With the creation of a new news channel set to be launched next month, one Fermanagh journalist is ready to play his part in making sure it is as successful as possible.

GB News will be available for viewers from Sunday, June 13 and Darren McCaffrey who hails from Newtownbutler takes up the role as one of the The Great British Breakfast Show presenters as well as their Political Editor.

Darren, who has worked for Sky News and EuroNews before making the switch to the fledgling channel, is excited to get up and running as staff put the final pieces together in rehearsals for the June launch.

“There hasn’t been a news channel launched in the UK for 25 years,” explained Darren. “It’s quite nice to kind of go in at kind of ground-level because I think people forget it’s a news channel we’re here to kind of shake things up, and to do things differently, but it’s also a business.

“It’s a startup business, so it’s very much a feeling that kind of we need to make this work because you know this is a company that employs about 140 journalists and, you know, it’ll be a success if we work hard to make it successful.”

Darren will rub shoulders with well-known journalists such as Kirsty Gallacher, Simon McCoy, Alastair Stewart and Andrew Neill in his new role and he hopes that the new channel will give viewers another angle on what is happening throughout the UK.

Fox News

There have been some reports that GB News will become the equivalent of Fox News in the US, but Darren asks people to not judge the channel before it is even launched.

“You know, people have reached that conclusion without actually seeing, you know, we haven’t actually broadcast yet so it’s difficult for people to conclude some of that.”

But he does not think a Fox News type channel would work in the UK adding: “It’s not going to be Fox News. I mean two things, I don’t think Fox News would work in the UK, I don’t think anyone actually wants it.

“And that type of journalism, which frankly, at times, reports on news that’s not necessarily entirely truthful and it’s a very divisive form of commentary and debate.”

What Darren does see GB News doing is listening more to viewers across the whole of the UK and giving them more of a voice.

“It’s a channel for the whole of the UK. There’s been a perception that actually a lot of the news organisations, wouldn’t necessarily go to somewhere like Fermanagh unless something really awful happens.

“But we’re kind of determined to spend far less time in London and get out in and about gets to every corner of the UK.

“I tweeted about this a couple of months ago that when the violence sparked up in what parts of Belfast and other parts of Derry and elsewhere that in the UK we weren’t covering it enough. That it wasn’t on the TV and no one was properly analysing what has happened and you know there are concerns that we could see some more stuff like that this summer.

“But also at the same time that’s not you know, that’s not the Northern Ireland that every time I go home, that I see.”

And it is getting to the other side of the story that Darren sees GB News doing and moving away from a London-centric type of journalism.

“There’s a sense of what journalism thinks in London isn’t necessarily what other people think around the country and we need to change that.

“We can’t just be telling or covering stories or reporting on things that people are a relatively small number of people think is important when there’s a whole load of stuff happening out there that never makes international news.

“We want to make sure that something really important to people elsewhere in the country gets reported on,” Darren concluded.