Nuala O’Loan
Lyra McKee 
The View
Easter for me is a time of great mystery. This Easter Week I find myself reflecting on all that we experienced doing those brief three days. Now we celebrate the Resurrection, but, for all of us, as we carry on through life’s journey, the carrying of the cross continues and will continue, even as we experience the joy and peace of Easter, which resonates in my heart as I write this.
For the dying do not cease to die here on earth, the suffering do not cease to suffer, and, for the most part, the lonely, the marginalised and the weary do not cease in their struggle.
On Holy Thursday night, for young Lyra McKee, who four minutes earlier had tweeted of the “absolute madness” she was witnessing in the Creggan in Derry, death came without warning, savagely, as she was shot in the head by a terrorist gunman. For her partner, her family, her friends, the death of this feisty, clever, caring young woman must have brought unimaginable pain and desolation.
Consolation, please God, will come, but in this glorious Easter week the darkness and the sadness in their hearts must be almost tangible, even though I suspect they will laugh and smile too, as they remember so many incidents from her short but very full young life. A brave young soul made by God, loved by God, gone home to God.
Casualties
Her death coming as it did 21 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement must make us all pause for thought.
Between March 2018 and February 2019 in Northern Ireland there were two security related deaths, 122 casualties of paramilitary shootings and assaults,15 bombing incidents and 37 shooting incidents. Just as loyalist paramilitaries are still active, engaged in killing, extortion, and similar crime, so Republican terrorists are still trying to bomb, maim and kill. I have no doubt that the bullet which killed young Lyra McKee, as she stood near a police landrover, was meant for a police officer.
It takes great courage to come forward and pass information on after a terrorist murder like this. That is what must happen though. The communities from which the people who killed Lyra McKee came must stand together and provide the information the police need to bring the killers to justice. I know that is very hard to do, but it can be done, it has been done before. There must be no exiling, no shunning, no attacking those who help to bring murderers to justice, rather a quiet acceptance of and gratitude for their courage.
After the death of Lyra McKee, for the first time, I think, I saw clergymen of different denominations, politicians of all kinds and lots of ordinary people standing behind ACC Stephen Martin of the PSNI as he appealed for help and for information. This was no accident. It was the whole community, united in horror and grief standing together to say: “This was wrong. It should never happen again.”
The problem we have here in the North is that, whilst our people stood together on that occasion, there are still far too many occasions when we do not stand together, when we do not see ourselves as one people, because we are still a community divided to such an extent by our historic experiences and fears.
There are those who work tirelessly for peace and reconciliation, and they are good people. Despite them, however, sectarianism still dominates our lives. People talk freely of their unease if they find themselves in certain places at certain times, knowing that they may be attacked.
Flags are said to fly to celebrate – yet the appearance of paramilitary flags among the Union flags on one side, and the Tricolours on the other side, send a sinister message. Most people interpret it as meaning “you are not welcome here”. Why else would those paramilitary flags fly? What other message can they be sending? We are still very much geographically divided.
We can be divided in our hearts too, not really seeing the other as one of us. True, many people have moved beyond overt sectarianism and there are many friendships and relationships across the divide.
Yet there can still rest deep within the psyche of both sides of our tiny little world in Northern Ireland, a deep rooted distrust of the other.
Trust grows from common experience: from simple things like grieving with each other when people die, rejoicing together when babies are born, celebrating life’s little joys and happinesses together, from caring for each other and knowing each other as our true neighbour – in Christian terms, our brother or sister in Christ.
History tells us that it takes decades for the kind of distrust, which is the product of our Troubles, to be healed or at least to cease to divide. Peace agreements break down. I once heard, at a global peace conference in Norway, that the average peace agreement lasts 15 years! There is plenty of evidence of that around the world.
Even when we think that ISIS, the IRA, or the UVF, for example, have been defeated, we know it is possible for one man or woman to do great evil in the name of one organisation or another.
On Easter Sunday morning we heard of the terrible slaughter in Sri Lanka where 290 died and over 400 were injured – the focus of these attacks were Catholics and other Christians and foreigners staying in big hotels. As I write this so many families are searching, trying to find out what happened to their loved ones. Many people alive in Northern Ireland today will know what that feels like.
Their deaths seem to have been caused by a small number of suicide bombers. We have seen that it takes very few people working in isolated cells to inflict grievous harm on so many.
This all seems such a long way from the joy of Easter, but the reality is that part of our work of carrying the cross must involve constant attempts to build trust across communities, countries and the world.
Consensus
Here in Northern Ireland we have had no government for 27 months. It is time that that our politicians, rather than refusing to go into government, do so on the basis that they will work together to reach consensus where there is consensus, and will accept that sometimes it is not possible to legislate in a particular area because the will of all the people, expressed democratically, does not endorse a particular law. Where that is the case, politicians must work in harmony to try and provide maximum benefit for all our people.
If they do not do so, they demonstrate and perpetuate the division between us.
For the families of Lyra McKee and of all those who have died through terrorism here and elsewhere, we can pray for peace. We must do more though. I think it is very simple: we must challenge ourselves and our “own” to ensure that in every act we seek to respect, to love and to cherish all those whom we encounter. It was for this that Christ died. This at least we can do.
