In a 1965 interview with the BBC, the author Edna O’Brien articulates the “stifling” landscape that Irish writers navigate, and how it creates “the urgency to write or to scream.” Her interview is sandwiched between others with men who laud the censorship of the arts in a not-so-distant past Ireland. Across her 19-book oeuvre, O’Brien captured an amorphous Ireland, and grappled with its suppressive past: a country reckoning with a new generation intent on its liberalisation. She is one of several era-defining veteran voices that shook a stagnant Irish society, writing both delicately and ferociously on war, gender, familial struggles, and social strife—giving voice to a generation of Irish women long bridled by the religious, patriarchal state.
That sense of purpose and urgency reverberates through a new generation of Irish writers, and is captured in Lost, Found, Remembered, a new commemorative selection of essays, book passages, and articles both unreleased and well-known from the late Belfast-born writer and journalist Lyra McKee. From Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the imperfect peace brought by the Good Friday Agreement came a post-conflict generation: the “ceasefire babes.” Though she hated that term, McKee reflected on it for a seminal article for the Atlantic in 2016. In it, she investigates the high suicide rates in some of NI’s most deprived communities, still dealing with the residual trauma of a war supposedly snuffed out over a decade ago. Like O’Brien years before, McKee illuminates the contemporary battles against Irish societal stopgaps.
“We were the Good Friday agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us,” McKee writes further in a Mosaic piece that same year. In both pieces, and in what became her journalistic endeavour, she deftly unpicks the layers of stigma that bolster silence around mental health and wider suffering in Northern Ireland. McKee treats the nebulous political and social constraints, the multi-faceted identities of the country, and the individuals at its stormy heart with care and compassion. She shows an acute awareness of the horrors and violence her generation was spared from, while navigating their own stifling world.
*** “I think it’s possible for the first time,” McKee writes in an excerpt from The Lost Boys, the book she was working on at the time of her death, “for someone of my generation to write about the conflict from a historical perspective.” Lost, Found, Remembered tracks just that. Just over a year ago, on Good Friday, 29-year-old McKee was shot and murdered by a dissident republican group as she observed rioting on the Creggan estate in Derry. Her senseless death was a seismic blow. She was a beloved friend and family member; a talented, empathetic, and valued voice in local and international media; an activist for LGBTQ+ issues and marginalised people. In her writing and life, she reflected the passion and potential of a post-conflict generation. The brevity of this collection, quietly framed by the knowledge that she too was to be a victim of the unresolved trauma she so valiantly explored, inspires an ache deep in any reader.
In this anthology we see a body of work by a writer who, while accomplished, was at the beginning of her burgeoning career. She was meticulously crafting her art and style, while documenting her own era. Articles in the Atlantic to the Mosaic, Buzzfeed and the Belfast Telegraph highlight McKee’s sharp reporting on a post-conflict Northern Ireland. She reported on the Ardoyne festival—a controversial republican-associated event—and the work being done by grassroots organisers to break sectarian barriers. Her perspective is sharp and diligent—"Northern Ireland’s leaders still can’t agree on one big issue: how to deal with the past,” written for Buzzfeed in 2015, offers a sweeping, steady eye on the Stormont government collapse, made all the more poignant that she wasn’t alive to see it restored.
There is a refreshing, dynamic outlook that harnesses journalism and opinion writing to galvanise communities centuries divided, with a hopeful approach. A 2014 piece rightfully picks up on the growing irrelevance of the old constitutional debate on the national question that for so long dominated NI’s politics and still pocks its tribalistic political parties. “I don’t want a united Ireland or a stronger Union,” she writes. “I just want a better life.”
Her empathy when asking tough, important questions is crucial, and she listens to the answers with care, as seen in her treatment of sources and the compassionate picture she captures of human experiences. “Why I set myself on fire at Belfast City Hall,” published in the Belfast Telegraph in 2015, goes beyond tabloid sensationalism to profile a destitute Algerian refugee and the ruthless system he was acting out against. Towards those swept up in the conflict, she was sympathetic and intelligent. “When you were a working-class kid with no prospects or money, nothing made you feel as powerful as a weapon in your fist,” she writes in The Lost Boys transcripts.
Sinéad Gleeson, the author of the searing 2019 essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life, remembers meeting McKee at a panel discussion. She describes her writing as “political, fearless, but also personal.” Gleeson, who herself writes powerfully on the body, womanhood, and its implicit politics in a patriarchal Ireland, says: “she had a way of writing about broad subjects like the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland, while making it specific to her own experience, and deeply humane.”
Gleeson points to McKee’s Atlantic piece, “Suicide of the ceasefire babies” as emblematic of McKee’s ability to merge forensic reporting style with humane portraiture. “It has all the fury and curiosity of good investigative journalism, and continues to examine the legacy of war and terrorism long after the bombs stop going off.”
The article reports on the rising suicide rates, interwoven with McKee’s friend Johnny’s multiple suicide attempts. “At one point, Lyra is told (erroneously) that Johnny has actually succeeded in taking his own life, and her first response is ‘How can he be dead?’ Whenever I think of Lyra, I feel that too: her loss as a person, and of all the things she would have gone on to achieve” Gleeson says.
In an illuminating piece for the Muckraker, McKee offers advice on how to be tenacious when pursuing investigative stories, and succinctly outlines her own mission: “certain stories turned me into a workaholic monster… these stories had two common themes: 1) injustice and 2) a need for someone to write the wrong.” She concludes: “reporting for the sake of reporting is not enough. It must lead to a greater outcome than publication of reporting.”
“So hope for a great sea-change/ On the far side of revenge./ Believe that further shore/ Is reachable from here./ Believe in miracles/ And cures and healing wells” writes Seamus Heaney in The Cure at Troy, a play that aligns the Trojan War myth with the Troubles and Apartheid. “That line reminds me of Lyra’s own attitude to hope,” says journalist and Northern Protestants author Susan McKay. “It is a deeply serious one—it’s a political imperative to be hopeful. Despair is not an option. That’s what I felt reading her writing.” McKay, a writer who has gone deep on Northern Ireland’s political legacy too, wrote tributes for McKee in both the Guardian and the New Yorker following McKee’s death.
McKay points to McKee’s “Letter to my 14-year-old self” and her TEDxStormontWomen talk —which see McKee discuss her personal journey to self-acceptance as a gay woman who challenges prejudice—as prime examples of her power of storytelling and style. “It’s so moving, but she can be so funny!” says McKay. One particularly amusing and poignant moment is when McKee remembers coming out to her mother, who is relieved that her daughter isn’t announcing she’s pregnant. “She had a good sense of drama and comedy in her writing, on a topic that can be so hard for people to deal with. There’s a brevity that’s very special.”
She tells me about their symbiotic mentor-mentee relationship and friendship over the years. McKay taught McKee, a keen learner, classic “old-school” methods of reporting—meeting sources in real life and uncovering stories by visiting small communities. McKee, likewise, taught McKay about smartphone apps to stay up-to-date in the ever-growing digital journalism arena. McKay reflects on McKee’s instrumental part in envisioning a modern Ireland, using her journalism to right wrongs.
“I've long been of the view that the (Irish) border has been broken down by young women— with the issue of abortion, same-sex marriage, the activism and work that goes across the south and the north. From ‘Repeal the 8th’ to ‘The North is Next.’ The border for most young people today isn’t the most significant thing—it’s women’s rights, it’s human rights. Lyra saw this, and was embedded in it herself” McKay explains.
Padraig Reidy, a writer, editor, and editorial director at 89Up, was a friend of McKee’s. He astutely observes her style: “Lyra managed to be sincere without being self-important: a rare thing, particularly in a young writer dealing with big issues. She treated readers as she treated people in everyday life—with an assumption of equality and curiosity about the world.
“She's a joy to read because she treated readers as friends she wanted to tell an interesting story, not an audience to be addressed. And the stories always were interesting. It's just too sad that there won't be more.”
*** In the year since her death and past the publication of Lost, Found, Remembered, Northern Ireland and its decaying political arena has somewhat reluctantly been propelled forward—the NI executive was restored, and reform on abortion and marriage equality has been seen through. Its mental health crisis is still desperate with services constricted, paramilitaries still solid threats. It is an enduring shame that we don’t have McKee, her urgent voice, or her valiant pen to capture the choppy sea changes.
“There’s a brilliance in there, but Lyra was learning her craft,” adds McKay. “There’s so much promise, she had places to go, and there’s no getting away from the sadness of that. She's not a person who died when they had achieved everything that they were going to achieve.”
Still, her work and this collection feels ever more pertinent. We will need this brevity of reporting now and in the future. You can see her same commitment to community, justice, and peace-building in other young Irish writers—we see that same tenacity in the work of Caelainn Hogan, whose book Republic of Shame doggedly depicts the “shame industrial complex” of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes and Magdalene laundries; the Irish Times’ Sorcha Pollak on the horrors of Direct Provision and the people behind the immigration headline splashes, and Siobhan Fenton’s steely analysis of a turbulent Stormont.
As Glenn Patterson wrote at the time of Lyra’s death, “Now, more than ever, when it feels as if there are no words, we have to go on finding words.” With Lost, Found, Remembered, journalists, activists, organisers, and otherwise can be emboldened first to scream, and then to right the wrongs Lyra set out to.
Lost, Found, Remembered by Lyra McKee (Faber & Faber)
