Cathal O'Shannon (TV presenter)  Cathal O'Shannon (23 August 1928 – 22 October 2011) was an Irish journalist and television presenter. He was a reporter with "The Irish Times", and television reporter/presenter and documentary film maker with RTÉ. He was awarded lifetime membership of the Irish Film & Television Academy in 2010, to which he said it was "particularly gratifying that it occurs before I pop my clogs". The Irish radio and television broadcaster Terry Wogan described O'Shannon as possibly the greatest Irish television journalist of the 20th Century. O'Shannon was born in Marino, Dublin, Ireland, on 23 August 1928, the son of Cathal O'Shannon (Sr.), a Socialist and Irish Republican. He received his formal education at Colaiste Mhuire School, in Parnell Square, Dublin. Despite his father's politics, as a 16-year-old O'Shannon volunteered for war time service with the Royal Air Force in Belfast in 1945 during World War 2, utilizing a forged birth certificate to disguise being underage for enlistment with the British Armed Forces. After air crew training he was posted to the Far East, as a rear gunner in an Avro Lancaster bomber to take part in the Burma Campaign, but the war ended with the downfall of the Japanese Empire before he was required to fly combat sorties. O'Shannon first became a journalist with "The Irish Times" on leaving the R.A.F. in 1947. Later he joined the Irish state broadcasting service Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). In July 1972 he recorded a notable television interview with 31 year old Muhammad Ali, when Ali was in Dublin to compete at Croke Park in a bout with Alvin Lewis. He received a Jacob's Award for his 1976 TV documentary, "Even the Olives are Bleeding", which detailed with the activities of the "Connolly Column" in the Spanish Civil War. Two years later he was honoured with a second Jacob's Award for his television biography 'Emmet Dalton Remembers' (1978). In 1978, he left RTÉ to join Canadian company Alcan which was setting up an aluminium plant at Aughinish, County Limerick in 1978. He was head-hunted to become its Director of Public Affairs, an important post at a time when there were environmental concerns about the effects of aluminium production. He admitted that he was attracted by the salary, “five times what RTÉ were paying me”, but he also later said that one of the reason for the move was that he had become unhappy with working at RTÉ, stating in an interview that: “The real reason I got out of RTÉ was that they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do journalistically.”