Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies

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In Northern Ireland, more people took their own lives in the 16 years after the Troubles than died during them. Why? Lyra McKee finds out.

So the answer to your question is yes.

If you’re ever really gonna kill yourself, yes, please,
Call me. 

Extract from ‘I Won’t Write Your Obituary’ by Nora Cooper

“He’s only 17, how can he be dead?”

For once, Big Gay Mick wasn’t saying much. “I don’t know. We just seen his stepdad getting out of a taxi at the top of the street and he told us.”

There was no getting any other details out of him; he was in shock. Big Gay Mick was not normally lost for words. Stick-thin, with a baseball cap permanently pulled down over his eyes and a gold chain around his neck, you might have mistaken him for one of the neighbourhood hard men until you heard his voice: shrill, camp and a fair bit higher than what it should have been post puberty. In our little teenage gang, he was the only one brave enough to be openly gay. It wasn’t easy.

We grew up just off Murder Mile, a stretch of the Antrim Road so called because of the number of casualties there during the Troubles (the wider area was known as the Murder Triangle for the same reason). On the street where Big Gay Mick lived, beside a ‘peace wall’ that separated us from the Protestants, loyalist paramilitaries would drive down, single out a target and pull the trigger. Even though Mick lived just two streets away from me, I wasn’t allowed to go to his until I was 10 years old, two years after the Good Friday Agreement – a key part of the peace process – was signed. In an area where murder and mayhem created hardened men, it was not easy to be as camp as Christmas. He managed, though, all the while smirking at a member of the local paramilitary who would shout homophobic abuse at us as we walked by.

The swagger was gone today. I was grilling him and he didn’t have the answers I wanted.

“How can he be dead?”

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Attribution

The source of flipbook:
Lyra McKee. (2016, January 19). Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies. Mosaic Science. https://mosaicscience.com/story/conflict-suicide-northern-ireland/
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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