My friend Henry McDonald died a year ago today

The self-styled "punk journo" was an essential chronicler of the maddest and baddest of the Northern Ireland conflict, but never succumbed to self-importance

In July 1976, after the assassination of the British ambassador to Ireland by the Provisional IRA, Seamus Costello, the founder of the Irish National Liberation Army and its political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, told his comrades of his fear of a crackdown on republicans by the Dublin government in the form of internment without trial, the policy that had seen hundreds of young nationalist men locked up in the north.

Internment never came. But where Costello, very much the brains of the operation, saw trouble ahead, his colleagues saw an opportunity. If, they speculated, they could carry out an atrocity that did trigger an authoritarian move by the government, surely their victim status would galvanise support among the ordinary people of the south. 

They set out a plan to assassinate the new ambassador at a Remembrance Day Service at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. The INLA got as far as planting an explosive device in the prayer stool upon which the diplomat, Sir Robin Haydon, would kneel. 

The only thing that saved Haydon was the INLA men’s miscalculation about the power of the remote control detonator to penetrate the thick walls of the mediaeval cathedral.

This incident is recounted in INLA: Deadly Divisions - the 1995 book by Henry McDonald and Jack Holland. It is preposterous, but in a book that charts the chaotic rise and fall of the INLA, it is one of the milder anecdotes. A few years after the failed cathedral plot, the INLA managed to assassinate the MP Airey Neave, who had been Margaret Thatcher’s campaign manager in the race for leadership of the Conservatives, and was set to become a hardline Northern Ireland Secretary. A few years after that, INLA men were chiselling the fingertips off a kidnapped dentist and sending them in the post with ransom demands. In between, there was an extraordinary amount of fratricidal bloodletting.

The book is riddled with the feuds, arguments and sadistic violence that made the INLA simultaneously repulsive, intriguing and comic. Their attempt to fuse old style Irish republicanism with the high-stakes spectaculars of new-left paramilitaries and national liberation movements of Europe and beyond brought a macabre edge to an already horrifying conflict. 

A conflict chronicled brilliantly by Henry, who served, variously, for the BBC, the Observer, the Guardian and the News Letter over the course of his career.

McDonald, a friend of mine, died a year ago -19 February 2023. Deadly Divisions is a masterpiece - one of the finest books written on the Troubles and terrorism more broadly, and should be compulsory reading for anyone with an inclination to romanticise the brutality of the 70s and 80s - no matter from what perspective.

The dark heart of the Troubles was a theme that ran through Henry’s work, right up to his novel Two Souls, which charts the protagonist’s descent from teenage romantic disappointment to republican feuding, echoing the quasi-Marxist language and justifications reported in Deadly Divisions. While he had a keen, almost tabloid, sense of the theatrical absurdity of the protagonists of the conflict, he nonetheless had a much undervalued trait in any reporter or analyst - he understood that these people really did believe their own rhetoric (think how much time has been wasted in the past decade trying to interpret what Donald Trump, or Vladlimir Putin, or Nigel Farage, or the Ayatollah Khameini, or the Israeli far right, or indeed Hamas really want, even as they repeatedly and openly tell us).

In 2009, after a spate of dissident attacks on security services, Henry interviewed Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the veteran IRA man and intellectual wellspring of the side of republicanism that clung for dear life to its guns.

At a time when everyone’s instinct was to describe terrorism as “senseless” and by implication, unfathomable, Henry’s instinct was to seek out the rationale. O’Bradaigh spouted the same lines he always had and always would, but it struck one at the time, and still does now, as an important interview, particularly for a London-based liberal newspaper such as the Observer, the readership of which would not have been acquainted with the finer points of Irish republican factionalism, or underwood why the acronyms and historical references mattered to these people. 

The piece was powerful because it is written with the attitude that characterised all of Henry’s journalism: he was healthily sceptical of everything and everyone (editors and executives in particular), but at the same time, he took people seriously. So much of commentary on politics and ideology - particularly in the North, is based on the idea that rhetoric is just that; That ideological statements are really just manoeuvres. Henry understood that, no matter how ludicrous or overblown the words, more often than not, the orators and rabble rousers were serious people, and their utterances should be examined.

This was not a trait that won Henry friends in the political classes. The leadership of Provisional Sinn Féin in particular were irked by Henry’s book Gunsmoke And Mirrors, which put forward the thesis that any claim by Sinn Fein that the Belfast Agreement represented a “victory” for republicanism should be rejected: their entire existence had not seen them advance the cause of Irish unification one inch beyond where it would have been had a peaceful path been followed. You can see why this might irk Gerry Adams and his successors - among Northern Ireland’s political class, Sinn Féin was notable silent as tributes poured in after Henry’s death.

Henry was not without his own baggage; no one is. His youth in the Official-IRA dominated Markets area of Belfast gave him a certain perspective; indeed, he travelled to East Germany in the early 80s as part of a delegation of the youth wing of the Workers Party, the Officials’ political wing.

But if there is a hallmark of the former “Stickie”, it is contrarianism. While Henry was not a controversialist, he was someone who found consensus uncomfortable - again, a healthy trait in a reporter. He found the idea that Brexit would empower dissident republicans simplistic, not least because, as he saw it, no one ever took into account how a reversal of Brexit would empower loyalist terror. And he retained a punkish suspicion of anyone claiming to speak from a position of intellectual or moral authority - which is not to say he was anti-intellectual or amoral; far from it.

And he was not a cynic. Too often hacks mistake performative world-weariness for sophistication. Henry had great passions, for music, for reading, for sport - no one who supports Everton and Cliftonville, or Antrim hurling, could be called anything but a hopeless romantic. I recall once meeting him for one of the frequent post work drinks we had when he had moved to London to become a general news reporter for the Guardian, where he excitedly, and in enormous detail, told me about the Subbuteo conference he’d been to write up. He loved ideas, while retaining a keen nose for bullshit - or, more accurately, for bullshitters. He was not especially concerned with status; his love of journalism stemmed from a love of meeting people and hearing and telling stories. He was uncomfortable with any aspect of the job that took him away from that (the great irony of journalism, as with so many jobs, is that ascending the career hierarchy often pulls people away from the things that drew them to it in the first place.)

Henry’s life was cut stupidly short, and his death, according to his partner, the medical philosopher Charlotte Blease, was made needlessly by the kind of bureaucracy and secrecy he had spent his journalistic life challenging.

As Charlotte wrote, “Henry was intensely trusted as a journalist in our troubled corner of the world, because he stood up for justice and the facts, and didn’t underestimate his readers. He never caved into tribalism or romancing about the past.”

One year on from his death, his work, and his approach, stand as models for anyone who aspires to create journalism of value.