The Belfast Telegraph Trampled on the Memory of my Murdered Friend for Clicks

John Laverty is a terrible writer and an even worse person.

I had intended to publish something today that was in fitting with my usual fare — yet another diatribe about the moral deficiencies of the tech industry, and the people who lead it. That was my plan, but it went out of the window when some sneery, turtle-necked ghoul at the Belfast Telegraph decided to dance on the grave of one of my best friends.

I am sorry. This piece will be personal, and it’s not about tech, and it’s being written in a state of what I can only describe as apoplectic grief and anger, in part because some repugnant, click-hungry piece of shit decided to prise open the wounds that, six years later, have barely healed, and then pour salt on them.

In 2019, my friend Lyra McKee was murdered on the streets of Derry’s Creggan area by a stray bullet fired from the gun of a New IRA terrorist. McKee had attended a protest in her capacity as a journalist, and she was standing on the sidelines. Twelve rounds were fired aimlessly in the direction of the police. One hit her in the head.

Lyra’s murder became a subject of national anguish and international curiosity, in part because she was the first journalist murdered in Northern Ireland since the 2001 killing of Martin O’Hagan, but also because she belonged to the generation that grew up knowing only peace.

Lyra would have been eight when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, which resulted in the majority of paramilitary groups disarming. She would have been sixteen when the Irish and British governments (as well as the various parties in the North) signed the St Andrews Agreement, which created the political institutions and power-sharing agreements that, although imperfect, have sustained peace all those years later.

Her murder should have belonged to an earlier era — a time when the ballot box was yet to triumph over the armalite, and when savage acts of political violence were depressingly common.

In 2019, we should have been past this shit.

I wasn’t there when it happened, but the events of that night are burned into my memory. Lyra’s partner, Sara, called my wife around thirty minutes after it happened. It was late at night.

We cried. I tweeted out a tribute, not knowing she hadn’t yet been named. That tribute was then picked up by the national and international media. My phone started vibrating with replies and requests for comment. I didn’t sleep that night, instead pacing around my patio. I called my parents in floods of tears at three AM. After that, everything feels fuzzy.

After the initial shock had faded, I looked at my phone to see dozens of emails from reporters around the world. I figured that those closest to her would, undoubtedly, be in the same position, and so decided that the best way to honor Lyra’s memory — and to help out her family — was to answer every single email and phone call that came my way, no matter who it came from.

I went on TV in Germany. I appeared on BBC TV twice, including on the morning of her funeral, as well as on various BBC radio shows. I spoke to Carol Off of the CBC. I penned a eulogy for The Telegraph, and spoke to reporters from daily newspapers across the UK and Ireland.

Lyra’s funeral came one week after her murder. Despite coming from Catholic stock, it was held at Belfast’s Anglican cathedral, with the ceremony officiated by both Catholic and Anglican clergy. Theresa May, who was Prime Minister at the time, was in attendance, as was the then-leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn. The leaders of every major Northern Irish political party were present, as were the Taoiseach and President of the Republic of Ireland.

At the back, television cameras loomed over the congregation, broadcasting the funeral live on BBC News, and streaming it online too.

And there were her friends and family, who had filled every inch of available space within St Anne’s Cathedral, with others — some who perhaps didn’t know her, but nonetheless shared the grief of those who loved Lyra — waiting outside.

Lyra wasn’t just a reminder that the bad old days of The Troubles hadn’t, in fact, fully passed — and that remnants of a darker, more violent time were still among us. She was a human being whose light immeasurably bettered those who were fortunate to know her.

I consider myself one of those people. Day or night, I could call Lyra and she’d answer. She was only a year older than me, but she was already far more accomplished than I was, being both new to journalism and having no formal training. She put me in contact with sources, provided helpful advice, but most of all, she was a friend.

We had our own little in-jokes. Whenever I rang her, I’d adopt an exaggerated Northern Irish accent based on Harry Enfield’s William Ulsterman character — itself a caricature of the late Rev. Ian Paisley — and say things like:

“I AM MAKIN’ A LEGITIMATE REQUEST TO KNOW HOW ARE YAEEEEEE DOING.”

She’d then do an exasperated sigh — as if we haven’t already done this routine hundreds of times already — and then respond in the same exaggerated accent. It was our little thing. An in-joke that belonged to us — and only to us.

I actually met Lyra for the first time in 2016. My friend, Bryan Clark, had just joined The Next Web and offered me a free ticket to the annual conference. I said yes, booked a flight and the cheapest room I could find (at the hilariously-named Hans Brinker Budget Hotel), and then called Lyra.

“Want a cheap vacation to Amsterdam? All you need to buy is your flight.”

She said yes. Before then, we’d only spoken online, or through the phone. We hadn’t met in person, but she trusted me.

Our spartan accommodations — which Lyra described as being “reminiscent of a Thai prison” — should have undermined that trust. Etched in the whitewashed walls was some cyrillic graffiti. The toilet and shower was a perspex cube with a foot-long gap between the bottom of the door and the floor, meaning that whenever one person took a shower, the other person had to turn their head and pretend that they could read Russian. When one person used the toilet, the other heard everything.

This was the first time we had met, but if you were someone watching from the outside, you wouldn’t have been able to tell. We looked like we were best friends — people who grew up together, or perhaps were the kinds of siblings that grew up extremely close, and remained so even as they entered adulthood.

When I got married, it felt obvious that I would ask her to be my groomswoman. She tied my necktie on the day of my wedding — something that I couldn’t handle, due to my dyspraxia, but something that, she joked, as a lesbian came natural to her.

In the years before her murder, we would take every opportunity that we could to meet up — normally in Belfast, her home, and the city that she loved. The dire economic prospects in Northern Ireland has meant that its biggest export is its young, but I couldn’t imagine Lyra ever leaving — even though she occasionally talked in fantastical terms about, one day, moving to San Francisco or Boston.

It was a dream that, like so many others, had been snatched from her by the cowardly actions of a man who, to this day, lacks the moral courage to take accountability for what he did, and what he robbed from so many of us. Those who loved Lyra do not know closure — though a trial is ongoing.

The reason I’ve committed so many words to telling you about who Lyra was, and why she mattered to those who loved her, is because I need to give you the context behind why myself and so others who knew Lyra are so angry at the Belfast Telegraph and its columnist, John Laverty, who in an attempt to find a local spin on an international story, juxtaposed her with Charlie Kirk while also downplaying the reasons why people loved her so much.

The article starts like this:

I didn’t know the late Lyra McKee, never had the pleasure of meeting her. I did speak to her once, though, having answered a persistently-ringing landline in the office one night.

She wanted to know if the news desk had received a piece she’d sent. I confirmed that it had.

This unremarkable exchange lasted less than a minute — which, going by the revisionist utterances of certain others in my profession, was more than enough to place me in the “best friends with Lyra” category.

The 29-year-old victim of a Derry rioter’s stray bullet died unaware of how many “best friends” she had in the media and that, posthumously, she’d transmogrify from relatively unknown writer into one of the most instantly recognised journalists in Northern Ireland’s history.

Firstly, John, go fuck yourself. By your own admission, you did not know her, so therefore how can you possibly know how close she was to other journalists.

The reason why so many people described Lyra as their best friend is because Lyra made everyone feel like she was their best friend. I’m curious, how many people would describe you as their best friend?

Secondly, John: “relatively unknown writer?” Go fuck yourself.

The first time I met Lyra, she was crowdfunding her investigation into the murder of Robert Bradford — a cold case that was, at that point, decades old, and had confounded what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary. She was bold enough to think that she could succeed where the establishment failed.

Enough people knew Lyra and believed in her vision to actually commit to giving her regular donations, and if I recall correctly, at one point she was making around £12k a year. She had just signed a two-book deal with Faber and Faber — a publisher that had previously released works by C.S. Lewis and Seamus Heaney.

She was giving TED talks and had bylines in a bunch of places, including Private Eye and… yes… the Belfast Telegraph.

Go. Fuck. Yourself.

It continues:

The tragedy of Lyra came to mind following that recent horrific death of another influential victim of gun crime, Charlie Kirk, and the fallout from his brutal assassination.

Like Lyra, the senseless and all-too-public murder of the 31-year-old firebrand produced instant global awareness of someone who, prior to what happened in Utah that fateful afternoon, was not particularly well known in many circles outside of the US. A divisive figure, sure, but what befell this happily married father-of-two was wrong, something acknowledged by an overwhelming majority of right-thinking people.

I suppose both Lyra and Kirk could be described as an “influential victim of gun crime,” but that’s where the comparison ends.

Their political views were diametrically opposed. Kirk was not a journalist. Lyra was. While you correctly describe Kirk as “divisive,” Lyra was someone who loved all, no matter their ethnic or religious background, and whose funeral was held in a church not of her own faith, and officiated by both Protestant and Catholic ministers — a powerful symbol in a city known for being divided by religion.

Seriously, what were you getting at here?

Laverty continues:

The subsequent grief expressed by those who didn’t know and had never met Charlie Kirk is what’s known as parasocial attachment — an unreciprocated sense of intimacy towards a prominent figure in which the follower feels they know that person as a friend.

Perhaps, but again, I’m left wondering what the connection between Lyra and Kirk is? Are you suggesting that those who mourned her were, in fact, parasocially attached to her?

No, dipshit. People loved Lyra. She was gregarious and bright, and she made an effort to know everyone who crossed her path. She bettered everyone who knew her — and we were lucky that she chose to share her light with as many as possible in her short 29 years on this planet.

Laverty’s implication that the grief felt after Lyra’s death by many is some weird parasocial phenomenon continues throughout the piece. He brings up the death of Princess Diana, which he describes as “the biggest mass parasocial episode of all time,” saying:

“Who could forget the teddy bears, the countless cellophane-wrapped bouquets outside Buck House, the unashamed public weeping for the “People’s Princess”, and the anger directed at folk like me who weren’t inclined to wail and blub alongside them.”

After bringing up Queen Elizabeth, he then moves on to Jimmy Saville — a British TV presenter and arguably one of the most prolific child sex offenders this country has ever known, and whose crimes came to light only after his death.

There’s no doubt that Diana’s untimely death in that Parisian underpass set a template for UK public mourning — well, at least until Jimmy Savile’s funeral delivered a more chastening sense of retrospection.

I’ll spare the blushes of the various orators who said the following about the monstrous serial paedophile and necrophiliac during his funeral service:

“I hope God will fix it that Jimmy gets the ultimate reward — a place in Heaven”... “a man who made staff and patients feel better; ‘good’ was never enough for him”... “he was as he appeared — a caring man”.

Outside Leeds Cathedral that day in November 2011, fans of this “national treasure” donned blonde wigs, tinted glasses and cigars in honour of what BBC Online described as “an extraordinary man”.

What the fuck were you trying to get at here, John?

Seriously, I want to understand how you wove a thread that started with my murdered friend, and then went on to one of the most reviled pedophiles this country has ever known. What were you thinking? I want to understand your thought process.

Laverty meanders some more, before saying:

“Kirk was one of the POTUS’s “best friends” and, unlike countless others who descended on Glendale, Arizona, last week, he has a myriad of photographs to justify that claim.

Okay, so now I’m defending The Donald. It’s time to stop typing.”

No, dipshit. The time to stop typing was when you sat down before your laptop to write this fucking dogshit column which — even if I divorce myself from the emotional context that drove me to write this newsletter — fucking sucked.

You are a bad writer. You are not good at this. And the fact that you continue doing this job — which necessitates publishing words that other people read — suggests that you’re either oblivious to your own professional inadequacies, or you’re surrounded by people who lack the heart to tell you as much.

You are also a terrible human being, but that’s by-the-by.

I have worked with people who, very obviously, cannot do their jobs and only got hired through a miracle of blagging. You have seemingly been doing this shit for a while, which only raises the question: how.

Obviously, I have an axe to grind — and it’s one I fully intend to do so — but John, I have to tell you that you are, in fact, a fucking abysmal writer. The entire premise of the article screams: “HOW DO I CAPITALIZE ON A TIMELY GLOBAL NEWS STORY BUT ALSO WITH A LOCAL ANGLE BECAUSE I WRITE FOR A LOCAL NEWSPAPER?”

You’re about as subtle as I am tranquil — and I’m really, really, really fucking angry.

Your grotesque opportunism reeks, so much that I can smell it from across the Irish sea from my office in Liverpool.

Having found — or, more accurately, contrived — that link, you were confronted with yet another problem. It turns out, linking Lyra with Charlie Kirk, despite the two having about as much in common as you have with basic human decency, only gets you a few hundred words, and so you have to bulk it out.

How? I’m still, having read and re-read your piece-of-shit article multiple times, trying to figure that out.

Did an editor read this before it went live? Was that editor sober? Were they concussed? These are the questions that I — and everyone else who is currently very, very angry with you, John — want answered.

But perhaps your biggest fuck-up wasn’t your framing, or the fact that — I repeat myself — you are not a good writer.

It’s that you pissed off people who loved Lyra, and still, all these years later, are mourning her. People who will tell you as much in the comments to your article, on BlueSky and on Twitter, and to your face should you ever cross their paths.

And, given that Lyra was beloved by so many in Belfast, I would say that will happen sooner rather than later.

You also pissed me off, and I have no problem expending nearly 3,000 words explaining both your moral and professional deficiencies, and to question how, in a media ecosystem that is dogged with layoffs and newsroom cutbacks, you have somehow managed to escape unscathed.

Your existence is to rebut the professional darwinism that defines modern journalism, where not even the best are guaranteed to survive.

How, given your personal and professional mediocrity, do you have a job, John? I’m dying to know. Are you like the character Milton from Office Space — someone who should have been laid off years ago, and would have been if not for a technical glitch that kept him on the company payroll?

What is your secret, John? What’s the magical force that’s stopped you from embarking upon the same career in PR that has befallen other (and, I daresay, more talented) journalists?

I have no problem telling you this to your face, and when I publish this newsletter, I’m going to email it right to you. I will tag you on Twitter and LinkedIn, and I will leave no room for you to question whether or not you fucked up.

I’ll be honest, John. I found your entire fucking article shitty, and badly-composed, and just plain offensive. But as I wrap this newsletter up, I think I’ve found something that offends me even more.

The fact that you still have a job.

I’ll close by repeating something I’ve said in this piece three times already.

Fuck you, John.