“Leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and of slogans,” wrote John Hume for The Irish Times in 1964, and that sentiment is just as true today as it was then; it is even more true when one considers the reoccurrence of flag protests outside Belfast City Hall in protest against the Council’s infamous ruling in 2012.

The dominant feeling of Northern Irish politics in the last year has been one of pessimism and despair over the passionate ineptitude which has come to be the defining characteristic of Stormont. Talks went on and on, but there seems little evidence that any listening has been done.

The conclusion to which many have been brought by this state of affairs has been that the Good Friday Agreement has finally, after two decades, failed. Yet, the Agreement ended the Troubles and transcended the politics of Northern Ireland out of the cycle of violence which had been prevalent for thirty years before. It is not the Agreement that failed, and the peace process has certainly not ended, but it has plateaued, as Quintin Oliver has said.

Thinking of the latest in a very, very long line of impasses at Stormont is particularly poignant this Easter as the next week will see a great programme of events with a grand array of speakers to commemorate the difficulties lived through and the risks made in order to get the Agreement signed in the first place.

On the 10th April an event will be held at Queen’s University Belfast: 20 Years On: Building the Peace. It features all those of the great and the good of the Agreement era present who are still here to talk about it: George Mitchell, Bill Clinton, Bertie Ahern, Seamus Mallon, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Monica McWilliams and many more. With three panels planned this event is essentially the Northern Irish political equivalent of a F.R.I.E.N.D.S reunion.

The key thing that the names listed above have in common is that they will be adorned with either the prefix or suffix of ‘former’. The three and a half years that it took to produce the Agreement stand as an exception to the rule of Northern Irish politics in that there was a vast amount of talent at both the grassroots and the institutional level, and all aligned towards one purpose. Now there is still an astounding amount of talent at the grassroots level, but there is not sign of leadership from those who have inherited the legacy of their predecessors.

From the Women’s Coalition to the Executive Branch of the US Government, there were dynamic individuals with the political will and the patience to carry on; recognising that humanity transcended identity and that nothing worth doing was going to be easy to start.

John Hume found an accord with Gerry Adams who, along with Martin McGuinness, brought that message back to the Army Council of the Provisional IRA; David Trimble managed to do what had seen the downfall of both Terence O’Neill and Brian Faulkner thirty years before; and David Ervine, a pragmatic loyalist devoted to his community rather than his seat, is very much missed when the unionist leaders of today are more reminiscent of the nationalists that Hume was criticising in 1964.

Furthermore, there were groups such as the Women’s Coalition to bring a bit of reality to ideology. It is also true that various paramilitary groups took great leaps of faith for the sake of moving away from mutually destructive violence, and that should not be forgotten.

When one considers all the risks that were taken, in their entirety, it creates an enormous perspective for the fact that those institutions agreed in the midst of a longstanding conflict, and even in spite of it, are now prevented from forming because their inheritors cannot agree over the principle of recognising what is our shared cultural heritage, to an extent which would allow for an actual policy discussion of some kind of Irish Language Act; no matter how many legs it may or may not have.

The leaders of today, converse to the likes of David Ervine, appear more committed to their seats than to their constituencies. In popular history, those who take the biggest risks tend to be remembered first.

The present situation is not the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement, but rather the legacy of its predecessor, the St. Andrews Agreement. It solidified the more insidious and sectarian elements of the former.

One would hope that by 2027, when we come to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the latter, firstly that there may be a government to host such commemorations, but secondly that it will be recognised as a standstill, if not an active step back from the momentum that the Good Friday Agreement gave rise to by its creation.

How will the tenures of Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill be remembered twenty years from now, if at all?