How Lyra McKee remains a symbol of hope in Northern Ireland

It was supposed to be a new peaceful era for Northern Ireland. But four years ago, shortly after the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a young writer called Lyra McKee was shot dead by dissident republicans. A promising investigative journalist from Belfast, she had had no truck with sectarian fighting. “I don’t want a United Ireland or a stronger Union,” she once wrote, distancing herself from the binary identities of previous Northern Irish generations. “I just want a better life.”

At 29, she was at the top of her game, professionally and personally: she had recently signed a two-book deal with the publisher Faber & Faber and had moved in with her girlfriend, whom she hoped to marry. As the priest at her funeral said, she had “her whole life ahead of her”.

Now, a new Channel 4 documentary film, Lyra, tells her story. It is not just the singular tragedy of a talented young woman who passionately believed in, and advocated for, change; it maps the pain and trauma of the Ulster generation still living with – and dying from – the fallout of decades of bitter political conflict.

Although Lyra, the youngest of five children, had grown up relatively sheltered from the violence, the Troubles formed the backdrop to her early years. Her family lived in Ardoyne, on what was dubbed the “murder mile” – a working class republican part of north Belfast notorious for bloodshed.

“There would often be trouble where we lived,” says her older sister Nichola McKee Corner, 48, a mother-of-three. “We weren’t allowed in the front room after dark or near a window in case someone was looking for someone to attack and saw you there. It was a very dangerous time and location. There were so many people being killed and you didn’t know, when you left for school in the morning, would everyone still be in your family when you got home.”

The historic Good Friday Agreement, signed on April 10 1998, was hailed as signalling the end of 30 years of armed conflict between unionists and republicans. Lyra was eight at the time, and so came of age post-Troubles. She was, though, acutely aware of the long shadow they cast on the lives of so-called Ceasefire Babies like herself.

Although things were better than they had been, post-1998 Northern Ireland “has never been that utopian ideal everyone hoped for”, says Sara Canning, Lyra’s partner.

Lyra was interested in chronicling its realities, including for the LGBT community to which she belonged. In 2014, aged 24, she published A Letter to My 14-Year-Old Self about growing up gay. “Kid,” she wrote. “It’s going to be OK.”

And it was OK for her, coming out in early adulthood. “She was lucky because she had a very accepting family,” says Sara. But Lyra knew that in a society steeped in religious tradition, it still wasn’t OK for everyone, and in a powerful TEDx talk in 2017 she called for change in the religious teaching on homosexuality.

By April 2019, she had recently moved in with Sara in Derry, dividing the week between her and her disabled mother, Joan Lawrie, whom she cared for in Belfast. On the night of her death, she and Sara were in their pyjamas for the evening when a message came through in the WhatsApp group they shared with friends. During a police raid on the local Creggan housing estate, a riot had broken out and one of their friends was going. (“It’s a pastime where we’re from,” says Sara, drily.) Lyra and Sara, now 39, had been planning to “chill out, read, listen to a podcast”. But now Lyra wanted to attend the riot. Sara, whom she had met on an online dating app in March 2018, protested in vain. So the couple got a lift to Creggan with their friend, and Sara rang her sister as they arrived. “Oh my God, this place is crazy, there’s people everywhere,” she told her. “The streets are black, there’s no room for cars, really big crowds, this is mad.” Her sister warned her to be careful. “We will be, don’t worry,” Lyra shouted back. Eight minutes later, she’d been fatally struck by a bullet, which the New IRA later admitted to firing. The gunman had been aiming at police, the group said, and apologised.

In the fateful eight minutes leading to Lyra’s death, she and Sara had walked down the road until they neared some burning vehicles. “A car was making popping and hissing noises and I said to Lyra ‘I don’t like the sound it’s making’,” says Sara. “ ‘I don’t know if it will explode but let’s not take the chance, we’ll go back up.’ ”

So they retreated to stand among other onlookers near a police Land Rover. Lyra had gone into journalist mode, scanning the crowds to see who was there and texting journalist friends about what was happening. Then Sara heard a loud roar from the crowd down the street. “I turned to say, ‘we should move, I think they’re going to do something,’ and Lyra wasn’t there. She was on the ground. I didn’t hear gunshots so I didn’t work it out immediately.”

But when Sara bent down, she realised Lyra was bleeding from her head. “I started screaming and put my hand to the wound and I knew then that it was really devastating.”

Lyra was rushed to hospital in the Land Rover and Sara joined her there, her hands and face covered in Lyra’s blood. The doctors could not save her. “I was just incoherent,” says Sara. “Everything went fuzzy. All I could think about was her mummy finding out her youngest child, her baby, had been murdered. It was horrific.”

Nichola, who was on her way to the hospital after learning Lyra had been injured, heard the news of her death from a police officer on the phone.

“I collapsed in the street and just started screaming,” she says. “I had to tell my mummy her baby was killed. I said, ‘our Lyra has died,’ and the sound that came out of my mummy’s body, I had never heard anything like it.”

When Lyra’s family gathered at her hospital bedside, “it was just wailing in that room”, says Nichola. “I just wanted to hold her, I wanted to hug her. If I could have died beside her I would have died beside her, just to be with her.” Lyra’s mother had a heart attack and died less than a year later. “She didn’t know how to live without Lyra and she didn’t want to live without her,” says Nichola.

Across the UK and beyond, Lyra’s murder was met with a public outcry. “It resonated with people because suddenly we had a victim who you couldn’t say, ‘well, there were links to dissidents or [loyalist paramilitaries] or drugs or crime,’ ” says Sara. “Lyra was, in a way, I suppose the perfect innocent victim.” The grief and anger was visceral, and was accompanied by calls for change. At her funeral, in St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, leaders from across the political divide came together in a rare display of unity. Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, was there, sitting beside Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill from Sinn Féin.

But four years on, Northern Ireland is back in political stalemate, without the power-sharing devolved government envisaged by the Good Friday Agreement.

Two men, Peter Gearóid Cavanagh, 35, and Jordan Devine, 21, pleaded not guilty to murdering Lyra at Belfast Crown Court last month and now await trial.

What message does Sara hope people will take from Lyra’s story? “I really hope young people will realise taking up arms in pursuit of anything, [that] there’s always a repercussion,” she says, of those in the generation below her succumbing to sectarian radicalisation online. “It’s not like playing Call of Duty.”

Although the promised peace in Northern Ireland has always been a fragile one, Sara is optimistic. Looking to the future, she quotes Lyra’s own words: “Don’t tell me there’s no hope.”

Lyra will air on Channel 4 on April 15 at 9.25pm