How dare dissident republicans claim to ‘respect’ the writer. They have silenced a woman who told the stories of their forgotten victims
(from The Guardian 19 April, 2019)
“Derry tonight. Absolute madness.” That was Lyra McKee’s last tweet as she stood beside a police Land Rover watching young boys in masks hurling petrol bombs that smashed and flared on to the streets of the city she loved. Then, out of the shadows, a gunman emerged, knelt down and started shooting. Lyra, who had stayed to witness events rather than go home and write about them, was hit. Police got her into a Land Rover and the driver bravely plunged it through a burning barricade to get her to Altnagelvin hospital. But it was too late. She died soon after arriving.
Lyra was from Belfast. She had moved (emigrated, she said) to Derry just a few months ago to live with her partner, Sara, a nurse at the hospital. She was madly in love. She was happy. She was writing. She was only 29 and she had everything to live for, and a great deal to give.
Lyra was a friend of mine. We were to meet on Sunday in Derry. We would have talked about writing – she had been sending me chapters of the book she was working on, and I had been making suggestions, mostly about structure, and encouraging her, for she was brilliant. She had a unique voice, as original in non-fiction as that, in fiction, of Anna Burns – Lyra was very proud that the Booker prize winner had gone to the same school.
Lyra was writing about the disappearances of young people during and since the Troubles, people who are not necessarily regarded and listed as victims of the conflict, but whose lives were nonetheless lost on its dark margins. I am certain she would have been looking at those masked young boys in Derry and feeling compassion for them, recognising that as well as throwing fireworks and petrol bombs, they were throwing their own precious youth away.
She was the sort, too, who would have stood up to the old bigots who are still sending the young out to fight their battles for them. “Still trying to reach the future through the past/ Still trying to carve tomorrow from a tombstone” as Paul Brady, from just up the River Foyle in Strabane, sings in The Island.
A group calling itself Saoradh, which is close to the so-called thinking of republican dissidents styling themselves the Real IRA, put out a statement blaming “heavily armed crown forces” for attacking a republican area, and claiming her death was accidental. Such factions claim to speak for the republican community – and all thrive in the poorest and most marginalised communities, where young people have seen little benefit from peace and are readily seduced by the apparent glamour of armed struggle. The organisers of a march commemorating the Easter Rising say it has been cancelled as a “mark of respect” for Lyra. Respect?
Lyra had signed a two-book deal with Faber, a measure of her promise as a writer. She’d published Angels With Blue Faces about the deaths by suicide of young people born since the end of the Troubles. Her essays had appeared in some of the best literary journals. Her “Letter to my 14-year-old self”, written a few years ago, was made into a moving short film. It starts: “Kid, it’s going to be OK.” In it, she speaks about coming out to her mother when she was 20. She’s sobbing so hard she can’t get the words out and so her mother asks, “Are you gay?” She says “yes”, and then she says, “I’m sorry.” Her mum says, “Thank God you’re not pregnant” and takes her in her arms. She felt, she says, like a prisoner who’s just been released.
She also did a TED talk in which she addressed young LGBTQ people. “It gets better,” she says. “It gets better for those of us who live long enough to see it get better.” Lyra made it better for people. John O’Doherty, director of Derry’s Rainbow Project, recalled how despite her full awareness that she had “two left feet” she took part in a recent Strictly Come Dancing event to raise funds for the project. “She gave it everything,” he said. Feminist activist Taryn De Vere told how when Lyra recently heard that a young mother in Derry was penniless, she sent her some money.
“Hello Lovely? You in Derry any time soon?” she’d messaged me ahead of our meeting on Sunday. After we had made a plan, she wrote: “Epic.” Her last word to me. Lyra was a beautiful young woman, brimful of life, love and creativity. She was murdered on the 21st anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday agreement. Let no one dare say that she died in the cause of Irish freedom. Lyra was Irish freedom. Goodbye, Lovely.