Bill began his career with BBC Northern Ireland in 1981, at the height of the Republican hunger strikes. He covered the violence in Northern Ireland for six years before joining BBC television's news and current affairs department in London in 1987. After a period with Sky News, during which he helped launch the channel, Neely joined ITN in June 1989 and has covered many of the major world news events of the last quarter century, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he describes as "the best story I ever covered, bar none", the break-up of the Soviet Union, the first and second Gulf Wars, both attacks on New York's World Trade Center (1993 and 2001), the mass killings in Darfur, the death of Pope John Paul II, the siege of Beslan, and numerous natural disasters, including around a dozen earthquakes. He has won an unprecedented three consecutive BAFTA awards for news coverage, an Emmy award, a Peabody prize and has numerous other nominations and awards for international news reporting over the past two decades, including eight Emmy nominations. He won four Royal Television Society awards, including the International News Award for coverage of the Haiti earthquake.