The present difficulty is compounded both by the rickety foundation of the NI 6 county State and by the forced involuntary power sharing D’Hondt mechanism for this Assembly . NI has now progressed from an abnormal one party State to an even more abnormal two party state . The former never had a credible opposition and the latter won’t even have an opposition . Sectarian politics are so irredeemably locked in to the system that it would be easier to escape from a black hole at the centre of some dead universe!

Let’s hope it’s not the very foundation of the Northern Ireland state that is too poisonous for anything good to be built on!

O’Loan, you may recall from two months’ back, is the Northern Ireland police ombudsman who produced the devastatingly detailed report that made headlines around Britain (for at least 15 minutes). She and her team revealed how police informers in one Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang had been shielded by RUC officers as they murdered 10 or more Catholics – some of them total innocents. These loyalists were, in effect, sanctioned killers who the forces of supposed law and order left to get on with their grisly business.

You couldn’t find a more damnable indictment: in Spain, in similar (Eta) circumstances, they locked up the interior minister for letting such things happen. But in Northern Ireland? These killings took place. Because only one UVF mob was targeted, there may well have been more the ombudsman never got round to. And, as she investigated, she got shamefully scant police cooperation.

Serving officers said nothing. Retired officers said nothing. Even the chief constable of the time – now Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, if you please – found nothing to say. But, jobs unaffected, pensions intact, they’ve just been allowed to carry on as though nothing untoward had occurred. That – the time of police-approved murder – was then; this is now.