Shattered

The writing of Lyra McKee

Photo by Thomas Dumortier on Unsplash

Late last year, my beloved and I sat in an almost empty cinema in Bloomsbury watching Lyra, the documentary about the Northern Irish journalist shot dead while observing a protest by dissident nationalists in Derry in April 2019. We emerged from the screening feeling shattered: by the story of McKee and her short life, the tragedy of her early death, the incompetence of so many Northern Irish and British politicians in the face of the ongoing crisis in Northern Ireland, the loss of a young queer woman with an astonishing capacity for fact-finding and storytelling in the face of trauma and violence.

McKee’s life and work fell victim to a conflict that did not miraculously end with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement almost twenty-five years ago. Lyra leaves the viewer with an acute sense of emptiness, of knowing we are left with only a sliver of what McKee was capable of as a journalist. She was an activist writer who yearned to learn and tell the truths of those in her community and beyond, especially those whose voices too often go unheard amidst the competing accounts of people with power.

At the time of her death at 29, McKee was researching and writing a book on the disappearances of young men during the Troubles. Her investigation took her into the layers of violence in that impacted Ardoyne – the Catholic neighbourhood of Belfast where she grew up, and where one fifth of deaths during the Troubles took place – and other working-class communities in Belfast. In this work-in-progress, McKee covered the controversial topic of paramilitary murders of people from their own communities, deaths that could not be easily mobilised for political ends.

McKee knew about death, and she knew how to write about it:

We’d all seen the havoc a dead body could wreak. You didn’t have to actually have seen one to know. As surely as people from the Welsh valleys knew coal miners or Scots knew the taste of haggis, Northern Irish youths knew someone who’d been murdered. It was there in nearly every family, a ghost in the background somewhere.

This research into missing children and men led McKee back to the question of Northern Ireland’s high suicide rate, the subject of one of her first published articles. “Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies” (2016) was an investigation into why people McKee’s age – those born during the 1990s, the era of “peace” – were much more likely than people of previous generations to take their own lives. The article is a master class in how to write about a collective experience from the position of both witness and citizen journalist. McKee and her peers had been dubbed the Ceasefire Babies – “the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace”. The young man whose story opens the piece, Jonny, was McKee’s best friend.

Jonny’s suicide weighs on McKee not just out of a lingering “element of Catholic shame” (“When they carted him off to hospital to pump the tablets out of his stomach, his mother didn’t go with him”) but because he is part of a bigger story: in the decade and a half between the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and 2014, the number of deaths by suicide in Northern Ireland was higher than the total casualties of three decades of the Troubles, between 1969 and 1998.

McKee was interested in patterns, in historical context, in the numbers and lives that the mainstream media and politicians tended to ignore. She knew she and her cohort shared with young people in other parts of the world some of the conditions that made suicide more common. Most of them had grown up in areas – like Ardoyne – with high poverty rates (elsewhere she writes that “Belfast was a city you could fall in love with, but only if you were middle class”).

McKee wanted to know why those who were too young to have witnessed the Troubles directly still carried the trauma of that conflict:

No matter whether we were old or young, war added new habits to our lives – everyday rituals that wouldn’t be so everyday in most countries without war, like not taking your toy gun outside in case a passing army patrol or police jeep mistook it for a real one and fired. Or watching your feet as you walked to school because the police were searching the area for a suspect device. Or getting hit by rocks that came flying over the “peace wall” that separated us from the “other side”.

She began to look into intergenerational trauma, into the experiences of children of survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. And her own research carried lessons for other conflict areas:

The problem is, there’s very little [evidence]. In war, the ruling government usually collapses – and with it any form of meaningful record keeping. Northern Ireland was unique: the Troubles was an internal conflict throughout which the state remained strong, even when the mainland was being bombed. To borrow a scientific term, it’s the best dataset we have to prove that the problems faced in a war-torn country do not end with the arrival of peace.

“Suicide of the Ceasefire” Babies is thread through with what McKee calls her people’s “quirky black humour, our way of dealing with all that’s happened”. The article ends with a twist, one that caught me pleasantly off guard: Jonny hadn’t died after all. For reasons no one knew, his uncle had told his friends he was dead, but after several suicide attempts, he had been able to get medical support and return to the singing that had made him famous in the neighbourhood.

It's hard to read the conclusion of this early article and not be impressed by McKee’s talent for storytelling; not be moved by the image of her sitting with Jonny and other friends, Protestant as well as Catholic, in a pub in a part of Belfast into which, twenty years previously, no young Catholic woman would have dared to wander, a pub now filled with “a genteel crowd of writers, journalists, poets and musicians, a smattering of post-conflict hipsters who wear tight jeans and tweed jackets and Converse”; not to wish that there was a twist, too, in all those stories told about McKee since April 2019, a twist that would keep her alive, and bring us more of her writing.

Jonny and McKee came out to each when they were teenagers. Being gay in a homophobic world was a topic McKee spoke and wrote about with particular passion. In a popular TedTalk she told of visiting Orlando, Florida in June 2017, exactly one year after a shooter killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, about how visiting a mosque in the city had helped her to overcome some of the hatred of religion that had replaced her hatred of herself for being gay when she was growing up. She sought the company of other queer young people, like Jonny and Big Gay Mick:

Stick-thin, with a baseball cap permanently pulled down over his eyes and a gold chain around his neck, you might have mistaken him for one of the neighbourhood hard men until you heard his voice: shrill, camp and a fair bit higher than what it should have been post puberty. In our little teenage gang, he was the only one brave enough to be openly gay. It wasn’t easy.

McKee was also concerned about how political violence and conflict affected women. Her last article, “The Girl Who Chased Frogs”, published posthumously a month after her death, was about the 2016 disappearance of Honduran biologist Isis Melissa “Meli” Medina Flores, in a Central American country with staggeringly high levels of gender-based violence against women. Reading the piece, I was reminded of a book I read years ago on women and the conflict during the Troubles: Shattering Silence by the late anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga. Aretxaga grew up in the Basque Country, and she brought her experience as a young feminist growing up in one conflict zone to research the gendered impacts of political violence in another, Northern Ireland.

I have no idea whether McKee ever read Aretxaga’s work. But watching Lyra and reading McKee’s writing, I was reminded that she was working in a long transnational tradition of feminist and queer writing about political conflicts. To honour this critical tradition it’s vital not only to mourn the loss of McKee and the work that will never be, but to read her writing, to learn from her powerful prose and analysis of how political violence touches and shatters lives in ways that too often get relegated to the margins of reporting on Northern Ireland and other political conflicts.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.