A man could easily become depressed. With the amount of pessimistic political commentary in circulation, it would be easy to believe that the end of the world, as we know it, is nigh.
It feels as if the hopes that were once generated by the Good Friday Agreement have faded to the point where half of the population is turning its back on the whole project and the other half working overtime to convince itself that there is still hope. This newspaper has carried its fair share of negative comment, telling its readers that what follows after this valley of tears is further valleys of tears.
Our politicians loathe each other. They can hardly bear to be in the same building with each other, never mind working with any common purpose. The governance of the place is shambolic and likely to get worse.
That is the tone of some of the commentary that is circulating and if you examine voting patterns and listen to stakeholders from a multitude of social and commercial organisations, it is probably the dominant judgment. And the truth is: it is true.
It is true for the moment. But if you want to judge what is happening at a deeper level, you have to open your eyes to other realities and truths that will have a greater long term effect. What is happening at Stormont is no longer contained or constrained within that building nor within the politics of Northern Ireland.
Tectonic plates are shifting under the politics of these islands in a manner that hasn’t happened in 800 years and those shifts are likely to affect every political relationship and every political legacy.
For us, those shifts began long before the issue of Scottish Independence and long before the Good Friday Agreement. They began with the Anglo/Irish Agreement. Unionism blew with all its might to blow that treaty down and failed.
The governments are often indolent, distracted and irresponsible but their relationship and the treaty takes the sting and the power out of the intermittent crises that crop up or are dreamt up by the local parties.
Local politicians have learned the limits of their power. The treaty also removes the sting from militant republicanism. Dissident groups are too slow or too thick to grasp that even in the most improbable scenario of the British government conceding any ground to them, the Irish government would block it.
Topography and modernity make up some of those tectonic plates. Leaving aside the questions of principles and values of political pacts, their effect is the same as a finger in the dam. They will hold back the tide for a year or a parliamentary term but the change is uninterrupted and the breakdown between nationalism and unionism will soon be 50/50. What either of those 50’s will stand for or will stand over in the future is another and more open question in which modernity will play a powerful hand. All you have to do is look to the resignation of Jim Wells to see the ground that has shifted under the influence of modernity.
And then take a trip across the sea to Scotland. Unionism and Irish republicanism are now in the grip of Scottish nationalism. One is terrified by it, the other is in awe of it. The United Kingdom, once a given, is now an open question. No matter what happens in next week’s election, our politics are going to be conducted in the light of changing dynamics in England, Scotland and Wales.
It would be better and more dignified if we did the work ourselves, if we changed the loathing and improved the governance. It would be a great relief if we could talk more civilly to each other and it certainly would be a good and less expensive thing if we could live beside each other and could send our children to the same schools.
We have had fifteen years or so to grasp the difficult nettles and have too often chosen to put it off to another day. But those postponements and those failures do not mean that things are not changing.
There are times in history when things seem dormant and unchanging. There are other times when the change is rapid enough to leave everyone breathless.
We are either on the edge or in the flow of one of those radical periods. The next few years are going to be far too exciting to even think about being depressed.
