Politics is no easy game. It is long hours, unending pressure and scrutiny; for every piece of praise that comes a whirlwind of criticism is not far behind. Rarely do we take time to recognise the human underneath and sacrifices they make. They laugh, they cry, and are shaped by life experiences beyond their control. They are not infallible.

This week’s BBC Spotlight programme, covering the life story of Alliance Party leader Naomi Long, challenged the black and white categories we often fit things into in Northern Ireland.

Naomi, often faulted for not taking a stance on the Union, spoke about her father’s membership of the Loyal Orders and watching her mother take a stand against sectarianism in their local area.

Holding strong principles can come at a cost; in 2012 she received death threats for supporting restricting the flying of the union flag at Belfast City Council to designated days.

Still, none of this came close to the fear she felt upon experiencing a cancer scare during that period – a stark reminder that politicians are not super human.

Naomi Long is not unique to this narrative. John Hume, former leader of the SDLP, knew all about sacrifice during his political career. The peace process in Northern Ireland owes a large debt to Hume, who for the most part laid aside his Irish nationalistic aspirations for the sake of peace. He sought to secure ceasefires at a time when the concept of compromise was not a popular one. Being a politician never made Hume any less immune to the reality that we are all human, as his battle with dementia illustrates.

And Ian Paisley too fits this picture. In the first instance, he was not born a fundamentalist – evangelical – Ulster Protestant; like us all, he was shaped by his context.

It took real humility to make the U-turn he did in 2007 when he signed a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Féin. He said, “If anybody had told me a few years ago that I would be doing this, I would have been unbelieving”.

Arguably, Paisley was the right person to do this; others might never have had the backing to make power-sharing a reality like he did.

We should be thankful that the ‘never man’ did surrender his position and signed up to Northern Ireland having a stable government for the first time in a long time. Not long after, the world caught up on him; the man who could not separate his politics from his church would soon leave both stages.

“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while a statesman thinks about the next generation.” James Freeman Clark