My first newspaper splash

Forty years ago this month I wrote my first front-page lead, in the Belfast Telegraph

Belfast in April 1985 felt tense. A few weeks earlier nine officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been killed in an Irish Republican Army mortar attack on a police station in Newry. It was RUC’s highest loss of life in a single day in the whole of the Troubles. Anger was brewing in Portadown that would soon erupt into a summer of rioting by loyal…