Opinion

Leona O'Neill: We need hope and reconciliation in our politics, not more despair and division

As the next assembly election grinds ever-closer, Leona O'Neill finds the prospect of yet another Stormont contest fought along traditional tribal lines deeply dispiriting. More than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, don't our children deserve far better?

Voters will go to the polls this year to elect a new Stormont assembly. Will the contest be fought on traditional lines, or will their be an outbreak of consensus politics?
Voters will go to the polls this year to elect a new Stormont assembly. Will the contest be fought on traditional lines, or will their be an outbreak of consensus politics? Voters will go to the polls this year to elect a new Stormont assembly. Will the contest be fought on traditional lines, or will their be an outbreak of consensus politics?

ELECTION time is coming around again and in Northern Ireland that means folks here digging trenches and firing mud at one another in order to point-score and ultimately motivate their voters to head to the polls.

I really wish it wasn't this way. I wish some of our politicians knew another way to energise their voters. I wish it was the promise of positivity and prosperity not tired, divisive tribal antics that lit a fire under some Northern Ireland voters.

But some parties roll out the same nonsense every election year, the same voters fall for it every year, and we find ourselves in the same place, every year.

Every election year I look at those trying to make a difference, trying different ways to engage voters, trying positive politics, promising brighter, more peaceful and harmonious futures.

And every election year - and I have covered so, so many as a reporter - I feel the hope drain from my body as I see the same parties reinstated and the promise of the same old divisive politics being played out again and again and again.

All we have ever been able to do is buckle in for the ride which promises to be a ceaseless lurching from one crisis to the next, to the next, to the next, while those who support these parties congratulate each other for a job well done and the victory of coming first.

Meanwhile the rest of us, who just want a normal life and a normal society have to watch from the sidelines as one side commemorates terrorists as heroes and the other side stand outraged, or one side wants to celebrate their British culture, while the other side stands outraged, or one side wants to celebrate Irish culture, and the other side slams it.

Enter a hundred different scenarios here, each one cutting deeper and deeper into the Northern Irish wound.

It seems in the last few years we have dug our trenches deeper and have moved away from reconciliation to whatever this new normal is - a constant jarring of one another and a fiercely competitive desire to get one up on 'the other side'. It's hard to watch, frankly.

I've been writing this column for 17 years now, since my middle son was just four weeks old, and every election year I have made the same plea: Why don't we, just this once, try something different?

We have tried the two big parties - who are extreme polar opposites in their beliefs, perpetually stand firm against one another, and disagree so ferociously Stormont has seen more crises than hot dinners in the Parliament Buildings basement canteen.

Is it not time - and stop me if this is a completely mad notion - we elected folks who will at least try to work together on issues that impact on you and I and our families?

I know that sounds like a radical idea, but I am so sick of hope being taken from us, from our kids, and this sickening seeping in of sectarianism and division that I thought my children would never have to experience.

The Good Friday Agreement was signed and we were promised peace over 23 years ago. Since then, in this peace time, my children, their friends and this young generation know of and have experience of bomb scares, explosions, murders, punishment shootings, raging riots, sectarian attacks.

My children's mother - me - watched a woman murdered by terrorists and die at her feet. They have experience of paramilitary intimidation. Children along the peacelines in Belfast still live with fear, they witness hatred spill over into street violence. There is so much division and awful sectarianism growing like poisonous weeds unabated in places.

My children and the young people of this bright new generation, who were promised so much, still do not live in a normal society.

There are a lot of reasons for this, and one part of the jigsaw is our political environment. Breeding hatred and division to win votes only pumps fuel onto this fire.

There are so many brilliant people working hard in our communities, in our schools, in politics, to make this place work, to patch up the broken bits and to build bridges, not burn them to the ground.

We need more of that. We need more hope. We need less extreme, more normal.

It's not that much to ask, really.

Twenty three years after the promise of the Good Friday Agreement, we deserve it.