FERGAL Keane celebrates his 36th birthday on Monday, having achieved in eight years as a BBC correspondent more than many journalists pack into a lifelong career.
His inclusion in the 1,035 name New Year's Honours List - the latest in a string of accolades and awards - testifies to the admiration his foreign despatches have won from the British public.
Keane's OBE is for his services to television journalism, but it is perhaps his radio work which recently has brought him most notoriety.
Anyone with a radio cannot have avoided hearing his moving despatch inspired by the birth 10 months ago of his son, Daniel.
It was originally broadcast on Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent slot last February.
This brutally honest reflection on his own troubled childhood and his fatherhood clearly touched a nerve with listeners. Within minutes of the broadcast ending, the programme's office was inundated with calls for transcripts and copies of the tape.
The piece has been rebroadcast several times on BBC and RTE.
That script, and another memoir to his late actor father, Eamon Keane, have been collated in a book of 43 essays, Letter to Daniel: Despatches From The Heart which is fifth in the top 10 UK paperbacks list.
Keane's deeply personalised reporting style - and the autobiographical and almost confessional style of his broadcasts - have captivated the public as much as it has repelled those who accuse him of mawkishness.
In his introduction to the book, Keane says he was reluctant initially to do a broadcast about Daniel's birth because he knew it would leave him open to criticism inside and outside the BBC from those who believe his personal style is inappropriate for the world of news and current affairs.
This prediction was accurate, but the listeners have had the last say. Former colleagues and friends defend Keane from the charge of being over dramatic. His work is emotional, they say, because he is genuinely touched by events.
"He can't help but cover things with a bit of himself in it. It's a very humane trait," said one editor.
WITHIN the corporation, producers from numerous radio and television programmes vie to commission work from Keane. He is one of the best paid of the BBC's foreign correspondents, with a salary estimated at £75,000.
While professional rivalries are par for the course in the gossipy world of broadcast journalism, Keane's colleagues speak no ill of him.
He is, they say, amusing, charming and sincere - a genuinely nice guy. But he obviously didn't get where he is in the highly competitive field of foreign correspondence without being able to fight his own corner. Close friends say he knows how to negotiate office politics and is conscious that a little bit of plamas can go a long way.
Fergal Patrick Keane was born in London in 1961, the eldest of three children. His mother, Maura Hassett, was a language teacher in Cork and is well known on the literary scene there. He is the nephew of playwright John B. Keane, from whom many say he inherits his writing flair.
Keane attended primary school in Dublin and secondary school in Cork. He has written of the many happy childhood summers he spent at the ivy covered home of his maternal grandmother, May, in Turners Cross outside Cork city. These summers were a respite from his home environment which was constantly disrupted by his father's alcoholic binges.
Keane's father died from a heart attack in 1993 in north Kerry where he was born, his wife having separated permanently from him in 1970. Keane has acknowledged that his fragile childhood left him with an insecurity which drove him to "make something" of himself. His father's alcoholism has also left him with a wary attitude to drink. A few glasses of wine or a few pints are his maximum.
Keane began his journalistic career in 1979 with a job in the Limerick Leader, a start which he has acknowledged was "greatly facilitated" by his uncle John B, a columnist on the paper.
The paper's editor, Brendan Halligan, remembers Keane as a shy and slightly nervous 18 year old with a flair for writing who proved to be "as brave as a lion" in tackling stories.
Keane always dreamed of working in television and being a foreign correspondent. His determination to achieve this is evidenced by the directness of his career path from Limerick to the Irish Press, RTE and the BBC.
At the Irish Press he met Clare born Anne Flaherty, whom he later married. A talented journalist whose own career has been curtailed by the demands of her husband's, Anne gas worked freelance for the past few years.
From the Irish Press, Keane moved to RTE, working in the Dublin and Belfast newsrooms from 1984 to 1989. "He was always brilliant," says one former editor. "He was heads better than anyone else. We knew we were looking at someone whom RTE was never going to hold on to."
Keane joined the BBC in 1989. According to a former colleague, he was originally interviewed for a job as a regional journalist with BBC Northern Ireland but he shone so much in his interview that he was appointed Northern Ireland correspondent for the network service.
While this anecdote sounds apocryphal, Keane so impressed his BBC bosses that within a year, he was appointed South Africa Correspondent. This posting was a homecoming for Keane who had been deeply interested in South Africa since, aged 12, his mother gave him a copy of Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country.
For the next four years, he covered the township unrest in South Africa, the first multiracial elections following the end of apartheid and the civil war in Rwanda. He has written two books on South Africa, The Bondage of Fear and Season of Blood, which won the 1995 Orwell Prize.
Keane's voracious appetite for work has kept him constantly on the move around Asia since he was posted to Hong Kong in 1995. His perfectionism and professionalism at work contrast sharply with his almost legendary dishevelment when it comes to personal arrangements.
Friends and colleagues are full of tales about his lack of punctuality for social appointments. He left a bag of baby clothes in the BBC offices in London for about six months. "If Daniel gets any more famous, we'll be putting them on a barrow and flogging them," says From Our Own Correspondent producer Tony Grant.
Keane has often spoken about his indebtedness to his wife's personal and professional support. He said in a recent interview with the Examiner that he was "working on" his promise to Anne that he would work in safer lands.
A talented singer, guitarist and song writer, Keane has played in bands with other journalists since his Limerick days. He enjoys fishing and owns a cottage in Ardmore, Co Waterford.
HE is passionate about reading, particularly fiction and poetry and has completed about half a collection of poems. He has spent the past six months on sabbatical in a rented house in Fountainstown, Co Cork. He took the time off to be with his family and work on his first novel, which is set in Africa.
He restarts work on Monday on a Panorama documentary, Return to Rwanda, which will be broadcast next month. Then he will return to Hong Kong and report on its handover to China in July. If the Asia job is Keane's last posting as a day to day reporter, few will be surprised. Friends say his novel is "fantastically important" to him and that he has ambitions to focus on a writing career supplemented by occasional journalistic projects.
The OBE award only adds to the nervousness of Keane's BBC bosses who are well aware that a journalist who becomes a personality is hard to hold on to.