Mark McFadden (born 1965, Derry, Northern Ireland) is a former broadcaster and journalist with ITV News. He was based in Northern Ireland where he fronted broadcasts for UTV.
For three decades he was the North West correspondent for UTV Live, the flagship early evening news programme on the ITV regional channel.
McFadden was born in Derry in 1965. He is a former pupil of St. Columb's College – a school that boasts Nobel prize-winners Seamus Heaney and John Hume among its alumni. After St. Columb's he studied English and French at Queen's University, Belfast.
His career in journalism began in 1988 with the Derry Journal, the second oldest English-language newspaper in the world.
During six years at the Journal he worked in news, features and sports. He also contributed news and sports reports to London broadsheet newspapers The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.
In April 1994, McFadden joined the UTV Live team becoming the face of UTV in the North West of Ulster. He worked mainly on hard news reports – covering politics, serious crime, terrorism, the economy, etc. However, he also produces a wide range of material for the sports and features departments.
McFadden was UTV's correspondent throughout the entire course of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. This Tribunal of Inquiry was chaired by Lord Saville of Newdigate, and it sat at the Guildhall in Derry and Methodist Central Hall in London. It was the longest and most expensive Inquiry in UK legal history. McFadden was the only television journalist to cover the Bloody Sunday Inquiry from its inception in 1998 to its conclusion in June 2010 when Lord Saville's final report was published. [1]
In April 2011 he was one of UTV's analysts for Queen Elizabeth II's historic state visit to the Republic of Ireland, broadcasting from Dublin Castle and Croke Park. McFadden has also presented 12 series of "Rare Breed" for UTV, examining the multi-billion pound agriculture industry in Ireland. The programme has been picked up by international broadcasters including Netflix.
He was primarily based in UTV's studio in Derry, but also reported across Britain and Ireland.
McFadden has won a number of prestigious journalism awards at regional, national and international levels. In April 2011, he picked up two top prizes at the New York Festival's World Film & Television Awards. He won the World Gold Medal for journalism in recognition of his coverage of Lord Saville's inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings, and he scooped the World Silver Medal for his 2010 UTV documentary 'Insight: Bloody Justice' which examined Bloody Sunday and the Saville Inquiry.
'Bloody Justice' was also winner of the News & Current Affairs Programme of the Year prize at the 2011 Institute of Public Relations media awards. The Chairman of the Judges at the IPR Awards said: "I thought I knew all about Bloody Sunday until I watched 'Bloody Justice'. The sequence re-enacting the individual killings was gripping, evocative and startling. Each part of the current affairs machine purred powerfully through this splendid offering."
McFadden has since become a jury member for the World Film and TV Awards.
He retired from ITV and UTV in April 2024, marking the end of a 36 year career in the media.
Bloody Sunday, or the Bogside Massacre, was a massacre on 30 January 1972 when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. Thirteen men were killed outright and the death of another man four months later was attributed to gunshot injuries from the incident. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and some were shot while trying to help the wounded. Other protesters were injured by shrapnel, rubber bullets, or batons, two were run down by British Army vehicles, and some were beaten. All of those shot were Catholics. The march had been organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) to protest against internment without trial. The soldiers were from the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, the same battalion implicated in the Ballymurphy massacre several months before.
The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize was created in 1977, in memory of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, British Ambassador to Ireland, who was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1976.
Mark Oliver Saville, Baron Saville of Newdigate, is a British judge and former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
John Passmore Widgery, Baron Widgery, was an English judge who served as Lord Chief Justice of England from 1971 to 1980. He is principally noted for presiding over the Widgery Tribunal on the events of Bloody Sunday.
ITV News is the branding of news programmes on the British news television channel of ITV. ITV has a long tradition of television news. Independent Television News (ITN) was founded to provide news bulletins for the network in 1955, and has since continued to produce all news programmes on ITV. The channel's news coverage has won awards from the Royal Television Society, Emmy Awards and BAFTAs. Between 2004 and 2008, the ITV Evening News held the title of "RTS News Programme of the Year". The flagship ITV News at Ten has won numerous BAFTA awards, and also being named "RTS News Programme of the Year" in 2011, 2015, 2021 and 2022.
St Columb's College is a Roman Catholic boys' grammar school in Derry, Northern Ireland. Since 2008, it has been a specialist school in mathematics. It is named after Saint Columba, the missionary monk from County Donegal who founded a monastery in the area. The college was originally built to educate young men into the priesthood, but now educates boys in a variety of disciplines.
The Bloody Sunday Inquiry, also known as the Saville Inquiry or the Saville Report after its chairman, Lord Saville of Newdigate, was established in 1998 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair after campaigns for a second inquiry by families of those killed and injured in Derry on Bloody Sunday during the peak of The Troubles. It was published on 15 June 2010. The inquiry was set up to establish a definitive version of the events of Sunday 30 January 1972, superseding the tribunal set up under Lord Widgery that had reported on 19 April 1972, 11 weeks after the events, and to resolve the accusations of a whitewash that had surrounded it.
Eamonn McCann is an Irish political activist, former politician and journalist from Derry, Northern Ireland. McCann was a People Before Profit (PBP) Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Foyle from 2016 to 2017. In 2019, he was elected to Derry City and Strabane District Council, remaining in the position until his resignation for health reasons in March 2021.
Edward Kevin Daly was an Irish Roman Catholic priest and author. He served as the Bishop of Derry from 1974 to 1993. Daly took part in several civil rights marches and events during the Troubles. He came to wider attention during Bloody Sunday in January 1972, waving a blood-stained white handkerchief as he escorted a group carrying a mortally wounded protester after British troops opened fire on demonstrators.
UTV Live is a Northern Irish television news service broadcast and produced by UTV.
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Jane Loughrey is a journalist, originally from north Belfast. She has worked for UTV Television in Ulster between 1992 and 2021 and is a principal journalist for UTV Live. She graduated from Queen's University Belfast and then studied journalism in England. In 2013, she was awarded the Gold prize in the category "feature of the year" from the ITV Regions and Nations News Awards in London, for her program about the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Bloody Friday bombings. In 2015, Loughrey was honored as the year's best television journalist at the Northern Ireland Media Awards ceremony of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. In 2018, she was one of the 68 journalists selected to relate their personal memories of The Troubles in the book by Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, Reporting the Troubles: Journalists Tell Their Stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict published by Blackstaff Press. Academic analyses of the events have tried to place them in context of politics and paramilitary organizations, but have sanitized the human cost, which reporters' first-hand accounts make evident.
Gerard V. Donaghy, sometimes transcribed as Gerald Donaghey, was a native of the Bogside, Derry who was killed by members of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday in Derry, Northern Ireland.
Toby Harnden is a British-American author and journalist who was awarded the Orwell Prize for Books in 2012. He is the author of First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11, published by Little, Brown in September, 2021. He spent almost 25 years working for British newspapers, mainly as a foreign correspondent. From 2013 until 2018, he was Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times. He previously spent 17 years at The Daily Telegraph, based in London, Belfast, Washington, Jerusalem and Baghdad, finishing as US Editor from 2006 to 2011. The book's title is a reference to paramilitary officer Johnny Micheal Spann, a member of the CIA's Team Alpha, whose eight members became the first Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks of 2001. He is the author of two previous books: Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh (1999) and Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain's War in Afghanistan (2011). He was reporter and presenter of the BBC Panorama Special programme Broken by Battle about suicide and PTSD among British soldiers, broadcast in 2013.
Colonel Derek Wilford OBE was a British Army officer who commanded the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment.
Margo Harkin is an Irish filmmaker. Best known for the drama Hush-a-Bye Baby and the documentary Bloody Sunday: A Derry Diary, Harkin produced the surfing documentary Waveriders in 2008.
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