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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 for about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it 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 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. The USC 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.
Patrick Joseph Devlin was an Irish socialist, labour and civil rights activist and writer from Belfast. He was a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), a 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.
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.
Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR) is a non-governmental organisation founded in 1998 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Based in Markethill, it describes itself as a "non-sectarian, non-political organisation" that works "in the interests of the innocent victims of terrorism in South Armagh."
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.
Brendan Hughes was a leading Irish republican and former Officer Commanding (OC) of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Also known as 'The Dark', and 'Darkie', he was the leader of the 1980 Irish hunger strike.
Jonathan Eric Bardon, was an Irish historian and author.
The city of Derry, Northern Ireland, was severely affected by the Troubles. The conflict is widely considered to have begun in the city, with many regarding the Battle of the Bogside in 1969 as the beginning of the Troubles. The Bloody Sunday incident of 1972 occurred in Derry, in the Bogside area.
Henry Patrick McDonald was a Northern Irish journalist and author. He was a correspondent for The Guardian and Observer, and from 2021 was the political editor of The News Letter, one of Northern Ireland's national daily newspapers, based in Belfast.
UVF Mid-Ulster Brigade formed part of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force in Northern Ireland. The brigade was established in Lurgan, County Armagh in 1972 by its first commander Billy Hanna. The unit operated mainly around the Lurgan and Portadown areas. Subsequent leaders of the brigade were Robin Jackson, known as "The Jackal", and Billy Wright. The Mid-Ulster Brigade carried out many attacks, mainly in Northern Ireland, especially in the South Armagh area, but it also extended its operational reach into the Republic of Ireland. Two of the most notorious attacks in the history of the Troubles were carried out by the Mid-Ulster Brigade: the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the Miami Showband killings in 1975. Members of the Mid-Ulster Brigade were part of the Glenanne gang which the Pat Finucane Centre has since linked to at least 87 lethal attacks in the 1970s.
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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 off-duty 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 World War I 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 Seanad Éireann, 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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