Skip to main content

RIP Lyra McKee



Lyra McKee, a reporter of some reputation in Northern Ireland, died in the line of duty on April 18, during rioting in Derry, a/k/a Londonderry.

Police in that city recently cracked down on the apparent stockpiling of weapons and gasoline bombs by Republican groups. Pursuing this crackdown, they engaged in sweeping searches of homes. The searches catalyzed riots, and McKee died covering that responsive violence. She was killed by bullets apparently intended for police.

The leaders of all of Northern Ireland's major political parties, from the Democratic Unionists to Sinn Fein, issued a joint statement calling this shooting a threat to the progress made over the last 20 years; progress, they said, toward peace and democracy.

McKee had a book ready for publication, to be called THE LOST BOYS, focusing on the disappearance of two young men in Belfast during 'The Troubles.'

Her death comes as debate in London over Brexit becomes ever more intertwined with the matter of Northern Ireland's border. Those 20 years of progress, away from the 'Troubles' of still-recent times, had occurred because of the commitment of various parties to an 'invisible' border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The border is invisible in the sense that one can cross it unaware, and without dealing with customs or showing a passport. This invisibility has helped create the sense of progress for the Republicans on the one hand, while the allowing the Unionists to remain the subjects of their Queen on the other.

But how does one retain the invisibility of the border if that becomes THE big land border between what is the EU and what is not? Won't customs officials have to get involved? And if they do, are we headed back to The Troubles?

Questions but no answers. Ms McKee, of blessed memory, is beyond worrying such issues now.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more