Politicians return to failed rhetoric

THE trauma of the past 35 years has led many people to believe the North has failed as a political entity, and to recognise that democracy cannot exist in a fundamentally artificial unit.

We have had a plethora of theories and stopgaps and interim arrangements. Each day, ministers and presidents fly around the globe to heal or contain the world’s trouble spots. Of course, the situation in the North does not carry the same danger to world peace as the Middle East but it matters to a lot of people on this island.

It is futile to pretend the paramilitaries can be defeated. Violence is only a symptom of the problem. The politicians, however, shy away from that thought and again fall to the temptation to use rhetoric and garner all the emotive applause such language expounds.