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Henry McDonald is a writer and is the Irish editor for The Observer, the sister paper of The Guardian.

McDonald has written extensively about The Troubles, its precedents, its consequences, its demographics, and such. He was born in the nationalist Markets area of Belfast and attended St. Malachy's College. McDonald was formerly involved in the Sinn Féin the Workers Party a left republican party that emerged out of the Official IRA in the early 1970s. He travelled to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) with the youth wing of SFWP around 1980. Much of his writing concerns Northern Irish paramilitaries, like the UDA and the INLA. He has written a book on the Irish National Liberation Army - INLA - Deadly Divisions, which he co-authored with the now deceased Jack Holland. The book was first published in 1994 and has since been re-printed.

More recently, McDonald has written on loyalist paramilitary groups and has co-authored books on the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association with Jim Cusack. He also wrote a biography of Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble. He was, for a period, a security correspondent for the BBC in Belfast and has since criticised the BBC for burying stories which raised doubts about the intentions of the Provisional Republicans in the peace process. In this regard, he specifically cited the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe. During the 1990s he was a staff reporter at Belfast newspaper The Irish News where he edited the youth pages.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Henry McDonald", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0