'I still miss her every day': Lyra McKee's partner on new film showing in Cork
The late Lyra McKee and partner Sara Canning.
“Some days I still can’t fathom it, some days I still wake up and think ‘How could somebody have done that, how can Lyra be dead?’”
Two-and-a-half years after Lyra McKee was murdered, her partner, Sara Canning, still struggles to come to terms with the loss of the woman she was going to marry. “It doesn’t seem real, and I still miss her every day and I still talk about her and think about her constantly.”
Sara and director Alison Millar are chatting about the late journalist in advance of the showing of Millar’s film Lyra at Cork International Film Festival.
Lyra McKee had earned a name as a respected investigative journalist covering the lives of those left behind in Northern Ireland in the two decades since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
Lyra was fatally shot while reporting from a riot in Derry’s Creggan on the night of Holy Thursday, 2019. Police blamed dissident Republicans for the killing. A number of people are facing charges in relation to events in Derry on the night of Lyra's death.
Lyra’s first book, Angels with Blue Faces, was about to be published when she was murdered, and she had been working on her planned second book, The Lost Boys, having a year earlier signed a two-book deal with Faber and Faber. She had bought an engagement ring and had planned to propose to Sara. She was 29-years-old.
Alison Millar, a BAFTA-winning director, had known Lyra for years and they had been close friends. She baulked initially at the thought of making a film about Lyra, but then Sara, and Lyra’s sister, Nichola, persuaded her.
“I felt ‘I don’t think I can do this’, and then Sara on one hand said ‘Well, people approached me from America and want to do a film’, and then Nichola would go ‘I have somebody coming into the UK…’ And then, by the end, I had a pincer movement between the two of them going ‘Are you gonna do this?’ “They were very clever, because in the end, I actually knew, of course I wasn’t going to let anybody else make this film, because if they did it wrong, I’d never forgive myself.”
The finished film is a beautiful tribute to Lyra, telling the story of her life and work, showing family footage of Lyra from the age of four, instantly recognisable at any age. It’s a very moving piece of work, and also has moments of outright hilarity as we get to know someone her friend describes as “quite bonkers at times”.
The director says she could not have completed the film, which was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, had she not had the support of Lyra’s family, and the backing of her team in Channel 4.
Canning says it was important to her that the film include personal videos of Lyra showing her fun side. “I really wanted people to know Lyra. There was so much reporting after her murder, and it was all wonderfully complimentary, but none of it was really her. This is just to give people an insight into who she was, rather than what she was.
“She had so much potential, she was just riding that wave. She had started writing when was 13. Her first big story broke when she was 16, and that’s how she met Alison. It was about the defunding of the rape crisis centre in Belfast. At 16 she was doing investigative work that everyone else was kind of ignoring.” That was the story which earned Lyra the Sky News Young Journalist of the Year award, and Sara says investigative journalism was always Lyra’s passion.
“Her mum always said that she asked a million questions. She was endlessly curious, always wanted to know why and how. I think that was in her from an early age and then she had struggled quite a lot, because she had hearing issues that were undiscovered as a child, so she was in remedial classes. I don’t think [school] expected much of her, but her granny said to her she could do anything, that she could move mountains.”
Alison recalls meeting her at that age and they became friends. “She was always digging for stories, and stories that were really out there but that actually people weren’t covering. She was always nine steps ahead. You met her for coffee or for lunch, and she always ordered too much food and never ate it. She always had thirty things going on, she threw ideas at you.”
Sara adds that Lyra was always trying to give a voice to those who are forgotten, and denied justice. “Politicians, they play politics, but Lyra was with people who are living the reality for those politics playing out. Politicians get to go back to their middle-class houses, and they tend not to live in the areas where all the violence is, and it’s their constituents who have to deal with the aftermath of them looking for clout a lot of the time, trying to be the biggest Republican or the biggest Unionist or whatever.”
Alison agrees. “This is what Lyra was picking up about too. And working-class people are still struggling. She was picking up on that in her writing because she saw that they’ve been left behind. She saw that, coming from a working-class family herself, brought up by her mum, a single parent. And her sister, Nichola, is a teacher helping kids failed by the system.
“We lost someone so special, someone who literally would have given – and did give - a coat to people, if she was walking home and she met someone who had no food, she would get them food, she would give you the last five pounds in her purse.”
Both women express their gratitude that Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has agreed to introduce the film at Cork International Film Festival. He is featured in the film, in footage from Lyra’s funeral. Sara, who that day had challenged many attending dignitaries on their failing of Northern Ireland, at a time the power-sharing Executive had been suspended for two years, says Coveney has always been kind and considerate.
“In fact, Simon Coveney was the only politician that I was nice to that day,” Sara laughs. “Well, him and Michael D Higgins!”
Both women urge people to attend the Everyman to see the film on Sunday, while a simultaneous screening will also take place in Belfast.
“We want Lyra’s work to live on, we want her writing to live on, we want her voice to live on. She’s a great character, and what we really want is for people to come and spend some time with her,” says Alison.
- Lyra shows 7pm, Sunday, November 7, at the Everyman Theatre, as part of Cork International Film Festival, with an introduction by Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney. Bookings: corkfilmfest.org
