On Tuesday the north reached a 589 day milestone since Stormont collapsed following the RHI scandal.
Significant because it overtook Belgium as the longest peacetime period without a functioning government.
However, we didn’t make the Guinness Book of World Records as the Stormont impasse was ruled ineligible.
We don’t qualify as a country but a devolved administration and we do have governance of sorts, albeit at the end of a very long and reluctant arm stretching from Westminster.
The day was marked by a series of public protests under the banner ‘We deserve better’ although I’m not sure that’s even true.
We get the government we vote for and despite allegations of corruption, incompetence and refusal to recognise rights or step out of the dark ages on social issues, if there was an election tomorrow the DUP would in all probability receive an even bigger mandate than they have now.
They could wipe out the UUP, who still seem unsure of what kind of party they are or what they stand for.
There are no signs that the DUP are preparing their supporters for any compromise needed to allow a return to Stormont and why would they?
They’ve never had it so good, their MPs currently the darlings of Westminster as Theresa May desperately needs their support to pass a Brexit bill which has divided her party and the nation she is elected to lead.
Sinn Féin are aware that their supporters can take or leave Stormont, in reality power sharing may have created an industry of assembly workers and allowed control of aspects of community funding.
Apart from that it delivered relatively little for republicans and over time became deeply unpopular with Sinn Féin voters.
As we head into September there will probably, if only for the optics of it all, be another attempt at getting a talks process going.
We hear about how close the two main parties were to a deal in February, in fact we saw with our own eyes what was on the table in the leaked draft proposals.
But there was nothing in that deal that would inspire long term confidence in the power sharing executive.
If – and it’s a big if – that February deal was rehashed and managed to get past the DUP’s militant wing, it had no resilience built into it. There was nothing to stop a repetition of the past crisis, nothing to stop the abuse of the petition of concern.
I think we’ve long since established that the north cannot function on goodwill as there isn’t any in the political sense.
And yet, another roll of the dice for a British government who have not the will or even the available manpower to impose direct rule seems inevitable.
It also seems pretty inevitable that any talks will fail, or even if by some divine intervention manages to secure the bones of an agreement, it will never last.
Mandatory power sharing, in those dark days that preceded 1998, was the only show in town, it served a very important role in taking us from violence to peace.
It was a short-term solution to a long term problem and will always result in stand offs and hamster wheel of continuing crisis by the very nature of it.
And so, this ongoing impasse cannot be continually kicked about waiting on a Brexit miracle to free up time.
Direct rule, especially at a time when the DUP have influence, will always make nationalists nervous.
If Secretary of State Karen Bradley sufficiently empowers herself, cuts salaries, gives civil servants the authority to make crucial decisions, if her government passes same sex marriage, abortion reform, pay compensation to abuse victims and do in a few months what ten years of devolution couldn’t, that would soften the blow.
If the British and Irish Intergovernmental Conference continued to meet and the Irish government continued to lobby for rights for all citizens on this island that could again act as a soft landing.
We’re never going to have the form of dreaded direct rule that lorded over an unequal and troubled society.
For a start there’s not even a spare MP in Westminster to stick on a plane to take the job.
But we do need someone to steer the ship.
Things can’t skate along the way they have been forever, it’s an unsustainable situation and we do deserve better than that.
