‘Millionaire’ contestant returns for second chance

By Stephen McKinley

After claiming he was unfairly knocked out of the Irish version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," a contestant has confirmed that he will return to the show for another round.

But tough negotiations could lie ahead as Shane O’Doherty, 44, said he wanted to be reinstated at the £125,000 mark, rather than start at zero again.

The Knocklyon, Dublin, businessman was asked "Where in the body is the lunula located — the heart, fingernail, eye or ear?" by quiz show host Gay Byrne. Using the last of his opportunities to get help with a question, O’Doherty phoned a friend, who was a science teacher. The friend told O’Doherty that the answer was in the heart, and he gave this as his final answer.

But Byrne rejected the answer as wrong, saying that a lunula is found in the fingernail. As a result, O’Doherty lost £93,000, and has threatened to sue RTE, because, he said, several medical textbooks that he later consulted, showed that the lunula could be in the heart.

Tyrone Productions, the company that makes the show for RTE, said that the answers to questions are checked, and have to be backed up by at least four authoratitive sources. They said that the New Oxford Dictionary, Britannica.com, the Dictionary of Medicine and the Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology, all place the lunula in the fingernail — it is the small, almost-white crescent shape at the base of human fingernails.

With Tyrone Productions insisting that fingernail is the only answer, and O’Doherty saying that either the heart or the fingernail could be correct, RTE offered him the chance to return.

He told reporters that he did not want to come back as "a pariah back to haunt them. I want everything to be conducted with an even hand, free, fair and with a sense of fun." Tyrone Productions have also acted magnanimously, and issued a statement wishing O’Doherty "the best of luck."

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "lunula" as "a crescent-shaped body part or marking, as the whitish mark at the base of a fingernail."

The Knocklyon contestant said his case had popular support. "I got this far because of the will of the people. I believe it’s the will of the people that I go back in the chair," he said.