In a place where political deadlines come and go, never enforced, it's easy for people to become sceptical and disengaged from the political process entirely.
We go about our lives regardless. Those who remember the Troubles shrug that at least things are better than they were then, those under the age of 25 unsurprisingly take a different view, quite often with one eye on a job elsewhere.
So while we watch with either interest, disdain or indifference the stop/start haphazard talks process, it is worth remembering the very real the consequences of that political failure.
Last week I stood in the bedroom of a man who had lived a life of suffering that most people would find unimaginable.
A man who was preparing himself for his own death having been told he'd terminal cancer.
Most of us know the story of Jean McConville and the Disappeared victims of the Troubles.
Each family have terrible stories of loss and dashed hopes.
I have spent a lot of my working life talking to victims of republican, loyalist and state violence and the stories of loss, compounded by cover up, collusion and a denial of justice.
Children are always the casualties of any war, orphaned, injured, displaced from their homes because of a conflict they had no role in creating or sustaining.
And the McConville children, all ten of them, were the innocent victims of the IRA murder and abduction and secret burial of their mother.
Victims beyond the initial loss of a sole care giver.
Victims of a dysfunctional state that showed no compassion towards confused and grieving children.
They were at first left to fend for themselves and spend a sparse and lonely Christmas, without presents or joy, no Santa, no tree, no laughter.
When social services did eventually intervene far from being rescued they were plunged into a different type of hell, abused, physically, mentally and in some cases sexually.
The idea that children orphaned in a terrorist attack would be treated in such a cold and inhuman way in today's society is unthinkable, but the McConville children were not alone.
There were hundreds of children, orphaned or victims of an ultra-conservative society, a society that took children from their distressed mothers only to abuse those children.
The Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry findings are a remarkable and disturbing body of work that gives a distressing insight into that time and how children were viewed and treated by the religious orders that were tasked with taking care of them.
It paints a picture of children who were hungry, cold and in a world with no love or joy, filled instead with fear, pain and endless suffering.
Sexual abuse at the hands of staff and older children was known about and covered up.
Children who complained were beaten.
The McConville children were passed between these institutions, from one place to another, abused and failed again and again.
Sir Anthony Hart, who chaired the HIA inquiry, listened to thousands of hours of evidence and his findings delivered in a hotel on the outskirts of south Belfast in January made for difficult listening.
I've read most of that huge report and it should come with a warning, it is horrifying, the lives some poor children lived are unthinkable in their sheer brutality.
The findings were also delivered at the beginning of a political crisis that has since seen two elections and no restoration of the institutions, and as I write this there is no indication as to when devolution will be restored.
Those child victims of abuse are now the adult victims of political failure.
It is easy to become detached from political negotiations, given how in Northern Ireland we are continuously in a cycle of crisis.
But the victims of Church and state child abuse are being retraumatised by politician failure.
Sir Anthony Hart recommended an apology, access to proper medical and mental health facilities and compensation up to £100,000 for victims of abuse.
No apology or financial payout could compensate for a lost and nightmarish childhood but would give at least some recognition to those victims.
The picture of Billy McConville, in his last weeks on earth, should have shamed the political parties into finding a resolution to the current crisis.
He is the very real face of political failure and he is not alone. There are hundreds of elderly, ill and still suffering victims.
At a time when we are told there will be a military covenant to protect ex service personnel from discrimination, it seems shocking that we haven't the same political pressure being applied to establish a victims covenant.
For they are people who have and continue to be discriminated against, and for some such as Billy McConville, justice, if it ever does come, may be too late.
