Henry McDonald (writer)

Henry Patrick McDonald (6 July 1965 – 19 February 2023) was a Northern Irish journalist and author. He was a correspondent for The Guardian and Observer, and from 2021 was the political editor of The News Letter, one of Northern Ireland's national daily newspapers, based in Belfast.

Early life

Henry Patrick McDonald was born in a Catholic enclave of central Belfast in 1965, and was a student at St Malachy's College. He briefly attended Edinburgh University before gaining a degree from Queen's University Belfast.

In his youth, McDonald involved in the Workers' Party, a left-wing party that emerged from Sinn Féin in the early 1970s and was associated with the Official IRA. He travelled to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) with the youth wing of SFWP in the early 1980s.

Career

After taking a journalism course at Dublin City University, McDonald began his professional writing career in 1989 at the Belfast newspaper The Irish News. He wrote extensively about the Troubles and related issues, with a particular focus on paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, like the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). He wrote a book on the INLA, INLA – Deadly Divisions, which he co-authored with his cousin, Jack Holland. The book was first published in 1994.

McDonald also wrote on Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups and co-authored books on the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and UDA with Jim Cusack.