Lyra McKee’s life must mean more than the way she died

Twenty one years ago this week, a deal was signed in Belfast that undoubtedly gifted many people with a future who would otherwise now be cold in the ground. The Good Friday Agreement saved lives in Northern Ireland and brought a measure of consensual politics, but there is no tent big enough to accommodate the sadists who inspired and now evade all responsibility for the death of journalist Lyra McKee on Thursday night in Derry.

She was murdered standing at police lines reporting on rioting orchestrated by dissident republicans who, in their desperation to kill Irish men and women in uniform protecting a community they hold hostage, took her life instead. The self-serving ‘apology’ later issued from a mouthpiece for the New IRA gunman, the apparently revolutionary but not very socialist ‘Saoradh,’ blamed the police for her death stating, ‘a republican volunteer attempted to defend people…after an incursion by heavily armed crown forces.’