One-sided story of a polite Dublin bank robber

There are myriad ways to tell a story, and myriad rules around the telling that you can bend or break according to your desires. I’m Not Here to Hurt You, a new Irish Independent podcast by journalist Kevin Doyle, tells a complicated story simply: largely through one man’s voice, and in a chronological fashion. It makes for a vexing sense that there’s more here that could have filled this canvas – even Doyle seems frustrated at times by the constraints on his ability to recount this remarkable tale.

Doyle’s subject is a man once dubbed Dublin’s politest bank robber. In 2004, John O’Hegarty of Ballsbridge was arrested outside the Ulster Bank in Ranelagh, which he had just relieved of almost €2,000. He had entered the bank in disguise, approached a teller, and passed them a note, beginning with the lines: “I’m not here to hurt you.”

O’Hegarty was convicted of robbing more than a dozen banks of nearly €50,000 over a four-year period, and ultimately sentenced to eight years in jail. So how did a bright young man with a master’s from Trinity College Dublin end up in a series of low-grade heists? The answer seems straightforward: a crack cocaine addiction. But the story behind that addiction adds another layer: O’Hegarty also accidentally killed a man.

That accidental death is the focus of the first episode in this five-part series. O’Hegarty, who was working as a bicycle courier, ran into a pedestrian on Baggot Street one day in the course of his work. The man, who appeared fine at the scene, ultimately died in hospital of his injuries. O’Hegarty, publicly pilloried as “the killer courier”, couldn’t handle it: hence the spiral into drug addiction, and the robberies conceived and executed to fund his habit.

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Doyle gets unparalleled access to the man at the centre of this story, granted because its subject had decided it was time to talk. It’s no wonder the journalist’s interest was piqued: This is an appealing yarn of the gentleman criminal ilk, and it’s not every day you get to talk to someone who had the temerity and tenacity to rob bank after bank.

Doyle has to rely on one man’s accounting of his own mistakes and his attempt to take some kind of ownership of a life derailed

It’s all the brazen bank heisting that’s the real hook here: O’Hegarty’s description of his disguise of a beard of his own shavings stuck to his chin, and a hat with a pony tail attached, is almost farcical, and Doyle even gets in on the act, re-enacting a getaway at the scene of the crime in a way that communicates the thrill. But he also presses O’Hegarty on the victims of his crimes, reminding listeners of the trauma of encountering the barrel of a gun at your place of work. (The bank tellers had no way to know the gun they were looking at came from Smyths Toys.)

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It’s clear that Doyle, as a journalist, looked for ways to reach beyond O’Hegarty’s narrative, digging into the details, comparing accounts, and searching for other voices. But no bank teller came forward to recount their experience, no relative of the dead man agreed to talk, and Doyle has to rely on one man’s accounting of his own mistakes and his attempt to take some kind of ownership of a life derailed.

And so Doyle is left with fewer options from which to carve his tale, and instead lets O’Hegarty’s humanity lead. “Listening back, it’s clear that what started as an interview has ended as a conversation,” Doyle remarks at one point. Ultimately, I’m Not Here to Hurt You suffers from having no one else to talk to.