To be in that powerless position and watch someone you love being abused is horrific.'

In fact, he and Des had it easier than the other pupils, he says: their mother was an articulate American academic who wasn't afraid to complain about the treatment of her children. 'But I was at school with kids whose fathers had been beaten and terrorised by this same guy, 30 years earlier, and they saw it almost as a rite of passage. And the poorer and less protected you were, the more you were hit.'

So profound was this experience that, on a return visit to his home town five years ago, Donal caught sight of his old form master, now in his nineties, hobbling along, and was literally rooted to the spot with fear. The teacher has since died, much to the regret of several of his pupils who were hoping to stage a private prosecution. Ironically, though, the experience has undoubtedly informed Donal's successful career exposing the abuse of the underdog.

Outside school, his childhood was happy. He was the middle of five children: Darragh, Deirdre, Des and Tadgh, the youngest. His father was a playwright, his mother a teacher. They separated when he was four, but he claims not to have been affected by the split, largely because of his closeness to Des. 'It was harder for my older brother and sister.' But Ireland in the early Seventies was not a good time to be the child of divorced parents; his was the only broken family. 'We used to get abuse from the other kids: "Where's your father? You're a bastard" - that sort of thing.'

His mother, unwilling to accept support from her wealthy relations, took three jobs to support her family and seems to have done admirably. Donal's siblings are all notably successful: Deirdre and Tadgh are psychologists, Des lives in New York where he is the chief investment officer for the city and directs investment strategy for a pension fund of $70 billion, and Darragh is a director and reporter for the BBC.

It's through Darragh that Donal got his foot on the journalistic ladder, taking over his gig covering local football matches for the Irish papers. He became a news reporter in Ireland, then moved to London and became an investigative sports reporter. In 1995, he transferred to World In Action where he had his first taste of working deep undercover. 'It was accidental, there was nothing preordained about it.' An executive came into the office and asked the person with the biggest shoulders to stand up. 'At the time, all the others were women...' Donal found himself whisked to Nottingham where he had to build a new life for himself as a bouncer, getting a flat and a bank account in another name and becoming best mates with a drugs trafficker.

He took up smoking to keep people at arm's length, but someone once touched his body rig by accident, so he had to claim it was a back support; another time, someone spotted the camera lens in his T-shirt, but lost interest when he zipped up his jacket. 'It was an exotic kind of self-assertiveness course,' he says. 'I learnt that it's all about facing people down. You don't have to be brave; you just have to pretend to be brave. Nine times out of ten, the other person will back down.' It's a lesson that has stood him in good stead ever since.

The following year, he was living in a crack house to investigate false marriage scams, his camera equipment stuffed in a pillow to evade detection. And in 1998, he joined the BBC and began his most ambitious project, the MacIntyre Undercover series. He spent 18 months in a series of different identities, juggling four undercover investigations into football hooliganism, abuse in a Kent care home, international fraud and the modelling industry all at once. He only had 11 days' holiday during that period, even spending Christmas Day working shifts at the care home, after flying back from Milan where he'd been posing as a wealthy fashion photographer.

How did he keep his identities separate? He tried not to camp up his performances, relying on changes of clothes and car and, of course, that tattoo, to establish his identity. 'I'm a crap actor,' he says. 'The good thing about an Irish accent is it's hard to place.'

It must have helped, too, that Donal comes across as just a little bit blank: he is affable and chatty, but the real man remains elusive. One can't help but wonder if it's a result of his traumatic childhood, that facility to hide what he's feeling behind an impassive mask.

Of course, there were slips; most notably when a hooligan he'd befriended asked him what he'd been doing, and he was so tired he answered 'filming', covering his slip with a series of expletives beginning with the same letter.

The BBC series MacIntyre Undercover was a huge hit, resulting in the successful prosecution of two Chelsea Headhunter 'generals' and the closing of several Kent care homes. It earned him brickbats as well as praise, notably from Elite modelling agency which sued the BBC for libel (they settled out of court); and Kent police, who claimed his film was misleading. MacIntyre, who had the support of Mencap, then sued the police for libel and, last October, won around half a million and an unreserved apology. Next month, he's running two marathons, in London and Boston, within a week of each other in aid of the charity.

Although he has been vindicated, he's giving up deep undercover work. Partly because he's too well known, 'and it was very oppressive'. It took him a full year to recover his equilibrium, which he spent partly in a safe house, partly at Oxford University where he won a Reuters Fellowship, a scheme for journalists to take time out to examine their own profession. He adopted yet another persona, that of the mature student, grew a beard, swapped his hooligan's four-by-four for a bicycle and lived in student digs 'with a fridge covered in notes saying, "Who took my cheese?"

'I was there for two terms and the only person who recognised me was a tramp selling The Big Issue,' he laughs. 'Nobody in that academic world watches television.'

The interesting question is why, having spent 18 months pretending to be four other people, he would 'relax' by adopting a fifth persona. Doesn't he ever want to get his own life back? Apparently not. Since then, he's continued to explore his macho side, first with another, less well-received series MacIntyre Investigates, in which he set out to be mugged on film (and succeeded); then with a thrill-seeking project on weather for the BBC which saw him strapped in a wind tunnel experiencing 136mph winds, jogging through the Sahara and canoeing over a waterfall in Norway (a stunt that had him writing his will the night before).

His latest projects are equally gung-ho: a new series of MacIntyre Investigates has Donal chasing gorilla poachers, while he's investigating credit-card fraud for Channel 5.

Is he an adrenaline junkie? Well, partly, perhaps. But he also famously drives an ancient Volvo and thinks the wisest thing he's ever done is put money into a pension fund. And his next BBC project, on foundlings, explores his sensitive side, focusing on Baby William, dumped in a binliner on an allotment in Oxford last year, and David, who was abandoned in Ireland in 1962 and still hopes to find his mother. 'It's such an extraordinarily Victorian crime, to abandon a child,' Donal reflects. 'It runs so counter to what nature tells us. My mother is an extraordinary woman who brought up five children and had extraordinary reserves of energy and tolerance, and the contribution that she made to our lives was enormous. I suppose I wanted to find out what life is like without that kind of input.'

It's only when the conversation turns to the present day that the easy charm falters and the chat dries up; he refuses to discuss his love life, using the pretext that he doesn't want his girlfriend to be targeted by the sort of thugs who assaulted him on the phone. Eventually, he confesses reluctantly that she works in TV. Would he like children himself? He nods mutely, but looks horrified.

It all leaves one with an unexpected sense of pathos. Could it be that Donal's eagerness to experience the lives of others has made him lose sight of living his own? Or is it just that the man who made MacIntyre Undercover prefers to keep his own existence firmly under wraps.

MacIntyre Investigates: Foundlings is on BBC1 on 31 March at 10.35pm. Credit Card Cloning is on Channel 5 on 16 April at 9pm

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