“He had more guts in his little finger than all his detractors,” wrote a journalistic friend to me about Jim McDowell last week, after the news of his death.
Published: 30 April 2026
The detractors of this glorious human being included paramilitaries of all stripes, gangsters and drug dealers, who preyed on the people at the bottom of society, about whom Jim cared deeply and whose persecutors he relentlessly exposed.
His detractors also included respectable folk who despised what they saw as the gutter press — like the Sunday World of which he was northern editor for fifteen years — where Jim and other intrepid colleagues told graphic stories of the reality of the hard and often violent lives of the poor and exploited that few from the privileged classes wanted to know about.
Journalism was a vocation for Jim from his childhood growing up in a tough area of Belfast; he was a reporter from 1969 until a few months ago when ill-health silenced him.
‘The Good Fight: From Bullets To Bylines — 45 Years Face-To-Face With Terror’ was his own story and a great read which will still be valuable when thousands of learned analyses of the peace process lie undisturbed.
As he put it himself, Northern Ireland reporters lived “with the death and destruction and the desperation and the desolation of the bereaved every day … when that community bled and mourned, we bled and mourned with them”.
In a devastating sentence, he added “We translated the red blood pouring down the pavements into the black ink printed on the white pages of newspapers.”
The murder by the LVF of the Sunday World’s Martin O’Hagan in 2001 would not frighten him any more than had all the years of death threats, though being brutally beaten at 60 by drug dealers in Belfast city centre in 2009 took its toll.
Yet he was still at the centre of social gatherings in various pubs wherever he was.
I’m proud of how I put it years back in a review of his book:
“In any gathering Jim almost certainly has the biggest (“baldy”) head (literally, not metaphorically), the biggest heart (metaphorically, and, for all I know, literally) and the biggest balls (ditto).”
Of all the tributes I’ve read in the last few days, that of Ciaran Barnes in the Sunday Life moved me most.
Jim McDowell had “kicked open the door of journalism for working-class kids in Northern Ireland” he wrote.
He was their inspiration and their mentor.
But, said Ciaran, having seen his appearance on Stephen Nolan’s BBC1 “Story of a Lifetime”, his lasting impression wasn’t Jim coping stoically with dozens of death threats or his huge scoops, but the love he and his utterly intrepid wife Lindy (equally metaphorically ink-stained) had for each other.
In the many years I knew them, that was so palpable.
They faced the good and bad happenings in their time together adventurously, bravely, stoically, and joyfully.
Their laughter was infectious and shared with family and friends.
I expect tears and laughter in abundance in St George’s Church of Ireland on Saturday.
