Three white coffins in Rasharkin at the height of the Drumcree dispute should have been enough to push us toward “Never Again”.

It should also have been enough to spur anyone who truly believed in living peacefully alongside their neighbours to secure it.

The Good Friday Agreement was supposed to offer that opportunity. Instead, it’s been used internationally as an example, while at home politicians discard it when it suits.

A stop-start Stormont, coupled with little delivery and a focus on far-off constitutional change, has led to instability, with both extremes jostling for supremacy.

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Complacency and downright cockiness, combined with a regular poke in the eye, erode even the most basic lessons.

That need to beat a sectarian drum like a siren call to an election count ensures that politicians keep voters exactly where they want them: locked in a stasis of comfortability amongst their own.

Once the 1990s marching disputes ended, politicians pulled out and left people to their own devices.

That festering putridity can only stay dormant so long, until a societal infection returns – resistant to reason and abetted by inaction.

Peace, like everything else, can be taken for granted.

The Drumcree consequences were so seismic for everyone back then that it is almost unfathomable to find ourselves returning.

Those years have traumatic memories for all of us. For........

© The Irish News