Hope doesn’t last long where Lyra McKee was murdered

Hope is a strange thing to feel after a murder, particularly one as violent and sudden as Lyra McKee’s.

The 29-year-old journalist, who wrote about the aftermath of The Troubles, spent her last moments among petrol bombs, burning cars and armored police vehicles as she covered a riot on the Creggan estate in Derry on April 18, 2019.

Four shots rang out and she dropped to the floor, dead with a bullet in her head at the hands of the dissident republican New IRA.

A peace barely 20 years old looked set to unravel on in the very working class estates where the Troubles started 50 years before.

Lyra’s murder followed months of New IRA activity involving a car bomb outside a courthouse, and a letter bomb campaign targeting Heathrow Airport, Waterloo station and the University of Glasgow.

But for many in Northern Ireland, where nearly half of adults knows someone injured or killed in the Troubles, a return to war was out of the question.

Even Arlene Foster and Mary Lou McDonald sat side-by-side at Lyra’s funeral as their unionist and republican parties continued a more than two-year refusal to govern together.

Lyra’s last article was about the ‘ceasefire babies’, her generation born in the 1990s and promised the spoils of peace – safety and prosperity.

‘Your children, they’d told our parents, will be safe now’, she wrote.

‘The days of young people disappearing and dying would be gone now. Yet this turned out to be a lie.’

A legacy of violence in Northern Ireland

In many ways the Troubles started in 1969 because of economic and social inequality in a region carved to have an in-built Protestant majority.

Catholics felt locked out of power, trapped in poor quality housing and lower paying jobs.

When they tried to protest for civil rights in Derry’s Bogside in 1972, British soldiers killed 13 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

In her last article, Lyra wrote: ‘When you were a working-class kid with no money and no prospects, and feared people more violent than you, nothing made you feel as powerful as a weapon in your fist.’

The Troubles ended with Catholics offered an equal seat in government, a political route to achieve Irish unity, and the promise of better economic standing.

Doug Beattie, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party that negotiated the 1998 peace treaty, told Metro.co.uk: ‘You can go to some leafy suburbs and see people who have done extremely well for it.

‘You can go to some really hardened working class areas and you will see people who have done really well also.

‘But there’s an underclass that’s been ignored.’

This underclass is found in places like Creggan, one of the most deprived areas in Northern Ireland.

It’s so overwhelmingly Irish Catholic, the unionist parties don’t even run candidates in local elections here.

Pro-IRA graffiti reading ‘informants will be shot’ and ‘police will forget you, we won’t’ marked the walls even months after Lyra’s murder.

One of its councillors has been investigated numerous times for possible involvement in terrorist and criminal activity.

Jon Tonge, a politics professor at the University of Liverpool and an expert on Northern Ireland, said: ‘There are still hardcore areas that feel they haven’t seen the economic spoils of the peace. There are pockets of support.’

And in these pockets there are ‘hardcore fundamentalists who aren’t given to compromise, who try and recruit young people’ like those Lyra described, like the teenager police believe shot her.

A divided society and a broken government

When Lyra died, attention turned to the lingering inequality, poverty and lack of opportunity driving thousands of young people to emigrate and making others ripe for exploitation by extremist groups.

In the days afterwards, Prof Tonge wrote about ‘the hopes for progress revived by the tragic circumstances of Lyra McKee’s death’.

There was a government that needed restoring, bridges that needed building, and problems needed fixes in health, education, housing and the looming Brexit.

Lyra’s murder had shown ‘the futility of political violence’, Prof Tonge said, so maybe politicians could get on with ‘the business of compromise’.

‘I honestly though it was a catalyst where people would say, “that’s it, stop, this doesn’t need to carry on anymore”‘, Beattie said.

‘But we continued with boycotts, with government failing, with those gaps in society filled by men and women of violence.’

That sentiment is particularly strong among the ‘ceasefire babies’ and younger generations.

Róisín*, not her real name, is a 30-year-old who was raised Catholic in Ballymena, near Belfast.

She said: ‘You don’t really have hope for long when you’re from Northern Ireland because there’s always something.

‘A win never feels like a win. You’re always waiting for the bad thing that comes after.’

In many ways her life is better than her parents’ or grandparents’.

She didn’t pass through checkpoints manned by armed British soldiers on the way to school.

Her house has never been firebombed or the door kicked in.

‘People lead lives without having to worry about violence’ from either Irish republicans or British loyalists, as Prof Tonge put it.

Róisín may have grown up without her Protestant dad until her teens because his family couldn’t bear the thought of a ‘half a jaffa’ child.

But she has Protestant uncles, cousins and friends who go to parades and bonfires for July 12, celebrated by unionists.

She’s even gone with them because for younger generations it can more easily be ‘an opportunity to do some drinking’ rather than a point of existential difference.

Despite this, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided place where 90% of schools are segregated along religious lines.

Prof Tonge said: ‘Protestants and Catholics live separate lives, go to separate schools, go to different universities, levels of intermarriage remain low, housing segregation in working class areas remains acute.’

Róisín remembers going to separate underage discos, because even though she doesn’t practice or go to mass, in Northern Ireland she’s ‘thought of as a Catholic, no matter what’.

She said: ‘That’s just something left behind in the rumble of the ceasefire. There’s just this underbelly, this unspoken thing that’s always there.

‘Whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, you hold it and you’re always apprehensive of whether I can exist safely in this place.’

Is there a brighter future?

There are signs society is moving beyond this.

Beattie has always identified as both British and Irish, and he feels confident existing as such in the UK, just as someone who is Scottish or Welsh can also be British.

Sinn Féin is increasingly trying to project an image of a future united Ireland where people can be Protestant and British and still feel at home.

That’s made easier by the dramatic collapse of the Catholic Church and its influence in an increasingly progressive Republic in the last 20 years.

South of the border, the conversation has shifted from a question of ‘if’ unification will happen, to how and when it can be achieved.

As Róisín said: ‘I don’t want to get a united Ireland and have everyone who’s unionist or Protestant all of a sudden feel like we did.’

It’s all a drastic change from the eve of peace when unity seemed impossible, according to Prof Tonge.

But the opportunity peace offered to create a society where people can coexist and thrive has been ‘absolutely squandered’, Beattie said.

He pins the blame on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) who have alienated more liberal wings of unionism with its staunch opposition to LGBT+ rights, the Irish language and abortion, and its support for a hard Brexit.

For years, the region has gone through cycles of institutions collapsing because the dominant parties, the DUP and Sinn Féin, fall out in a political re-enactment of decades-long divides.

In the process they leave Northern Ireland with no government, no leadership and no change.

And the losers are the young still waiting for the spoils of peace.

Róisín said: ‘You want the world to share this love you have for your country.

‘You can see the potential, you can see what it can be, what it can contribute, and that potential is lying on the floor in the rubble with the rest of the aftermath of the Troubles.

‘It’s just another brick that hasn’t been picked up yet.’

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