Henry McDonald was a journalist and novelist from Northern Ireland. He was born around 1965 and passed away on February 19, 2023. He worked as a correspondent for The Guardian and Observer[1, and beginning in the year 2021, he served as the political editor of The News Letter, which is one of the national daily newspapers published in Northern Ireland and is situated in Belfast.

McDonald wrote extensively on the subject of the Troubles and topics connected to it. He went to St. Malachy’s College and was born in the Irish nationalist Markets neighborhood of South Belfast in Northern Ireland. McDonald was a member of the Workers’ Party in the past, which was a left-wing political organization that originated from Sinn Féin in the early 1970s and had ties to the Official Irish Republican Army (IRA). In the early 1980s, he was a member of the SFWP’s youth wing and went on a trip to the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. [2]

The Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and the Irish National Liberation Army were only two of the Northern Ireland paramilitary organizations that were frequently the subject of his writing (INLA). He and Jack Holland, who has since passed away, collaborated on the writing of a book titled INLA: Deadly Divisions, which is a history of the INLA. The first edition of the book was released in 1994, and it has since been reprinted and brought up to date.

In addition to writing about Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups, McDonald co-authored books with Jim Cusack on the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). In addition, he penned a history of David Trimble, the head of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), as well as his own autobiography, entitled Colours: Ireland – From Bombs to Boom, and, in 2017, he wrote Martin McGuinness: A Life Remembered.

He worked for the BBC in Belfast for a while as a security correspondent during that time. He worked as a staff reporter for the Belfast daily The Irish News throughout the 1990s, when he was also the editor of the youth pages.

It wasn’t until 2017 that he published his debut novel, titled The Swinging Detective.

Two Souls, his second novel, was published by Merrion Press and made its debut in September of 2019.

McDonald only spent a short time at Edinburgh University before transferring to University College Dublin to complete his degree.

McDonald was a fan of both Cliftonville Football Club and Everton Football Club. As a result of his marriage, he had two daughters and one son. In addition, he was in a relationship with the author June Caldwell for a period of twelve years. During this time, he spent a portion of it living in Dublin, where he was a professor at the Dublin Business School and the Irish Writers Centre, where he taught journalism and feature writing.

On February 19, 2023, at the age of 57, McDonald passed away in Belfast as a result of cancer.