Ben Lowry: We only had Henry McDonald as our political editor for a year but treasured that time

Henry was our political editor for the last year of his life, having joined the News Letter the previous February.

We were delighted to get such an experienced reporter as our political editor, such an important role in our highly political paper.

Henry had left the Guardian in 2020, where he had spent 23 years at the paper or its Sunday sister title, the Observer, mostly as Ireland correspondent.

He told me that he had left that distinguished family of newspapers, which is known within the media world for its good employment terms, because he was concerned that the newspaper industry was facing circulation and financial challenges such that it was best to take advantage of the generous redundancy offer.

That left him free to carry out work for other newspapers such as the Sunday Times, and indeed us. After Sam McBride left as our politics editor in the summer of 2021 I suggested that Henry write a regular column.

His first column was about a brazen INLA display of strength in Londonderry that August, which Henry described as the terror gang’s biggest propaganda coup since it murdered the loyalist Billy Wright in the Maze in 1997. Henry was well placed to make such an observation – he had co authored a book ‘INLA: deadly divisions’.

I first encountered Henry in the late 1990s when I was a journalist in London, returning home to Northern Ireland for big political events such as the Belfast Agreement and the cliffhanger Ulster Unionist Party meetings in which David Trimble sought support to continue with implementing the accord. I remember Henry was asking questions of Mr Trimble, about whom he finished a biography in early 2000.

By then I had returned to Northern Ireland and as a reporter for the Belfast Telegraph Henry was someone I bumped into regularly, and began to chat to when I did. I always cheered up when I saw him, and we could discuss events. I might even have become aware of Henry as a reporter in my last year in school, 1990, because I was reading the local newspapers a lot then, and Henry joined the Irish News the year before, 1989.

He had finished a journalism course in Dublin prior to that first reporting post, after completing a philosophy degree at Queen’s University that he had begun in Edinburgh University. Henry had attended St Malachy’s grammar school, Belfast.

As Ireland correspondent for the Observer, then Guardian, Henry was always on the move around the island. I bumped into him at terror trials in Dublin, at the Queen’s visit to that city in 2011 and at the Easter Rising centenary celebrations in 2016, when he gave me a video quote for this newspaper expressing sadness that unionists had not been present.

Henry’s background was republican, in the Markets area of inner east Belfast, the son of Thomas McDonald, a labourer, and Florence, a dress maker. Henry was living in the Markets when he died, with his sister Cathy.

Like many people of the Official republican tradition that was once dominant in the Markets, Henry became bitterly critical of the Provisional IRA. He seemed ultimately to be almost a sympathiser with unionism, although I never knew or cared what his politics were – despite talking to him extensively about things, particularly after he began to write for us. He had joined the Workers’ Party, which emerged out of Official Sinn Féin, but in his 2021-2022 columns for us he criticised Irish neutrality; he was critical of a plan to allow to police pursuits on either side of the border; he defended street preachers against censorship; he was scathing about extreme woke thinking; he advised unionists to be aware of how the BBC, for all its flaws, might help to cement the Union.

Henry mocked an Alliance Party mayor of Belfast’s claim that unionism was not engaging in a conversation about the future in the way that she said nationalism was doing. Henry, who had worked in the Irish Press in the 1990s, wrote: “As someone who has lived on and off in the Republic in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s,I still see an enduring paradox in the way its citizens view Northern Ireland … The widespread opposition however to cultural and constitutional compromises with northern unionists has not dimmed ...”

In fact, he said, anglophobia had surged since Brexit.

Henry was shaped by his time Lebanon following the Irish army as UN peacekeepers. His first book of many, later including fiction, was in 1993 ‘Irishbatt: The story of Ireland’s Blue Berets in the Lebanon’.

I was not the only author of our pro Israeli editorials when Henry later joined our staff.

His columns were clever, and so varied in content. He wrote about being a punk in the 1970s and about the travails of being a long-time Cliftonville FC supporter, a passion that he shared with his then fellow columnist for this paper, the comedian Tim McGarry. It was not average News Letter material, but we loved it!

Henry seemed so happy with the freedom of those post-Guardian years, when he could work on the stories he wanted to work on, for whichever outlets were interested in publishing them. He was thrilled to have bought an apartment in Spain which he visited in his last summer of 2022 with his beloved partner Charlotte Blease. A few times he suggested that I use the flat, something I hoped to do – one day.

One day. There seemed to be so much time.

Henry was full of ideas from his first day as political editor. I had been figuring out in my head how to fill the not inconsiderable gap caused by Sam’s departure, and it gradually dawned on me, and indeed Henry, that he might be the person. At first he did not want to relinquish his writing freedom, but the idea grew on him.

From the moment Henry took up the post he was a joy to work with. Barely anyone was going into the office in early 2022 and I was concerned that a French work experience student would have nothing to do. But her visit coincided with Henry’s start, and he wanted to be office-based, and took her out on stories.

As political editor Henry did not need to join our evening editorial conference, which finalises the next day’s paper. But he wanted to. And we benefited greatly from it, as he chipped in with thoughts on everything from culture to world affairs, always in good humour. He was only six years older than me but had a crucial extra layer of memory, of the early Troubles. For example he had just turned seven when Bloody Friday happened, and he remembered hearing the IRA bombs going off as he was out with friends on their bicycles, then seeing some of its horrifying aftermath.

Henry did video clips, he did reports, essays, reviews, analysis and he was always keen to interview politicians. His last day in the office was when King Charles visited in September 2022. With hindsight I now realise something wasn’t quite right in those last weeks, a fatigue on his part it seemed.

We miss Henry greatly but treasure the time he was with us.

Henry is survived by Charlotte, Cathy and the children of whom he was so proud, from an earlier marriage to Claire Breen: Lauren, Ellen and Patrick.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor