(Guardian, 21 Jul 2020) On 11 April 2015, Ella Parry stood beside her small pink car, outside her council flat in Shrewsbury, watching the road. She was waiting for her mother to drop off her 17-year-old sister, Becky. The sisters were planning to go shopping together in Chester. “Ella got into her car as we ...
Irish Times, Nov 4, 2019 He was a showman, Gay Byrne, first and foremost, but he was a showman in Ireland, and that made all the difference. He made his name with a national broadcaster that was set up primarily to make the Irish people submit to government. That, in Byrne’s earliest years with RTÉ, meant ...
…the deadly trade in diet pills (Guardian, 14 Aug 2020) DNP is an industrial chemical used in making explosives. If swallowed, it can cause a h orrible death – and yet it is still being aggressively marketed to vulnerable people online. Written by Susan McKay, read by Andrew McGregor and produced by Esther Opoku-Gyeni ...
Irish Times Jun 23, 2020. This country has to wake up. The whole society needs help coming to terms with the psychology of families in which there is child abuse.” Sophia McColgan said that to me in 1997, two years after her father was sentenced to 238 years in prison for multiple instances over many ...
(in the New Yorker) “Hello lovely,” she’d messaged me. “You in Derry anytime soon?” I loved Lyra’s easy way with affection. Twenty-nine years old, she was half my age. We’d become friends through writing and our shared obsession with Northern Ireland. I got back to her that, yes, I would be up to visit my ...
Lyra McKee is dead. A beautiful young woman, brimful of life and love and creativity, has been sacrificed to the bigotry of people who could never in any imaginable circumstances be reconciled to peace. They say they are the true keepers of the republican flame, the defenders of the people of Derry. But today the ...
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 ...
(The Guardian - Long Read) After a trial that dominated the news, the accused were all found not guilty. But the case had tapped into a deeper rage that has not died down. The verdicts were unanimous and came swiftly. After a trial that had lasted nine weeks, with four defendants and multiple charges, the ...