The apology from the New IRA used the term ‘tragically killed, while standing beside enemy forces’. A statement from a political organisation, Saoradh, said to be close to the New IRA, announced that a rally planned for Easter Sunday was called off, as a mark of respect for the ‘tragic and accidental killing of Lyra McKee’.
Her killing was not accidental. It was collateral.
'Collateral damage’ is a euphemism, used by military groups of all types, since the 1960s, to limit the negative effects on themselves from the killings of non-combatants. It is a controversial term, criticised for dehumanising the victims, while appearing to indicate that the action that led to the killing was agent-less.
Yet it is the appropriate term for the killing of Lyra McKee, in a society where military thinking dominates, where solutions are fudged, forced and battered, where peace-making is a battle of narrowly-contending ideologies, aspirations and ethno-religious groupings, as powerful state entities stand aside.
The militant republican who committed the foul killing – I called him DENIZEN, in a play from 2014 – already had blood on his hands.
Exhibit D. A life-less severed limb.
You see my handiwork. Yes, I did this.
And telling why, one reason we are here.
All damage is largely collateral,
When war is fought on the streets where we live.
When state power emerges from its lair
And wrecks the small spaces of daily lives.
Nothing clean. All is filthy, dirty, grim.
Sump oil running beneath a rancid wreck.
The play is an act of describing and imagining, that places the militant within the globalised military context in which we live, not to excuse his actions, but to properly set them, so that they may be viewed clearly and so that all such groups, state and non-state, may be held to account and brought to book.
She is the civilian who meets the soldier
Bombing Afghans' wedding celebrations.
The pale child who meets the atom's furnace
On the blasted streets of Hiroshima,
Where collateral blisters her young face.
For Lyra McKee is everywhere, not only in Creggan. She is the child on the bus blown to bits in Yemen; she is the school-goer mown down by an automatic weapon at her school; she is the sick infant in hospital blown up in an airstrike; she is the old man, bowing his head in prayer, as the bomb goes off.
She is collateral.
And she is more.
She is not a euphemism. She is an agent, in her own right.
A number of her friends went to the office of Saoradh and daubed red hand-prints on the outside of the building. This is an action that could be replicated across the world, echoing the actions by non-violent anti-war protesters, who poured paint down the steps of government buildings in the US.
For active agents, such as Lyra’s friends, is what it will take to put aside the military mindset that bedevils humans relations these days. And why does it do so? Because it brings wealth to the few and fear to the many.
For violence changes everything
And does stop war. Until it starts to sing …
Oh! Lord, give us some peace!
… again. When Business starts it up. Again.
The play is an act of imagining. We will need more. And we will need to band together. Among the many private and public reasons that Lyra McKee’s killing has struck such a chord internationally is the fact that she is a member of two groups; the LGBT community and the community of workers in her union, the NUJ. Both communities, as well as many others, including family and friends, have drawn our attention to Lyra McKee’s person, her life and her work.
Her 2016 piece on suicide among young people, for MOSAIC, reads tragically prescient of her own death by violence.
Those who survived the Troubles called us the Ceasefire Babies, as if resentful that we’d grown up unaccustomed to the sound of gunfire, assuming that we didn’t have dead to mourn like they did. Yet we did. Sometimes, I count their names on my fingers, quickly running out of digits. Friends, friends of friends, neighbours’ relatives, the kids whose faces I knew but whose names I learned only from the obituary column. The tragic irony of life in Northern Ireland today is that peace seems to have claimed more lives than war ever did.
For the peace we seemed to have has been processed to death, with little evidence of product for the people who live in Creggan.
Lyra McKee writes:
There is no single common factor in suicides among young people, according to O’Neill. Many things can be involved: educational underachievement, poverty, poor parenting. But the Ceasefire Babies are also dealing with the added stress of the conflict – even though most of them never witnessed it directly.
Since her death, there have been calls for the stalled political process to be re-started immediately. Imminent elections, and the way they connect with power-struggles at Westminster, will mean some token efforts may occur, but it is unlikely anything substantive will get going until the Autumn, as summer in Northern Ireland brings its own tensions.
So we are back to the communities, their solidarity and their strength, their red-hand actions and their support for each other. Even the militant can join in.
Can I be ambitious and imagine,
As the ancient man said, then vault myself
To a perch on history's other side?
I feel the fraught future in each instant.
The future is always fraught, for it is nothing but moments we make, with and for one another. How we make them, and with whom, is always contested. Here’s one moment, a fresh one, an imagined one in the play, yes, but, as Picasso says: Everything you can imagine is real.
Grab this pike, this long venerable spear.
Stand back! Draw near? This pike is yours. No fear.
I show this sign and create tomorrow.
The sign the militant makes is to break the pike across his knee and put the weapon away.
That’s a start.
DENIZEN, Dave Duggan; play text; Guildhall Press; ISBN 978 1 906271 87 9; Derry; 2014
The Irish News; newspaper, Belfast; 23.4.2019
The Derry Journal; newspaper; Derry; 23.4.2019
