Have you ever had a crisis of faith?

I don’t just mean religious faith; there are plenty of other kinds.  We can lose faith in institutions, or the political ideals we have always held. We can lose faith in the path we have chosen in life, or the personal moral assumptions that we once thought inviolable. Sometimes, and perhaps worst of all, we can lose faith in ourselves. Such crises usually have two things in common; they are deeply traumatic, and they do not come about because of a singular event. They are caused instead by confluence of factors all happening at once – a perfect storm.

Yet it’s not just individuals who can experience a crisis of faith. Groups can too. Tribes, countries, institutions, and even economic orders can and do succumb to the perfect storm. Sometimes they survive it; sometimes they are lost forever.

This is because political entities and institutions are just the manifestation of abstract belief. The European Union, the United States of America, or Northern Ireland, are all simply articles of faith that are shared by a sufficient number of people.  Stormont’s grand façade isn’t just held up by those ornate columns of English Portland stone, but also by the belief of a majority of people here that this is our best current option. Recently, that belief has taken a battering.

We’re having a crisis of faith – and it’s not for any single reason, but rather because we are experiencing a confluence of challenges. Taken separately, our political institutions might have survived each one of these issues in turn, like an athlete jumping over a series of hurdles. Our current misfortune is that the hurdles have been stacked one on top of the other into a very tall obstacle, and the athlete isn’t even sure he likes jumping any more.

Some of these issues have been gestating for a very long time.  Ten years ago, for instance, I made a BBC Panorama documentary about Northern Ireland. The purpose of the programme was to look at where Northern Ireland was, socially and politically, ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, and to explain it all – as clearly as possible – to people living in the rest of the UK. That’s a big undertaking, and we needed some sort of structure to hang it on, so we decided to build it around my own upbringing. I’d gone to primary school in Derry, where Martin McGuinness had his political heartland, but when I was 11 my family moved to Ballymena, the political citadel of Ian Paisley.  Since these men were at that time leading Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister, we decided that I should go to the two places where I grew up.

In Derry and in Ballymena, I talked to people about the long and bumpy road that had been travelled, and also the problems we still faced. Naturally, there were still huge issues with sectarianism and division, amongst many other things; continued punishment shootings, distrust of the police, political and social disenfranchisement and marginalization. What worried me most of all, at the time, was how many people kept using the term “carve-up”. They were concerned that Northern Ireland was becoming more politically polarized, not less. They worried that the two parties in the ascendant, Sinn Féin and the DUP, would ultimately become two unassailable power bases who were content to manage Northern Ireland on a “divide and rule” basis; always separate, and drawing their power from the very antagonism that such separation inevitably engenders.

This, in turn, could lead to a distorted reality, unlike anywhere else in Europe – a unique, strange ecosystem in which we had politics without accountability. Whatever the sin or scandal, be it at the level of local councils, or the NI Assembly, or Westminster, it would rarely lead to a party losing even a single seat, because no matter what, the electorate would always vote along the tribal lines set out by the constitutional question that fundamentally defines political life in Northern Ireland.

Fast-forward ten years, to our crisis of faith. I write this at a time where many people are wondering whether there will ever again be a Northern Ireland Assembly. Some of the seeds of our predicament can be traced back to those concerns of a decade ago; that is, if you set about managing division instead of building consensus, and if you simultaneously tolerate a situation in which tribalism always triumphs over ethics, than you create the conditions for ultimate chaos – the perfect storm.

The scandals that defined the last ten years led to a collapse of public confidence in the institutions amongst ordinary voters. As they emerged, one after the other, people began to ask whether Stormont was just a vehicle for cronyism, nepotism, and special favours for a golden circle from which the vast majority of people were excluded. It’s not just the RHI scandal that rankled. There was also NAMA, the MLAs expenses scandal, Red Sky, and even the financial elements of the Iris Robinson affair. In terms of local government, there was the issue of local councils apparently spending public money in supporting political representatives at fundraising dinners. People looked at all of this and thought; there are wheels within wheels in this society, mechanisms that are hidden, but very real.  Systems that we are not part of, and that offer special privilege those who are. True or not, this is what they suspected. And so, they lost faith.

Then, of course, came Brexit. The political accommodation here was always a delicate business, built upwards from two parallel identities. The idea was that as long as both could be protected to an acceptable degree, the system would hold. It worked, for a while, until Brexit threatened them both, casually, almost callously. In the first instance, it threatens to take away the sense of Irishness enjoyed by nationalists north of the border, and in the second, it threatens the unionist belief that they are fully part of the UK. None of us, nationalist or unionist, is any longer sure of what we are entitled to. Of who exactly we are, or of what we really count for in the big picture. That we even have to consider these fundamental questions at this time seems extraordinary, even outrageous. But we do.

This is why people who argue that politicians should get back into Stormont to mitigate the effects of Brexit are missing the point. It’s extraordinarily difficult for the assembly to operate when Brexit is taking a sledgehammer to the principles that founded it in the first place.

And so, here we are. A profound crisis of faith, caused by a confluence of factors, as such crises always are. First, our policy of “managed division”, that we pursued over a decade, eventually came home to roost. Secondly, a series of scandals at Stormont severely damaged the faith of ordinary voters in the entire project. Thirdly, Brexit quickly and comprehensively eroded the very principles on which the institutions were founded.

Is there a way out now, or do we all just have to move on and believe in new and different things?  A lot of factors would have to come together to get us out of this crisis, just as they did to get us in. Most likely, Brexit would have to be reversed in a second referendum, as painful as that might be for some. It’s impossible to see at this point how any deal negotiated by any British government could reassure both nationalists and unionists that their rights were the same as before Brexit. If it happens, as it most likely will, one side or the other is going to feel a good deal worse off than they did before.  And if they do, the idea of Stormont functioning again in any meaningful way is, I would argue, remote.

In the unlikely event that the Brexit decision were reversed, Stormont could start again. Nonetheless, to make it truly sustainable, it would have to be a very different kind of project, in which the two antagonistic sides no longer just seek to proceed on parallel lines, but start to gradually come together, ending up, some time hence, on a consensus that everyone can believe in. No more divide and rule, in other words – but a genuine move towards a consensus about the long-term future of this corner of the world. Admittedly, from where we are all sitting now, this scenario is somewhat fanciful.

Finally, we would need to hugely increase the transparency of the institutions and how they work; the era of secrecy and insularity would have to be consigned to history.  I would want every politician and Special Advisor to behave as though one day, they’d be asked about their behavior at a public inquiry.

All of this, I fully acknowledge, is aspirational to the point of naivety. And yet without a genuine desire to move in this direction of real, accountable government, there is no point in resurrecting Stormont. The thing about crises of faith, whether personal or collective, is that when they are serious, you can’t ever go back to believing what you once did – you either have to believe in something better, or else nothing at all.

So, we are in a profound crisis, and just now I’m not sure that the political will is there to properly address it.  I’m an optimist by nature, and so I always try to look at the glass as being half-full, but these days I am troubled more and more by a little voice that keeps whispering in my ear, saying, “Yeah, sure – but half full of what?”