On Tuesday, I gathered with a crowd in Dublin at a vigil for Lyra McKee organised by the National Union of Journalists. The meeting point was the Garden of Remembrance, a site frequently used for the commemoration of political and social causes. Over the decades, it has also become a known starting point for many public marches across the activist spectrum, from housing and homelessness, to causes that Lyra herself had been vocal about: LGBT rights and the need for free, safe and legal abortion (still illegal in Northern Ireland). Down the hill, on O’Connell Street, is the former site of Nelson’s Pillar, blown up in 1966 by a small group of dissidents who had been been expelled from the IRA. And now in 2019, a different sect of republican dissidents in Derry shot Lyra in the head with a single bullet.
Standing in the warm spring sun, no one was thinking of those cowards. The crowd were united in their grief for Lyra, her partner Sara, her family and friends. I thought about the beacon she was for so many in the North – young and old, LGBT people, those weary of politics and conflict, of sectarianism and bigotry. Carrying pictures of Lyra and candles, we walked to the Hugh Lane Gallery around the corner. Sections from Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies and A Letter to My 14-Year-Old Self – articles that had made Lyra’s name as an outspoken journalist – were read out. Many people wept silently.
In 1969, three years after the bombing of Nelson’s Pillar, the first of eight young boys in Northern Ireland went missing. They were not connected to the Troubles. They were not “the disappeared” – and Lyra was fascinated by their story. Her book on the subject, The Lost Boys, was due to be published by Faber next year, and was still a work in progress when she was killed. Faber, whose staff are heartbroken, is trying to pick up the pieces of Lyra’s loss and to figure out the unimaginable task of completing the book without her. When it was pitched to them, it opened with these words:
When you lost someone in the Troubles, you had a story you could tell. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. He lived, she died – because he was Catholic, Protestant, in the IRA, in the police, in a loyalist gang – and we miss her, every day. Beginning, middle, end.
We all knew the beginning of Lyra’s own story; of how she achieved so much, long before the middle of her short life. And the end is too much to bear for those who knew her – and those who didn’t, but still mourn her loss. Her words will live on, and as she wrote: we miss her, every day.
• Sinéad Gleeson is the author of Constellations (Picador).
