Liam Tunney
Liam Tunney is a journalist with the Belfast Telegraph whose reporting centres on politics and the mechanics of power, with a consistent focus on how institutions handle scrutiny, controversy and public pressure. His work combines coverage of devolved government, party strategy and legislative disputes with close, sustained reporting from courts and inquests.
Stormont priorities and political strategy
Tunney covers the day-to-day operation of power-sharing government, including debates over Programme for Government priorities and how the executive presents its progress. He reports on party manoeuvring and strategy, contributing to coverage that examines Labour’s stance on the region, the SDLP’s approach to challenging Alliance, and questions over the future of conservative politics.
His work regularly tracks how elected representatives frame their performance, such as claims that the current executive is the worst since the return of devolution, and tests those claims against events and policy decisions.
He engages directly with political leaders and commentators on these themes, appearing on the Belfast Telegraph’s politics podcast to analyse Irish language disputes, party positioning and the wider conversation around constitutional change. Across this material, he treats politics as both policy and narrative, paying attention to how official statements, media appearances and legislative moves intersect.
Court reporting and inquests
Tunney is a primary reporter on sensitive legal proceedings and inquests, most notably the inquest into the death of schoolboy Noah Donohoe. He follows that process in detail, documenting evidence about search efforts, the discovery of the body in a storm drain and the conduct of investigators over weeks of hearings. His coverage keeps the procedural shape of the inquest in view while foregrounding what it reveals about institutional decision-making and accountability.
Podcast episodes and coverage notes describe him as the Belfast Telegraph reporter covering these proceedings, reinforcing that courtroom and inquest reporting is a core strand of his work. He brings the same attention to contested criminal cases and public-order incidents highlighted in the masthead’s audio coverage, contributing factual updates and context that sit alongside commentary from specialist correspondents.
This material marks him out as a reporter who is comfortable working at the intersection of law, politics and public concern.
Irish language, identity and contested space
Tunney reports extensively on disputes over Irish language visibility and identity politics, treating them as political and legal issues rather than cultural colour. His work includes coverage of legal action over Irish language signage at Grand Central Station and the possibility of ministerial intervention in that case, tying questions of linguistic rights directly to government authority. He also covers the controversy around bilingual signage policies, including council decisions that have left unionists reeling and prompted wider debate about demographic change and symbolism in public space.
In podcast discussions he connects these disputes to broader political trends, exploring how parties use language policy to energise supporters and frame constitutional arguments. He contributes to coverage of Irish unity debates and leaders’ careful wording on the subject, indicating a sustained interest in how identity questions move from street-level campaigns into mainstream political strategy. These stories show a reporter who treats language and identity as hard politics, with legal consequences and electoral implications.
Investigations and institutional accountability
Beyond daily politics and court coverage, Tunney undertakes investigative work that looks at how private companies and institutions treat ordinary people. He is credited with breaking a story about a credit repair firm that encouraged clients to lie on credit card applications and facilitated paid online reviews, exposing practices that raised questions about regulation and consumer protection. That investigation extends his accountability lens beyond government to commercial actors whose behaviour can have serious financial and legal consequences for the public.
His wider portfolio, as catalogued by professional databases and profiles, spans thousands of articles across politics, current affairs and social-justice-adjacent themes. He has experience in teaching and local journalism before joining the Belfast Telegraph, and has been recognised for his investigative reporting.
Taken together, the evidence points to a reporter who consistently works on complex, often contentious stories where institutions are under pressure to explain themselves.
The through-line in Tunney’s coverage is a focus on how decisions are made, defended and challenged in public. Whether following an inquest line by line, dissecting executive claims about progress, or exposing questionable commercial practices, he treats official narratives as material to be tested rather than simply relayed.
That combination of politics, legal process and investigation defines his work more clearly than a generic label and shapes the stories he is the right fit to cover.
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