Henry McDonald: Lively writing explored the Troubles with empathy and fascination
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In 1999, a death threat was made against the then Observer (and later also Guardian) Ireland correspondent Henry McDonald. In a typically upbeat description, Henry recalled “slaloming my way through a human obstacle course in the semi-dark cavernous innards of Madrid-Barajas airport” when his mobile phone trilled.
It was the Royal Ulster Constabulary warning him of the threat, which had come from the Red Hand Defenders, a cover name for loyalists opposed to the peace process. They were infuriated he had pointed out that they were breaking the ceasefire to carry out attacks.
It was a call, he later explained in an article for Index on Censorship, that changed his life. He told his then wife and young daughter to leave their Belfast home and stay with his parents. When he returned, CCTV cameras were installed and steel bolts fitted to his front door. A klaxon alarm was put in. It accidentally sounded once, when a fuse blew, waking the entire street.
That was the year after the Good Friday Agreement. Such are the challenges faced by reporters who dig into the paramilitary and criminal underworld in pursuit of the truth.
Henry, the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent from 2007, who has died aged 57 following treatment for cancer, was alert to the dangers of his work, but the personalities and obscure details of the Troubles fascinated him. He was intrigued by those involved – how they rationalised political positions or advocated violent causes.
In a 2010 podcast for the Guardian, he recounted crossing the border to obtain a statement from a dissident group, the Real IRA.
“I was instructed to go into a public toilet,” he explained, “and behind the cistern there would be a thing I had to pick up. I fumbled around and found a surgical glove. Inside was a USB memory stick. I put it into a laptop and there was a detailed statement from the Real IRA’s leadership.”
Henry was born in the Markets area of Belfast, a Catholic enclave in the city centre. It was a stronghold of the Official IRA, which formally declared a ceasefire in 1972 in order to pursue left-wing politics.
His father, Thomas McDonald, was a labourer; his mother, Florence (nee McManus), a dressmaker. In Northern Ireland, geography and religion often dictated destiny but Henry rose above sectarian divisions.
One Friday afternoon he and a childhood friend were playing football on the street when gunmen in a Ford Cortina opened fire on the local pub with a Sterling machine gun. As “seasoned war babies”, he later recalled, their immediate instinct was to dive to the ground. The bullets passed overhead.
A few months later, in 1975, Henry and his father were watching on television when a car bomb exploded outside their house. Both were thrown across the room and showered with broken glass, but suffered no serious injuries. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) were thought to have targeted nearby Mooney’s Bar.
From an early age, Henry enjoyed writing stories. He attended St Malachy’s college grammar school and was one of the first punk rockers in Belfast, relishing the anti-establishment culture that defied tribal politics. He later fronted a punk band called Flea Circus.
He also joined the youth wing of the Workers’ Party (the Marxist movement that developed out of Official Sinn Féin). In the summer of 1981, Henry was sent on a summer work camp to East Germany. He described it as a “carefully controlled but not unpleasant bubble” that soon became a “hive of hedonism and bed-hopping”.
He studied philosophy, initially at Edinburgh University, but then switched to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he finished his degree and edited the student newspaper. He subsequently took a journalism course at Dublin City University and in 1989 became a reporter on the Irish News in Belfast.
Those were his formative years, he later said. “You were talking a funeral, a murder, a shooting, a bombing a day.” He learned “how to go into a house where an awful tragedy had happened only a couple of hours earlier”.
The paper sent him to cover the first Gulf war in 1991 and he travelled to Lebanon, where the Irish army was part of the UN peacekeeping mission, Unifil. That experience led to his first book, Irishbatt: The story of Ireland’s Blue Berets in the Lebanon (1993).
He moved to the Evening Press in Dublin then back to Belfast, where he was security correspondent for the BBC. Authoritative books on paramilitary groups followed: INLA: Deadly Divisions, which he wrote with his cousin Jack Holland, in 1994; UVF: The Endgame (1997), and UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror (2004) were co-authored with Jim Cusack. Henry was an astoundingly fast and lively writer.
As one Belfast friend observed, he had the “rare gift of distancing himself enough to observe and empathise, even with enemies”. The DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, described him as “one of the most knowledgable commentators on Northern Ireland politics”.
His contacts book was legendary; almost everyone – loyalists, republicans, the security forces and politicians – talked to him. He regularly disappeared off to bars to meet contacts, an absence that could exasperate news editors.
In 1997, Henry joined the Observer, and a decade later the Guardian as well. He frequently delivered scoops while also writing biographies of David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist party leader (2000), and Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander and Sinn Féin deputy first minister (2017).
Turning to novels, he produced The Swinging Detective (2017), a political thriller set in Berlin, and Two Souls (2019), a story that combined punks, Belfast street life and his passion for football. A third, Thy Will Be Done, a ghost story spanning the 20th-century experience of Belfast working-class protestants, is with a publisher.
With relatives on both sides of the religious divide, Henry enjoyed exploring Belfast’s convoluted political history. One forebear fought at Ypres, another was chased from his home in a sectarian attack; a grandfather was torpedoed while serving with the Royal Navy.
As the Guardian Ireland correspondent, Owen Bowcott overlapped for several years with Henry in Belfast, and walking with him through the city in which he took such pride invariably involved stopping frequently to talk to people who greeted him.
In 2018, he was asked to work in the Guardian’s London office. Around the same time he was diagnosed with cancer and a heart problem. He left two years later and returned to Belfast, where he worked for the Sunday Times and recently as political editor of the Belfast News Letter.
Henry was always generous with his time in encouraging young journalists starting off in the profession.
Despite surgery Henry remained resilient, writing books and filing stories. An ardent football fan, he followed Cliftonville in Northern Ireland, Hibs in Scotland and Everton in the Premier League.
Earlier this month he tweeted: “What’s going on! Everton beat Arsenal. Cliftonville knock out Coleraine on pens in Irish Cup. Hibs win away. Ireland triumph in Cardiff. The stars aligned to cheer me up today.”
Henry married Claire Breen in 1996 but they later separated. They had three children, Lauren, Ellen and Patrick, who survive him, as does his partner, Charlotte Blease, and his sister, Cathy.
- Henry Patrick McDonald, journalist and author, born 6 July 1965; died 19 February 2023