Malachi O'Doherty
Malachi O'Doherty (born Co Donegal, Ireland, 1951) is a journalist, author and broadcaster in Northern Ireland.
He is a regular contributor to a number of BBC programmes in Northern Ireland, providing political and social commentary for BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback and for BBC NI's Hearts and Minds programme, and reporting frequently for BBC Radio Ulster's Sunday Sequence.
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 90s 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 columnist for the Belfast Telegraph and former Managing Editor of Fortnight magazine. He writes for the Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog.
His favourite themes are religion and terrorism.
He has published two 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, and inept, journalist in Belfast in the worst year for desths (1972) of the Northern Ireland Troubles.
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 being the prime irritant. 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.
On March 16 2007, he delivered a lecture to the French Society for Irish Studies on the life and thinking of Margaret Noble, a Tyrone born Methodist who had taken the name Sister Nivedita, when initiated into the Ramakrishna Mission by her Guru, Swami Vivekananda. He brings lateral thinking to religious questions in much of his writing.
Malachi O'Doherty has lived outside Northern Ireland on several occasions. In the 1970s for four years he was in India, in the ashram of Swami Paramananda Saraswti. He has written about this in I Was A Teenage Catholic.
He befriended there the Austrian playwright, Gerlinde Obermeier.
He also, in the early 1980s, worked for a time as a language instructor with the Libyan Air Defence Forces.
Books by Malachi O'Doherty
- The Trouble With Guns: The Trouble With Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA (The Blackstaff Press, 1998). Described by the former leading IRA volunteer and informant Sean O'Callaghan as "An honest and decent book . . . It is lucid and accessible, and is the most subtle analysis of the modern-day republican movement that I have read . . . one of the most valuable books to emerge from Northern Ireland in recent years.'
- I Was a Teenage Catholic (Mercier/Marino, 2003). An account of Malachi O'Doherty's upbringing in west Belfast, his experiences of Catholicism and his eventual rejection of the church's beliefs. The book also narrates his travels in India and his encounter with a Hindu swami.
- The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 (Gill and Macmillan, 2007). A memoir of living and working as a journalist through the worst year of the Troubles, 1972. This was also the year O'Doherty was approached by an RUC officer in Northern Ireland and invited to become an "informer". He declined.
- Empty Pulpits: Ireland's Retreat From Religion (Gill and Macmillan, 2008). And account of the rapid secularistion of Ireland. O'Doherty attracted the wrath of humanist groups for his own attacks on the 'new atheists' and his claims that their critiques of religion were flawed by a failure to comprehend religious motivation.
Biography
Malachi O'Doherty was born in 1951 and raised as a Roman Catholic in nationalist west Belfast. He trained as a journalist at the College of Business Studies in Belfast and as an amateur student in 1990, took a master's degree in Irish Studies from Queen's University, Belfast. In June 1995 he married the poet and broadcaster Maureen Boyle.