Introduction

Northern Ireland (NI) hit the headlines during Easter of this year (2019) when the young, investigative journalist, Lyra McKee, was shot dead the day before Good Friday, while reporting on violence and rioting in the Creggan estate of the city of DerryLondonderry. While most of the media subsequently concentrated on the hope that Lyra's murder may signify a turning point at this fragile moment in NI's ongoing turbulent history, one of the lesser understood elements concerns how Lyra's educational biography embodies much of the complexity of what it is to grow up economically challenged in workingclass areas of NI.

Lyra's story is one of someone who personifies the will to succeed against the odds but it is a story nevertheless that characterises many of the inbuilt challenges associated with the relationship between poverty and education and division in NI. Lyra was born into a single parent, Catholic family of six children with a disabled mother in a republican area of north Belfast in 1990, one of the generation of postconflict young people that was promised peace, prosperity and stability. She attended a (now closed) local, allgirls’ secondary school. In her early days, Lyra was a schoolrefuser, a pupil who struggled with reading, required extra help, and was ultimately supported by a teacher who inspired her. While her obituaries go on to tell of how, at just 25 years of age, Lyra was already acknowledged internationally as an exceptional achiever as a writer and author, also as an acclaimed journalist and local activist, what often goes underreported is her withdrawal from her higher degree due to experiencing the university as ‘culturally alienating’ and, following this, the inbuilt workingclass bias she experienced in her subsequent training as a journalist. What is remarkable of course is that none of this stopped her from achieving her educational and life ambitions, including wanting a different future for NI – one without sectarianism, and one that was more equal and inclusive for all. These were things that she pursued vigorously and passionately to the end of her short life.