2011 saw political decimation and a real chance to reform our system

WHAT a year.

In all sorts of ways, none of them good, 2011 will go down in history as both eminently forgettable and at the same time totally unforgettable. There’s already no doubt it will need a chapter of its own in the history books of the future.

In my lifetime, there have been two years that produced the economic and political turbulence that we’ve seen in the past 12 months: 1969 gave us the arms crisis and the start of a quarter of a century of violence and terror in the North, while 1994 produced the IRA ceasefire and the collapse of a government in the most controversial circumstances possible.