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Former NUJ president Barry McCall, Member of Honour Kevin Cooper, Belfast, and Dublin members at the vigil outside the Hugh Lane, Parnell Square. From left, Ronan Quinlan, Barry McCall, Kieran Fagan, Kevin Cooper, Gerard Cunningham, John Brophy, and Seamus Kelly.


‘I know this is my vocation’ By Kathryn Johnston


At the foot of the steps of St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast I watched as mourners carried out the coffin of my friend and colleague Lyra McKee. I was part of a 100-strong NUJ Guard of Honour standing there to mark her passing, the latest victim of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Lyra had been eight when the Good Friday Agreement had been signed 21 years to the day from her death. Now she had joined its more than 3,000 victims. The long shrill calls of a couple of seagulls echoed through the silence as her body was carefully placed in the hearse which would take her to her final resting place in Carnmoney cemetery on the outskirts of her native North Belfast.


The silence was in stark contrast to the


spontaneous applause which had erupted from the huge crowds who paid tribute to her life, work and spirit as she was carried into the cathedral at 1 pm that afternoon. Just one week before, at exactly 1 pm, I had been sitting in the assembly hall of St Louis Grammar School in Ballymena as six victims of the Troubles from the Wave Trauma Centre brought in their photographic exhibition, ‘Injured on That Day’. History and politics teacher, Denise Johnston, had launched the school initiative to help prevent teenagers from supporting violence.


‘We want to give them an objective narrative of the past.’ When Lyra was the same age as these pupils,


she won the Sky News Young Journalist of the Year Award, 2006. She had just finished her GCSEs at St Gemma’s school in North Belfast, where the 16-year-old wrote about the high rate of young male suicide, one of the most tragic legacies of the Troubles. The night after that school launch, on Easter


Thursday, Lyra had been reporting on riots in Creggan, when she was shot by a gunman from the dissident group the New IRA who fired blindly towards police, journalists, and onlookers. She died instantly. That morning, she had phoned me to hear how the St Louis event had gone. Lyra had a deep and questing curiosity of the Troubles, which had largely finished before she went to secondary school. She was on her way to Derry, to meet the love


of her life, Sara. The two had met twelve months before and Lyra planned to propose to her when they went on a trip to New York this May. The ring was in her mother’s house in Belfast. She died by Sara’s side, in pursuit of the


second love of her life, investigative journalism. In 2006 she had told the BBC, in an interview about her Sky award: ‘I know this is my vocation, this is just what I want to do.’


(Continued on page 5)


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