Henry McDonald

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (April 2008)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Henry McDonald is a writer and is the Irish Editor for the Observer, the Sunday edition of The Guardian (UK). McDonald has written extensively about The Troubles, its precedents, its consequences, its demographics, etc.

He was born in the nationalist Markets area of Belfast and graduated from St. Malachy's College.

McDonald was formerly involved in the Sinn Fein the Workers Party a left republican party that emerged out of the Official IRA in the early 1970s. He travelled to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) with the youth wing of SFWP around 1980. Much of his writing concerns Northern Irish paramilitaries, like the UDA and the INLA. He has written a book on the Irish National Liberation Army - INLA - Deadly Divisions, which he co-authored with the now deceased Jack Holland. The book was first published in 1994 and has since been re-printed.

More recently, McDonald has written on loyalist paramilitary groups and has co-authored books on the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association with Jim Cusack.

He was, for a period, a security correspondent for the BBC in Belfast and has since criticised the BBC for burying stories which raised doubts about the intentions of the Provisional Republicans in the peace process. In this regard, he specifically cited the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe.^{[citation needed]}

McDonald's journalistic comment tends to be hostile to the Provisional IRA and its political partner and beneficiary, Sinn Féin - especially to the use of force for the achievement of republican aims.

McDonald's critics sometimes attribute this to his political background in the "Official" republican movement, between whom and the "Provisional" republicans there has been bitter and sometimes violent enmity since the early 1970s.^{[citation needed]}