Born: August 24th, 1949
Died: April 24th, 2026
Jim McDowell, who has died aged 76, was a larger-than-life Belfast journalist who took on the paramilitaries and drug dealers and also campaigned relentlessly for one of his murdered colleagues.
The former BBC security correspondent Brian Rowan, who described McDowell as “hard as nails and as kind as they come”, remembered phoning him in September 2001 having to relate that Sunday World journalist Martin O’Hagan had been murdered by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) in Lurgan, Co Armagh.
McDowell, who was the Northern editor of the Sunday World, didn’t want to hear or believe what Rowan was telling him but when he did face up to that terrible reality he went on to do everything in his journalistic power to bring O’Hagan’s killers to justice.
He carried out a number of exposés on the activities of the LVF and also named the alleged killers in the Sunday World, making the point that subsequently there were no successful libel actions against the newspaper arising from those claims.
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Eventually, the chief suspects were to face trial in 2013 based on the evidence of loyalist supergrass Neil Hyde. That trial was aborted, however, after the North’s Public Prosecution Service ruled that Hyde’s evidence could not be trusted.
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It distressed him that there “never was justice for Marty” but equally he never let up in writing about the criminal activities of the paramilitaries and the damage they were doing to their local communities.
McDowell’s crusading nature was greatly influenced by his own working-class roots. He was born in 1949 in the loyalist Donegall Pass area of central Belfast. Over the years of the Troubles and beyond he saw how drug dealing, the extortion and intimidation were damaging and corrupting those communities.
At his funeral the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Rev John McDowell, said McDowell had the “courage to reach above the great weight of political inertia and indifference”.
“And a greater courage still to face down the criminal drug dealers and the moral imbeciles, those who brought down the reputation of the people ... he loved: Belfast working-class Prods.”
His friend, the former PSNI chief constable Ronnie Flanagan said McDowell displayed “courage in facing up to the scourge of gangs that undermined our very society”, adding: “Through his own love of journalism, and his own unquenchable desire for the truth, he faced many dangers, and he faced them courageously and fearlessly, bringing the truth to the public.”
There was a cost to be paid for that bravery. His wife of more than 40 years, Lindy, a journalist with the Belfast Telegraph, wrote of how in the face of numerous death threats over the years their home was like Fort Knox, with bulletproof windows and security cameras.
But even a bad beating he sustained at the Christmas market outside Belfast City Hall in 2009 did not deter him, as Lindy wrote, from “investigating, challenging and standing up to terrorist gangsters and drug dealers on all sides”.
He engaged in journalism’s rough craft for more than 50 years and was Sunday World Northern editor for 25 years. Some of his early work was as a sports correspondent. He ran a number of marathons with his friend Brian Rowan, finishing the first Belfast marathon in 1982 in two hours 59 minutes.
He played rugby alongside Ronnie Flanagan for CIYMS in east Belfast and was able to boast that on one occasion he played with two of the greats of Irish and Ulster rugby, Willie John McBride and Mike Gibson. He also captained Ulster at junior level.
To avoid confusion over the different pronunciations of his surname in a gravelly voice he would introduce himself as “Madole”. He wrote for the News Letter in Belfast during the 1970s and later served both as deputy editor and editor of its sister paper, the now defunct Sunday News.
He lost his job during a strike at the Sunday News, which he supported, and later with Rowan and Joe Oliver set up the Ulster Press Agency providing reports on the Troubles and other aspects of Northern Ireland life to outlets in Ireland, Britain and internationally.
In 1996 he suffered leg injuries when a helicopter in which he was travelling crash-landed near Enniskillen in Co Fermanagh.
During the 1980s and 1990s he wrote a column for The Irish News and appeared regularly on BBC Radio Ulster’s current affairs programme Talkback. Here a frequent subject was Belfast City Council, which he sardonically dubbed the Dome of Delight.
He took pleasure in eviscerating what he saw as the bigotry and junketeering of a number of the unionist councillors, although he could be equally vitriolic against some of the Sinn Féin members when that party decided to engage in local elected politics. He stood his ground too in supporting the ban on Sinn Féin members from the broadcasting airwaves.
Former Sinn Féin Stormont minister and businessman Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who served as a councillor during that period, in paying tribute said McDowell was “a scrapper for the working man and woman, a journo who could use a single word to slice like a sabre or comfort like a country curate”.
He added: “His journalism was fuelled by his care for all the ordinary punters of Belfast but I think he was pained most by the collapse of the city’s once formidable working-class Protestant communities. Certainly no one, not police nor state, took on the paramilitary drug lords preying on those communities like he did.”
He is survived by his wife Lindy, daughter Faye and partner Jarrod, son Jamie and partner Jana, and son Micah and partner Zoi, grandchildren Niamh, Ewan and Marlenka, and his brother Tom.
