He was a correspondent for The Guardian and Observer,[1] and from 2021 was the political editor of The News Letter, one of Northern Ireland's national daily newspapers, based in Belfast.
Henry Patrick McDonald was born in a Catholic enclave of central Belfast in 1965, and was a student at St Malachy's College.
[2] He travelled to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) with the youth wing of SFWP in the early 1980s.
[3] After taking a journalism course at Dublin City University, McDonald began his professional writing career in 1989 at the Belfast newspaper The Irish News.
[2] 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).