I apologise for the slightly patronising title, but there has been, understandably, a lot of questions about where we go from here in Northern Ireland. I, like many of you I suspect, am bitterly disappointed about the events of the last week.

Whilst chaos ensues about whether there was actually a deal or not, and amid cries of “Where now?”, it is incumbent on anyone who wants to see progress to put their minds to what should happen next. So, as a starter for 10, here’s an idea: go and speak to people.

The prompt for this piece is grounded in the usual perusal of Twitter, where I stumbled across a number of threads from a Sinn Féin public meeting at the Devenish in West Belfast. The purpose of the meeting, as you might expect, was to provide an update on the political situation, and I was struck by the simplicity and strength of proposition. The only problem is that it was the wrong audience.

When considering what courses of action are available to our political leaders, it’s worth considering how we’ve found ourselves in this situation. Setting aside the specifics of the Irish Language Act and marriage equality, the issue is a fundamental breakdown of communication and trust between two sections of our community.

The simple answer is leadership. Unfortunately, leadership often requires doing and saying things that may prove unpopular with your own supporters and reaching out beyond the ‘bubble’.

Anyone who has worked in politics will know about the bubble. Politics is a passionate business, and an addictive hobby. As such, the bubble is a strange self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating environment, whereby your obsession with the matters at hand, and your own self-belief, mean that you only end up speaking and engaging with people who, broadly speaking, agree with you.

The problem with the bubble is that you often do not realise, often through innocent ignorance, that you’re actually in it.

The undoing of political movements can often be attributed to responses and strategies formulated in a room among a small number of people, predicated on anecdotal evidence of public opinion, without any real understanding of the underpinning assumptions and, more importantly, without speaking to any ‘real people’.

Some of the platitudes thrown around in the media including, “my Irish shouldn’t threaten your Britishness,” and, “there are more people speaking polish than Irish,” suggest to me that how our respective communities actually feel on the ground is not really understood by the political leaders of the opposite tradition.

The talks, perhaps understandably, have resulted in the most acute form of bubble, with our leaders making incredibly difficult political judgements on the basis of a huge amount of discussion with people that agree with their position and, at best, a superficial understanding of the root causes of the position of their opponents.

A good first step from where we are may be for our political leaders to take a break from talking to each other, their own supporters and the media, and go out and speak to people from different communities who have a different perspective – build trust from the ground up with reassurance and persuasion. Maybe a more complete understanding of where our respective communities stand on many of these issues could lay better foundations for compromise.

If there is a silver lining here, perhaps it is that there is now the space for our political leaders to get out of the political bubble and speak to people who do not share the same views as them.