POLITICAL vacuums create the perfect environment for malicious and chaotic groups to breed. We have seen it before here in Northern Ireland during the last stalemate. Dissident republican groups were able to ramp up their campaign to the point they were exploding bombs in city centres and under police officers' cars and shooting an innocent journalist dead in the street.
In the last couple of weeks we have seen a resurgence of violence occur again in that void. A man was forced to drive a dissident car bomb to a police station, police officers were targeted by a blast bomb, men were in court over UVF guns and a man was shot dead in Newry. There were also the normal, everyday security alerts and viable bomb finds that are becoming all too common in this place as we float completely rudderless in the choppiest waters imaginable.
Our problem is that we have become so accustomed to chaos and instability that we are desensitized to it, and don't put up a fight for what we deserve. Years of living through the Troubles has, rightly or wrongly, moulded a 'just-get-on-with-things' attitude in all of us. So that's what we do, because we are a resilient people. But we all have to admit, that attitude hasn't really served us that well.
Look at us, sitting here in cold December with no government, no decisions made, no progress achieved, since we elected people to work on our behalf way back in May.
Ask yourself this: would you accept, in any other area of your life, paying money for a service that you don't actually get? Would you subscribe to a TV channel that didn't work for seven months? Would you pay for a car that doesn't start when you pick it up at the garage? Pay a tradesman to do work to your house who doesn't turn up? I would say a firm 'no' on all those, yet we are quite happy to sit back and fund through our taxes politicians who aren't willing to provide the service that they are paid to do.
Stormont is not some magical place that, once up and running, everything will be OK here again. But political instability leads to societal instability. A stalling of our institutions just feeds into the notion that there is something badly wrong here. We are not worth investing in. It's not worth staying here. Political instability breeds hostility, division, negativity – all the things we here in Northern Ireland have had enough of over the years and can definitely do without now.
I often look at this place and sigh, despair at the state of us, try to convince myself that I actually did the right thing by staying here and raising our family, as opposed to heading off elsewhere, somewhere we might have had a more prosperous and stable life with more opportunities for all of us.
I wonder every day at how those who have chosen politics as their chosen career keep going. If we on the periphery, just impacted by political decisions, not having to fight for them every day, are fed up, how must our politicians – the ones who actually want to make this place work – feel? Fair play to them. I would have given up long ago, but they keep getting up and keep battling.
We are coming to the end of another very challenging year and are facing into another trying one. Things are not easy for anyone at the moment and they could potentially get worse. People are utterly exhausted by the events of the last few years, are mostly in survival mode and have very little fight left in them.
I just hope that we can all muster the strength we need to again pull us back from the edge of that abyss we seem to be addicted to circling.
