IT WAS Albert Einstein who said insanity was "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".
I think all of us watching the same old nonsense unfold in Stormont might have been thinking along the same lines as Albert. For here we are looking at yet another crisis; staring into another abyss; wondering what the hell lies ahead of all of us; what the future will be like for ourselves and our children.
For those who might have been living on another planet for the past week and not have heard about the Stormont shenanigans, just ask any five-year-old child about a fight they witnessed in the playground at school – about who said what and who pulled who's hair and what names they called each other – and you'll have full clarity and total insight on proceedings up on the Hill.
I remember voting for the Good Friday Agreement. I was 23 years old. I had just met my husband, we were living on the Falls Road. Both of us were children of the Troubles, both carried the burden of that title in our hearts and minds. For we were traumatised by the things we saw as children and events we bore witness to as teenagers – shootings, bombings, killings.
We both lost friends and family to the Troubles and will bare the scars of those experiences until the day we leave this Earth. The Good Friday Agreement was a big rubber stamp on the fact that our future, and our future children's futures, was going to be without violence, without fear and uncertainty. It allowed us a glimmer of hope that we would be safe and able to live a relatively normal life, something that was robbed of all of us as children and young people.
It is frustrating and infuriating to see our politicians squabble it out endlessly over almost every issue. It is infuriating to watch them destroy any sense of pride we might have in this place. It is beyond soul destroying watching us stagger and limp from one crisis to another as our young people just give up hope and leave our shores for a 'better life' – one we simply cannot offer them here.
Flags, marches, yearly riots, protests, sporadic murders, green and orange politics have all become our new normal, replacing our old normal of murders, bombings and viciously and openly hating each other.
But it has been 17 years since we all signed up to this and with age should have come wisdom and maturity. Not here, though. Not Northern Ireland, which seems to be in a completely different realm to the real world.
What other country in the world would you see a prime minister insult an entire community he is paid well to represent? What other prime minister threatens to quit office regularly and then walks away when serious business needs done, throwing us into yet another crisis that will again destroy our reputation as a stable region and scupper any small chance we have of international investment and the jobs and prosperity that inevitably comes with it?
We deserve so much more than this. Our children and grandchildren deserve more than this; more than what some of these poor politicians have done for us. We need politicians who will do the job, not abandon us when the going gets tough. We need people who are serious about running this place, not about running it into the ground.
Please remember this debacle when the time comes around to vote. We do not want to find ourselves the personification of Einstein's quote. Let's stop doing the same things over and over again and expecting miracles. They will not happen.
What we really need is strong, mature, tolerant, forward-thinking people in power who can shake off the shackles of the past and lead us forward. I don't know about you, but going around and around in circles on the Northern Ireland merry-go-round has left me feeling really ill.
