“WE WERE the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace,” wrote Lyra McKee, who was killed in Derry on Thursday night. 

“The spoils just never seemed to reach us.”

We woke up to the news of McKee’s death on the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. 

The past few months have seen an extreme flippancy about the fragility of Northern Ireland’s peace from figures on the hard right, and some who should know better.

The murder of McKee, attributed to so-called dissident republicans, was condemned by figures from across Northern Ireland’s political spectrum yesterday.

I didn’t know McKee, but we had mutual acquaintances — via friends in Northern Ireland, journalism and the National Union of Journalists, and in at least one case all three. 

As it happened, I heard the news en route to Belfast, where I’m covering a trade union conference this weekend. 

I didn’t expect to spend the journey in tears over someone I’d never met, but solidarity is a powerful force.

Across the world, people in this trade put their life on the line every day to report on injustice and speak truth to power — and many are closer to home than we commonly think. 

I’ve been fortunate enough to be relatively sheltered by the nature of my own work, and the existence of a sea between my home and a region still in the same governance unit which remains, to an extent, a conflict zone.

The article I quoted above, which shamefully I had yet to read until yesterday, poignantly asks why more people in Northern Ireland killed themselves in the 16 years after the Troubles than were killed during them.

McKee examined research suggesting that trauma survivors pass behaviours to their children, including biologically as well as socially and psychologically. 

But many in Britain know next to nothing about even the separation of Ireland, let alone the conflict of recent years. 

Many of our media organisations wilfully ignored developments over the Irish Sea until it became a component of the Brexit debate — and even now, the issues at stake are treated as a proxy for debate between British MPs rather than a subject of genuine importance or interest.

A number of young journalists from Northern Ireland have fought ferociously for these issues to be accorded the prominence they deserve. 

All too often, their crucial work is ignored by mainstream British publications and they have worked precariously as freelancers. 

Such journalists are not afforded the security and protection, in both the physical and financial senses, that should be standard for any journalist reporting on conflict.

Several whom I know, or whose work I follow, are also, like McKee, women, LGBT, working class or all three — demographics underrepresented and undervalued in our media as a whole. 

They tell stories about people on the margins and struggling against injustice at a time when journalism increasingly amplifies only the powerful.

Naming her among its 30 under 30 in 2016, Forbes magazine said McKee’s passion was “to dig into topics that others don’t care about.”

The least we can do in her memory is to take stock, and not let the voices she amplified, and the topics she passionately believed should be discussed, be ignored any longer.