Over the past week our politicians did what they do every year: talk about parades, disagree over parades and await political Armageddon. In the end the Twelfth passed peacefully; on the day, DUP MP Nigel Dodds praised unionist and loyalist leadership at every level albeit while failing to condemn electoral posters, flags and effigies hanging from 11th night bonfires. Every week our radio waves are occupied by debate over flags or parading, and every day Northern Ireland wastes thousands of pounds due to the Executive’s ongoing failure to agree on and implement welfare reform. Meanwhile, Westminster wields the real power. We have shut ourselves away from the rest of the UK, this week even turning a blind eye to Westminster’s government’s moves to pass emergency legislation to record our logged phone calls, text messages and emails without genuine public debate. Our benign politics matter so much to our politicians; worried more about imagined threats to their culture than by the real sacrificing of every citizen’s liberty in the name of security.

All politics is local in Northern Ireland. In 2014 we are as close to 1998 as we are to 2030 yet we continue to pick qualms with the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and its accompanying set-ups rather than consider or prepare for the great economic, social and technological challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and how these can be used to foster tangible reconciliation between our long divided communities. We currently have a devolved Assembly of super-super Councillors reacting to issues which should be dealt with at Council level. In the House of Commons last week, at Prime Minister’s Questions DUP MP Gregory Campbell asked David Cameron for his thoughts on County Antrim’s ‘gay’ cake controversy, something the PM of Britain was never likely to have heard of in the first instance. This simple quiz on religious freedom may as well have been a planted question from the Tory backbenches. In May of this year, Suzanne Breen of The Newsletter argued that Irish nationalism lacked a TUV’s Jim Allistair-like figure, someone to hold Sinn Féin to account like Alistair does with his former DUP colleagues. I would go as far to say that what we need in Northern Ireland are politicians with solid principles or values for true governance; a coherent vision for the role of the state. Moreover, they ought to articulate their aspirations in these terms rather than thrive on short-term politicking, volatile mud-slinging, spot-kick responses and graduated sound bites.

The point of devolution across the United Kingdom was to deliver greater representation, not semi-independence. Northern Ireland needs to re-engage with the rest of the United Kingdom, as well as with the island of Ireland. We must stop waiting on dates on the calendar to metaphorically blow up our government institutions, expecting the worst and hoping for the best. Our politicians continuously fall into the same trap, all too eager to allow issues like ‘gay’ cakes, flags and parading controversies to dominate the headlines while completely missing out on issues that matter to every one of us at all levels, like the right to privacy, membership of the European Union and so on. Northern Ireland boasts a pivotal geographical gateway between the US and Europe, a potential home to the world’s largest businesses like our neighbours in the Republic. We could and should have a constructive say in UK and wider affairs if we chose to approach our own local issues with integrity and calm heads, and genuinely involved ourselves in national policy consultations rather than leaving it to our political minders at Westminster.