Lyra MCKEE

Journalist, writer and LGBTQI campaigner Lyra McKee was shot dead on 18 April 2019 by a masked gunman as she was observing a riot on the Creggan estate in Derry, Northern Ireland. She was standing beside a police vehicle when a gunman fired on police officers and onlookers. She died in hospital soon afterwards. On 14 September 2022, Niall Sheerin, from Derry, was sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing the gun used to murder McKee. Three men from Derry have been charged with her murder. Their trial opened in May 2024 and was ongoing as of 31 December 2024.  

The first killing of a journalist in Northern Ireland since that of Martin O’Hagan in 2001, 

Lyra McKee’s death was met with outrage from political leaders and others in Ireland and worldwide. On 23 April 2019, the ‘New IRA’ paramilitary group issued a statement in which it issued ‘sincere apologies’ for McKee’s death, adding that she was not the intended target. By the time she died, aged 29, McKee had worked on numerous print and online publications including Buzzfeed, Private Eye, The Atlantic and the Belfast Telegraph. Her hugely popular blog, ‘Letters to my 14-year-old self’, chronicled her experiences as a gay woman. In June 2019, her book Angels with Blue Faces, based on her four-year investigation into the killing of an MP, was published posthumously. At the time of her death, she was working on a second book, The Lost Boys, about the disappearance of children in Northern Ireland, which remains under review. A collection of her writings, Lost, Found, Remembered, was published in 2020.