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Malachi John O'Doherty (born 1951, Muff, County Donegal, Ireland) is a journalist, author and broadcaster in Northern Ireland. He is the producer and presenter of the audio blog Arts Talk.
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O'Doherty was one of the longest running commentators/columnists on any Irish radio programme, having been a regular on Radio Ulster's Talkback from its creation in the mid-1980s until a revamp of the programme in 2009. He provided political and social commentary for BBC NI's Hearts and Minds programme, and was often a frequent reporter for BBC Radio Ulster's Sunday Sequence in the programme's heyday.
His political journalism has been published in many Irish and British newspapers and periodicals, including The Irish Times , The Guardian , The Sunday Times , The Observer , The Scotsman and The New Statesman . In the mid-1990s he worked on and presented several television documentaries on Northern Irish culture and politics, for Channel Four, The BBC and UTV, all of them with independent production companies, chiefly Observer Films, DBA and Chistera. He is a former Managing Editor of Fortnight magazine. He writes for the Guardian's Comment is Free blog.
He writes most frequently now in the Belfast Telegraph where his is often commissioned to write about religion and terrorism. He frequently writes through memoir. He has published four memoirs. One, I Was A Teenage Catholic (2003), deals with the development of his thinking on religious issues and the other, The Telling Year (2007) recounts his work as a young inept journalist in Belfast in the worst year for deaths (1972) of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
He wrote about his father, Barney, in Under His Roof (2009) and more recently a reflection on cycling and ageing in On My Own Two Wheels (2012). He has dabbled in fiction and drama. He wrote comedy sketches for a controversial BBC television cabaret called The Show in the early 1990s and scripted a history of the Dominicans in Ireland for a nationwide schools production in 2007.
O'Doherty has avoided expressions of party-political commitment though he has been more critical of the IRA than of any other party to the conflict, frequently accusing it of having been the prime irritant. But he has supported the Good Friday Agreement, which was endorsed by both the IRA and Loyalist groups and most political parties. He has addressed political groups from across the spectrum, including the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP. He has twice been a keynote speaker at the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland's annual conference. He gave a major speech at the Irish Association's annual conference in 2003 examining the future of nationalism.
O'Doherty appears at literary festivals in Northern Ireland and Scotland (Aspects and Wigtown, for example) and has also read at The Blue Met in Montreal (2004) and the Ottawa International Writer's Festival (2008).
On 16 March 2007, O'Doherty delivered a lecture to the French Society for Irish Studies on the life and thinking of Margaret Noble, a County Tyrone-born Methodist who had taken the name Sister Nivedita, when initiated into the Ramakrishna Mission by her Guru, Swami Vivekananda. In the 1970s for four years he was in India, in the ashram of Swami Paramananda Saraswati. He has written about this in I Was A Teenage Catholic.
O'Doherty was born in 1951 in Muff, County Donegal but raised in West Belfast, Northern Ireland. [2] He trained as a journalist at the College of Business Studies in Belfast and as a mature student in 1990, took a master's degree in Irish Studies from Queen's University, Belfast.
In June 1995 he married poet and broadcaster Maureen Boyle. He is a former Writer in Residence at Queen's University Belfast. He was awarded a PhD by the School of English at QUB in 2012.[ citation needed ]
The Troubles were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it is sometimes described as an "irregular war" or "low-level war". The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Although the Troubles mostly took place in Northern Ireland, at times violence spilled over into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was the police force in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 2001. It was founded on 1 June 1922 as a successor to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) following the partition of Ireland. At its peak the force had around 8,500 officers, with a further 4,500 who were members of the RUC Reserve.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement was a 1985 treaty between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland which aimed to help bring an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The treaty gave the Irish government an advisory role in Northern Ireland's government while confirming that there would be no change in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland unless a majority of its citizens agreed to join the Republic. It also set out conditions for the establishment of a devolved consensus government in the region.
The Ulster Special Constabulary was a quasi-military reserve special constable police force in what would later become Northern Ireland. It was set up in October 1920, shortly before the partition of Ireland. It was an armed corps, organised partially on military lines and called out in times of emergency, such as war or insurgency. It performed this role most notably in the early 1920s during the Irish War of Independence and the 1956-1962 IRA Border Campaign.
Martin Dillon is an Irish author, journalist, and broadcaster. He has won international acclaim for his investigative reporting and non-fiction works on The Troubles, including his bestselling trilogy, The Shankill Butchers, The Dirty War and God and the Gun, about the Northern Ireland conflict. The historian and scholar, Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien, described him as "our Virgil to that Inferno". The Irish Times hailed him as "one of the most creative writers of our time".
The Ulster Constitution Defence Committee (UCDC) was established in Northern Ireland in April 1966. The UCDC was the governing body of the loyalist Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV). The UCDC coordinated parades, counter demonstrations, and paramilitary activities, in order to maintain the status quo of the government, lead a campaign against the reforms of Terence O'Neill, and stymie the civil rights movement.
Patrick Joseph "Paddy" Devlin was an Irish socialist, labour and civil rights activist and writer. He was a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), a former Stormont MP, and a member of the 1974 Power Sharing Executive.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) (Irish: Cumann Cearta Sibhialta Thuaisceart Éireann) was an organisation that campaigned for civil rights in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Formed in Belfast on 9 April 1967, the civil rights campaign attempted to achieve reform by publicising, documenting, and lobbying for an end to discrimination against Catholics in areas such as elections (which were subject to gerrymandering and property requirements), discrimination in employment, in public housing and abuses of the Special Powers Act.
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Ronnie Bunting was a Protestant Irish republican and socialist activist in Ireland. He became a member of the Official IRA in the early 1970s and was a founder-member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in 1974. He became leader of the INLA in 1978 and was assassinated in 1980 aged 32.
During 12–16 August 1969, there was an outbreak of political and sectarian violence throughout Northern Ireland, which is often seen as the beginning of the thirty-year conflict known as the Troubles. There had been sporadic violence throughout the year arising out of the Northern Ireland civil rights campaign, which demanded an end to discrimination against Catholics and Irish nationalists. Civil rights marches had been attacked by Protestant loyalists, and protesters often clashed with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the overwhelmingly Protestant police force.
Burntollet Bridge was the setting for an attack on 4 January 1969 during the first stages of the Troubles of Northern Ireland. A People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was attacked by Ulster loyalists whilst passing through Burntollet.
William Mitchell was a Northern Ireland loyalist, community activist and member of the Progressive Unionist Party. Mitchell was a leading member of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and served a life sentence for his part in a double murder. He later abandoned his UVF membership and took up cross-community work.
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Down Orange Welfare was an Ulster loyalist paramilitary vigilante group active in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Operating in rural areas of County Down, the group faded after failing to win support away from larger groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
The Teebane bombing took place on 17 January 1992 at a rural crossroads between Omagh and Cookstown in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. A roadside bomb destroyed a van carrying 14 construction workers who had been repairing a British Army base in Omagh. Eight of the men were killed and the rest were wounded. Most were civilians, while one of those killed and two of the wounded were British soldiers. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) claimed responsibility, saying the workers were targeted because they were collaborating with the "forces of occupation".
Rosena Brown is an Irish actress of television, cinema, and stage from Belfast, Northern Ireland who also served as an intelligence officer for the Provisional IRA. Dubbed the "IRA Mata Hari", she was named in the murder trial of prison officer John Hanna, who was charged and convicted of helping the IRA kill colleague Brian Armour. She allegedly persuaded Hanna into providing information on Armour which she then passed on to the IRA; however, she was not charged with complicity in Armour's murder. In 1992, she and two men were arrested when a booby-trap bomb was found in their car. In 1993, she was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, but was released in December 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
The Battle at Springmartin was a series of gun battles in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 13–14 May 1972, as part of The Troubles. It involved the British Army, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
Denis Liddell Ireland was an Irish essayist and political activist. A northern Protestant, after service in the First World War he embraced the cause of Irish independence. He also advanced the social credit ideas of C. H. Douglas. In Belfast, his efforts to encourage Protestants in the exploration of Irish identity and interest were set back when in 1942 his Ulster Union Club was found to have been infiltrated by a successful recruiter for the Irish Republican Army. In Dublin, where he argued economic policy had failed to "see independence through," he entered the Seanad Eireann, the Irish Senate, in 1948 for the republican and social-democratic Clann na Poblachta. He was the first member of the Oireachtas, the Irish Parliament, to be resident in Northern Ireland.
Unquiet Graves: The Story of the Glenanne Gang is a 2018 documentary film about The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
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