5


As the funeral of Lyra McKee began in Belfast, RTÉ staff gathered to give her a minute’s applause.


(Continued from page 4) The interview makes for hard watching. The


slight, glowing schoolgirl in uniform, grinning confidently. ‘It’s shown me what I can do.’ I had known Lyra since 2006. Lyra was a kind,


courteous and thoughtful young woman, desperately eager not to offend the sensitivities of those, like me, who might be twice her age. I remember having lunch with her in the Kitchen Bar, on the corner of Belfast’s Victoria Square, when I got momentarily irritated with her for explaining hashtags to me. We ended up laughing, as we so often did. I


don’t want to make Lyra sound like a plaster saint. She had a feisty temper. She also had the dirtiest laugh I had ever heard. And she didn’t back down. Many of her published investigations have been shared around the world in these past weeks. She had crowd-funded and written her first book, ‘Angels With Blue Faces’, about what she told me was the real story behind the murder of the Rev. Robert Bradford MP, which is due to be published by Excalibur Press this year. She was halfway through the first of a two-book publishing deal from Faber & Faber. In 2012, in a disarming tongue-in-cheek essay


for her online publication, Muckraker, that listed Northern Irish investigative journalists she described herself in this way: ‘Me: Works through to 3am most nights, permanently exhausted. Needs a haircut but doesn’t have time to get one.’ (https://muckrakerdotme.wordpress.com/


2012/08/07/whats-next-for-the-muckraker/) By 2016, Forbes magazine had echoed her


confidence by including Lyra’s name in their elite international list of ‘Thirty under Thirty’ people to watch.


In St Anne’s Cathedral, I sat behind British Prime Minister Theresa May, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Karen Bradley, First Minister of Northern Ireland Arlene Foster and her Deputy, Michelle O’Neill. I joined those in the congregation who


spontaneously rose and applauded when Belfast priest Father Martin Magill asked: ‘Why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year- old woman with her whole life in front of her to get us to this point?’


Mourners outside joined with us inside as we


saluted her life and echoed his words. Viewers watched the unprecedented scenes live- streamed by Sky News and BBC. In Queens, New York, where they had heard that Lyra and Sara had planned to get engaged this year, the Irish Writers and Artists Association watched as they planned a festival and reading of Lyra’s work in June. In her foreword to Paper Trailers, The Cold


Case Detectives, a collection of victims’ stories, published by victims’ campaigner, writer and researcher, Ciarán Mac Airt, Lyra wrote: ‘Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. So does this one. It can be summarised as a bullet, a bullet and a bullet.’ She gave her share of proceeds from those sales to Paper Trail, a charity which helps all survivors of the conflict investigate the deaths of their loved ones during the Troubles. We echo the words of Ciarán Mac Airt: ‘The


story of Lyra McKee does not end with a bullet. Her family and friends will see to that.’


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