Here’s a gem you might have missed as a comment on the Contact page:
Hi Malachi, as a journalist from a nationalist background it gives me hope that somebody like yourself can be well known. I think to myself, if a dense little twat like Malachi who acts like a monkey to the unionist gallery by revealing his life `as a teenage catholic’ can make it, then anyone can. I’ve read your articles and, remarkably, they are devoid of anything intelligent to say. Still, you can prance around and they’ll throw you a few bannanas, you twat. Get a life, get a brain, get an identity.
Malachi O'Doherty 
It’s good to read a post from a journalist whose vocabulary is so wide ranging that he is able to make full use of the term ‘twat’ – twice.
Are bannanas the same as bananas?
Hang on! I know this fella. I met him in a bar in Andersonstown last time I was home. I remember him well. He was standing on his own in the corner. He was wearing a stained tee-shirt and there was a terrible smell about him. I could hear him mumbling as I stood up at the counter fetching a couple of pints. Something about the fact he’d been fired from his paper for making stuff up that he hadn’t made up, “‘cos you don’t have to check stuff like that out, you just know it’s true … the cunts!” I smiled at him and turned away. At the same moment, a good-looking woman of about 25 asked the barman for a vodka and tonic. “Don’t worry about it, luv, ” our friend said, emitting a long, slow fart, like a deflating tyre. “Sure I’ll get it for ye.” And then he fumbled in his pocket for the change. “Shite!” he said, flashing his blackened teeth at the girl, who was already backing away, waving her hand in front of her face. “You couldn’t lend us a fiver, cud ye?” That was when the landlord grabbed him by the collar and flung him out onto the street. The whole place erupted. It was sheer joy. Ah, the rare oul’ times.
How dare you. This is exactly the problem with this type of forum it gives people devoid of anything intelligent to say the opportunity to metaphorically throw up in cyberspace without revealing who they are. It is assault by internet and you should be ashamed. Malachi O’Doherty has for years been an intelligent, challenging, enlightening journalist. And Malachi has an identity – one he is happy to reveal along with his intellligent thoughts while you skulk in front of your dirty keyboard and don’t reveal yours. You get a life it’s too late for the brain.
that was funny, all of it.
You are doing the same thing, Conor, assuming that a writer represents a tribe and that his integroty is to be judged by reference to his loyalty to that tribe. You haven’t read enough Orwell yet. I’m sure your mother has a copy in the house.
That was funny! The guy may have been angry and sulking, but he does have a smidgen of a point! Malachi aint exactly neutral and he does have a certain appeal to unionists because, as he often remind us, he lived with actual, honest to goodness Catholics. Wow! lol.
That was a good one. Very funny, and yet sad at the same time.
Enjoyed the use of ‘Twat’. Has he been listening to David Cameron a bit too much? 🙂
Ah come on, it was pretty funny! You can’t take people like that too seriously. Also, even if it was overstated, maybe there is a valid point in there (somewhere)?