Woke up yesterday to the absolutely devastating news that investigative journalist Lyra McKee was shot and killed in Derry, during a police standoff with dissident republicans. She was there as a journalist, covering the events. A masked person fired a shot at the police vehicles, and McKee was hit. Her final Tweet was: “Derry tonight. Absolute madness.”
McKee was 29 years old.
Born in Belfast, right off socalled “Murder Mile,” she was of the generation that came of age post Good Friday Agreement (she was killed on the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement). She had a perceptive take on the challenges and struggles of the “Ceasefire Babies,” those of her generation raised in the aftermath of decades of terror and violence (centuries, really), when all of it was supposedly “over” but … it wasn’t over, not really. McKee wrote:
The Ceasefire Babies was what they called us. Those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was called. I was four, Jonny was three. We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us.
This important voice has been silenced. I’m so angry and so sad.
Martin Doyle recently featured her in his Best of Irish: 10 Rising Stars of Irish Writing. She was chosen by Forbes in their first European “30 Under 30 in Media”. McKee worked as a freelance journalist, and had signed a book deal with Faber & Faber. I was very much looking forward to her first book next year, The Lost Boys, described as:
“The Lost Boys will explore the disappearances of a number of children and young men during the Troubles. Many of them were not believed to be victims of the IRA or the UVF. Some were kids who left home for school and never came home and their disappearances were never solved by the police. McKee will investigate what happened to them.”
Her 2016 piece in The Atlantic about the high suicide rate among the Belfast “Ceasefire Babies” is what got my attention. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism: Suicide Among the Ceasefire Babies
She was also an advocate for LGBTQ youths. The struggles of growing up in Belfast are unique. It’s not like growing up other places. She spoke from and to those in that particular struggle. In 2015, she wrote a letter to her 14-year-old self on her blog, which then went viral. Her letter was made into a beautiful short film.
Her murderer was caught on camera. The hunt for him is on. The statements of condemnation have come from both sides of the conflict – a rare thing. Her murder has rocked the community. My friends, Anthony and Carrie McIntyre, two journalists who live and work in Belfast, knew Lyra McKee, loved her, and are horrified and infuriated at what has happened. (I stayed with them when I was there almost 15 years ago. We went to Bobby Sands’ grave. Anthony was in prison with Sands. We strolled by the Sinn Fein offices, and Carrie pointed out “Gerry’s” car. Anthony and Carrie have been – famously – look it up – harassed, for their dissident positions, and they found hope for the future in Lyra McKee’s example. They are both devastated.) Anthony’s site, The Pensive Quill, has a couple of different tributes to McKee up on it right now, one from human rights lawyer Sarah Kay, and an essay by Carrie, whose rage shimmers off the page.
This is just heartbreaking and infuriating.
