Troubling times

There have been many dreadful murders followed by high-profile funerals over the years in Northern Ireland. Several during the Troubles were themselves targets for bombings and shootings. Others became opportunities for paramilitary parades, which merely deepened community enmities and exacerbated personal animosities.

Funerals too often were not salutary moments from which people concluded that violence was destructive and futile; they were the warp and woof of the province’s tragic sectarianism. The funeral of Lyra Mckee in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, yesterday was as far removed from that grisly past as can be. An author and journalist, she was killed last week when a terrorist claiming allegiance to the so-called New IRA fired into a crowd of people gathered in the nationalist Creggan area of Londonderry.

At the time the police were conducting a search operation aimed at disrupting dissident republicans ahead of the annual celebrations of the 1916 Easter Rising. Petrol bombs were thrown at police and cars set alight. This was an echo of the bad days of the Troubles being perpetuated by a tiny minority of republicans who will not be reconciled to the peace agreement signed in 1998.

Miss Mckee’s funeral was a cross-faith affair, attended by politicians from all sides, including Arlene Foster, leader of the DUP, and her Sinn Féin counterpart Mary Lou Mcdonald seated together, united in their condemnation of the murder. It would be a fitting tribute to Miss Mckee were the politicians to sit down once again and restore Northern Ireland’s suspended power-sharing arrangements.