Irlanda
Lyra McKee remembered by Sara Canning
31 March 1990 – 18 April 2019
Her partner on the murdered Northern Irish journalist who had time for everyone on both sides of the divide
• Scott Walker remembered by Michael Morris
• Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2019 in full
Lyra and I met on a dating app called Plenty of Fish, the day after St Paddy’s Day, 2018. We started talking and we didn’t stop for a year. I didn’t realise who she was until about an hour into our chat. I asked her what she did and she brushed it off by saying she worked for a Silicon Valley news site and did a bit of journalism on the side. That’s when it clicked and I was, like: “Oh God, hold on, are you that Lyra McKee?”
Afterwards, we kept texting and DM-ing each other and eventually I drove up from Derry to Belfast to meet her on the Saturday before Easter weekend. I was really nervous, to tell the truth. I felt like I was in a bit over my head. I remember thinking, she has the world at her feet – a Silicon Valley job, a two-book deal with a big publisher in London – and I work in a hospital sticking needles in people.
She took on other people's problems, their pain. It would spill over into her own life and she'd worry a lot
Continue reading...Northern Ireland’s sectarian parties punished by rise of the non-aligned
The battle for Belfast North felt like a throwback to the Troubles, with dirty tricks, gory posters and sectarian rhetoric. It pitted the Democratic Unionist party’s deputy leader, Nigel Dodds, against Sinn Féin’s rising star, John Finucane, in Northern Ireland’s most bitter contest.
In a possible first for a UK election, a candidate was outed as a public urinator. Police caught Finucane, the mayor of Belfast, peeing outside city hall one night after he was locked out of his office with a full bladder, it emerged. Puns about who leaked the leak provided fleeting comic relief.
Sinn Féin and the DUP have both interpreted the results as punishment for their failure to restore power-sharing at Stormont
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