An author, speaker and gay-rights activist, she was shot during rioting on Thursday just before tweeting: “Derry tonight. Absolute madness.”
DUBLIN — Lyra McKee, the 29-year-old Northern Ireland journalist who was shot dead on Thursday night in Londonderry, considered herself a member of a generation whose lives would be haunted by the legacy of the Troubles of 1968 to 1998 but who would never know such violence themselves.
In an article she wrote in 2016 for the website mosaicscience.com, Ms. McKee spoke of her generation as the Ceasefire Babies — “those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional I. R. A. cease-fire was called.”
“I was four,” she wrote, adding: “We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined not to witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils never seemed to reach us.”
Ms. McKee, an author and freelance journalist, was killed while reporting on a night of violent unrest in Londonderry. Shortly before she died, she posted a picture of the rioting on Twitter with the words “Derry tonight. Absolute madness.”
The police in Northern Ireland attributed the killing to the New Irish Republican Army, a violent splinter group of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary organization that renounced violence in 2005 after decades of armed struggle to end British rule in Northern Ireland and unite it with the Republic of Ireland.
[Read the Times news account of the violence.]
The Troubles, as the turmoil has been called, pitted mostly Roman Catholic Irish nationalists against the British Army, the Northern Ireland police and mostly Protestant loyalists. The strife came to an end with the signing of the multiparty Good Friday Agreement of 1998, although low-level violence and militant activity have continued.
Rejecting the Good Friday Agreement, a number of small republican factions, including the New I.
