Donal O’Keeffe is a news reporter with national newspaper the Irish Examiner and local Cork daily The Echo. He describes himself as a latecomer to journalism. One of his first stories was that of Ireland’s mother and baby homes, where thousands of girls and women were imprisoned for the sin of pregnancy outside of wedlock. Those institutions, run by the Catholic Church and the Irish State, operated between 1922 and 1998. A 2014 email from one survivor of the Bessborough institution in his native Cork, the largest in Ireland, sparked a long-standing interest in what was long a taboo subject in Irish life. Donal has won in the Local Ireland Media Awards in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026, and he has been nominated for a Shine Mental Health Media award and a Justice Media award.