Richard Downes is a Prime Time reporter. Newly returned from a three-year assignment as Washington Correspondent, Richard joined RTÉ in 1999 after a decade of working as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in war zones and developing countries. During his time at RTÉ, he has spent time presenting Morning Ireland on RTE Radio 1 and working as a correspondent in the Middle East and Africa. Richard was born in Dublin and left to pursue a journalism career in London during the 1980s. He is married with two children and lives on the northside of Dublin. He has written two books, one a financial textbook (Japanese Equity Warrants, 1987)  and the other a memoir of life in Iraq, called, In Search of Iraq, published in Ireland and the U.S. in 2007.