REPUBLICANS, and perhaps with every passing day more nationalists of all stripes, are close to thinking the state of Northern Ireland is unfixable.
But to unionists this is a fixed part of a precious union. No matter how anyone talks it down, the divide is major.
Yet those who front up both sides get lambasted as though only badness keeps them apart.
Then there is the fact that they did reach an agreement, all of 27 months ago, which the DUP's Arlene Foster disavowed like lightning because the party beyond a small leadership circle erupted when they heard about it; an eruption voiced most loudly by the Orange Order.
The draft deal contained nothing of substance for republicans. Foster is facing into the talks meant to start next week as though the opposite was true, playing outraged, insisting that Sinn Féin want everything and will give nothing to "my community".
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn cannot agree on Brexit in Westminster because their parties are hopelessly split, which unlike here is not a matter of life and death.
With the froth of the past week-and-a-half finally clearing, what is left here is more sadness.
Along with, at best, a family or three in the Creggan who take their sons to a lawyer and then to Strand Road to hand themselves in. No, not that likely.
As for horror at the sudden, violent snuffing out of a 29-year-old woman forcing the current IRA to recognise it cannot murder its way to a united Ireland, surely few who lived through the Troubles in truth expected any such thing.
We know we can't unite Ireland, the Sunday Times quotes a spokesperson saying, but guns and bombs are essential as 'propaganda'.
So one or two who watched with carefully blank faces as red handprints covered their slogans might stop arguing their case with other republicans. Which would not be progress.
In among the predictable and until now ineffective police denunciations mixed with appeals for information, there was a novel tack from that senior officer who urged those who opposed violence to talk to its supporters, try to dissuade them.
The conversation gambit is what met Gerry Adams and company halfway to build the start of a peace settlement, if not, yet, a settled peace.
Talking to republicans who used violence rather than shooting them was denounced by unionists and, when they bothered to notice, by conservatives in the south and in Britain.
Having conversations all round but especially with those who hate or fear or oppose your very existence, was clearly a Lyra McKee speciality.
Presumably the bulk of those who grieved aloud in public for her knew how she ignored barriers of prejudice and dislike.
They must also have known, or they surely do now, that campaigning was second nature to her.
It was good at the weekend that Susan McKay, the campaigning writer and broadcaster whom the younger McKee admired and who knew her priorities, punctured the bubble around Fr Martin Magill's dramatic sermon to politicians at the McKee funeral.
He spoke respectfully of the love between Lyra McKee and her partner Sara Canning. McKay pointed out that his Church denies "hope to Lyra's generation" by its opposition to same-sex marriage.
Fr Magill had seized the moment, rose to it as the crowd in St Anne's rose to him. A congregation in a cathedral like nothing since the funeral of Martin McGuinness, pointless brutality cutting short a gay love story; here was a major occasion.
Did the bereaved want Lyra's legacy presented as restoring Stormont?
For centuries churchmen having been listing the flaws of others, raising authoritative voices in wrath or sorrowful pleading for repentance and reconciliation with God's law.
Magill is a fine preacher. Pretend bewilderment, like the line that had them standing and applauding before he got halfway through, is an ancient technique. "What in the name of God...?"
Of course it would have become the bigger news if he had followed his wallop at Arlene and Mary Lou with a mea culpa for his Church's rules.
Nobody who knows his record would doubt Magill's humanity. But settling for loving the 'sinner' and still preaching the sin is a cop-out.
Rome is not going to change - on sexuality, abortion, on punishment for clerical sex abuse and its enablement - until decent Catholics, lay and clerical, demand it.
Until they show they will walk away if the Church shows no genuine remorse and firm purpose of amendment.
