His father, Daniel O'Donoghue, was also born in Manchester, to Irish parents, and was a railway company clerk in the city.
Daniel O'Donoghue encouraged his son to study history and literature and spend time in Manchester City Art Gallery.
[4] He later gained an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1982 and was appointed to be artist-in-residence at the Drax power station near Selby in Yorkshire in 1983.
In 2008 his series of paintings Lost Histories; Imagined Realities, was shown at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands, and The Geometry of Paths, at the James Hyman Gallery, London.
[16] In 2013, he designed a stained glass window for Westminster Abbey to mark the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
[21] In this series, O'Donoghue also demonstrated a characteristic trait in his work of juxtaposing seemingly unrelated ideas, in this case combining his father's wartime experience and the RAF training manual on one side with the destruction during the Second World War of a painting by Vincent van Gogh called The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.
[22] As this indicates, O'Donoghue uses specific narratives as motivations to make his work, and this allows him to explore 'ideas of place and identity in relation to historical and personal meaning'.