Stormont deadlocked, again — Irish enlisted as a political Armalite

HAD William Faulkner been an Irish writer instead of a Nobel laureate born in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1897, he might not have left us his famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

An Irish writer of Faulkner’s perception would not have thought such a self-evident truth worthy of comment.

Like the air around us, the past is an eternal presence and even if some of us try to step beyond its clutches it drags us back to adjudicate on the long ago and reflect those conclusions in our everyday. We are not alone in this.