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FOUNDING MEMBER
R EMEMBR A N C E
Lyra McKee in 2017.
Lyra McKee and the Truth
That Breathes Beyond Borders
BY SUSIE DAY
Lyra McKee’s fi rst love was
journalism. The youngest of
six, she was born in 1990,
in Northern Ireland, to a
Catholic family headed by a single
mother. She grew up just off Murder
Mile, the area in Belfast where nearly
a quarter of the 3,700 killings took
place during “the Troubles.”
To know McKee, you must fi rst
know something about the Troubles.
They began in 1968 when Northern
Ireland’s government — pro-British,
mostly Protestant — started crushing
the civil rights protests of the
minority Catholic population, which
had been shut out of jobs and political
power. The resulting partisan fury
between Catholic “Republicans” who
wanted a free Ireland, and Protestant
“Unionists,” proud to remain in the
UK, metastasized into paramilitary
groups led at one extremity by the
Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the
other by the Ulster Volunteer Force
(UVF). Their bombings and killings
lasted 30 years until 1998, when the
Good Friday Agreement was signed.
McKee was a “Ceasefi re Baby,”
one of thousands of children meant
to thrive, free from violence and factional
terror. But with “peace,” and
the assurance that Northern Ireland
remained in the United Kingdom, the
UK Government settled into a policy
of imperial neglect, further impoverishing
the six northern Irish counties
still under its control.
So McKee, like most of the Belfast
she knew, Catholic or Protestant, grew
up poor. She was born premature; as
a child she had to wear a corrective
eye patch and take remedial reading
classes. A shy, nerdly creature — and
budding queer — she spent her early
school years in quiet misery.
But at 14, McKee began to take an
interest in her school newspaper. She
joined Headliners, a charity supporting
young journalists, and at 16, won
Sky News’ Young Journalist Award
for a story on suicide rates in North
Belfast. She began, as she would continue,
sifting hard truths from the
cold cases of Northern Ireland’s past
— and from the despair and dearth of
jobs of its present. If 3,700 people died
during the Troubles, McKee wrote, by
2014, 3,709 had died by suicide — the
majority, Ceasefi re Babies.
Although quick to see social inequities,
McKee valued people over causes
INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISM FESTIVAL/WILLIAM GRAHAM
and harbored little fondness for groups
like the New IRA. Speaking for much
of her generation, she wrote, “I don’t
want a United Ireland or a stronger
Union. I just want a better life.”
Even after discovering journalism,
McKee spent her teens in secret agony,
fearing God’s wrath for her attraction
to women. When she was 20, she
tried to tell her mother, but, “sobbing
and shaking,” couldn’t get the words
out. Finally, her mother asked, “Are
you gay?”
“Yes, mummy, I’m so sorry.”
To which her mother replied,
“Thank God you’re not pregnant.”
McKee later described this incident
in an essay, “Letter to My 14-Year-Old
Self,” which became a small international
sensation and was made into
a short fi lm. “It won’t always be like
this,” she tells her audience, “It’s going
to get better.”
It did. Her writings on queerness
and Northern Ireland were published
in an array of outlets such as Buzzfeed
News, The Private Eye, Mosaic,
and The Belfast Telegraph. Her article,
“Suicide Among the Ceasefi re
Babies,” appeared in The Atlantic.
➤ MCKEE, continued on p.15
JANUARY 13 - January 26, 2 14 022 | GayCityNews.com
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