Here is an admirable documentary about the brilliant life and tragic death of author and journalist Lyra McKee, shot dead in 2019 at the age of 29 by a stray bullet from the New IRA as she covered riots in Derry’s Creggan estate. Apart from being a grotesque homicide, perpetrated by swaggeringly unrepentant and clumsy extremists, the McKee killing represented a culture clash and a generational collision. An inspirational young LGBTQ writer, McKee came from a Republican community in Belfast, had written on depression among the post-Good Friday generation, challenged the UK government’s line on the 1971 Ballymurphy massacre, confronted homophobia in Catholicism and Islam, investigated the class inequality of the new peace dividend and – perhaps most importantly of all – started on what was set to be her first major work, a book entitled The Lost Boys, a study of the children who went missing during the Troubles, almost certainly in each case because they were witnesses to terrorist crime.
