LOCAL politics feels like it has entered a deep freeze that will last beyond Brexit-Day, a year from now.
Shortsighted words and deeds - whether lashing opponents or leaking documents - have iced the landscape.
Negotiations are landlocked. The risk is that hope gets fossilised.
Perhaps the problem partly stems from our society's narrow focus on dominant individuals and issues. Both absorb majority media attention. Individuals become our leaders, or hate-figures. Issues become our crusades, or battlegrounds. This shorthand 'framing' is natural and understandable.
But too often it excludes public discussion about something even more fundamental - namely, ideas.
Our politics currently has genuine problems - interpersonal and issues-based. Trust has broken down. Instability is being normalised. Inequalities persist. Brexit is coming.
This all poses a stark choice. Either key actors keep continually head-butting, or else courageous individuals start steadily and earnestly re-engaging.
The latter will inevitably be slow and tentative. It will need creativity, humility and generosity. But it is the only viable road.
Likewise with policy problems. Inadequate expertise and limited capacity is a major deficiency. Our polity routinely fails to sensibly dissect - or often understand - the basics of concepts like nationhood and statehood; constitutional sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy; human rights and fundamental rights.
The frequent default position is simply to localise and sloganise - not discuss depth and substance. The superficiality of 'spin' and soundbite, alongside sparse public participation, can create cul-de-sacs. One person slips up and society gets stuck.
Of course, as citizens, we're not passive onlookers. We each permit dominant public individuals and policy issues to develop under the broader umbrella of our own personal ideas. We make choices.
First and foremost, our personal ideas shape and structure our interaction at the level of citizen, state, nation and globe; and thereafter they inform our decisions about specific policy or political issues.
That's why we should now make space for more conversations about broader ideas - just as we'll keep talking about dominant individuals or detailed issues.
First off, we need an objective perspective of our place in the world - our scale, our size, our skill set as an island.
Nuclear weapons and a Cold War are realities once again. Global inequality and autocratic repression are spreading. Old orders are shifting. Economic assumptions are transforming. Some cities are now more powerful than states.
Meanwhile, the frightening possibility exists of an international extremist terrorist atrocity on a perceived 'soft' target like this island.
In Ireland, north and south, we need to constantly reinforce and reinvigorate our cultural and diplomatic profile as a progressive international influencer. That idea should also feed into sensible decision-making about local politics.
Second, all public discourse should be done under the condition of promoting dignity. We should agree that our differences over issues or individuals are moderated by the idea that each person possesses an innate dignity; and leaders should lead in that regard, irrespective of provocation or propaganda.
Today is the day to raise the bar - notwithstanding the many times we all, myself included, have fallen short of such a standard in the past. Our society deserves a higher level of dignity in debate.
Third, we need to increasingly reflect upon our personal motivations in commenting or contributing to society's public development and political direction. We need to repeatedly check and recheck such motivations.
Are we genuinely capable of transformation, or are we fixed and unchanging? Are we able to hear as well as hector; to listen as well as lecture? Are we honest about our interests and egos? Are we self-aware about tools like social media – its narcissism and negativity? Are we mindful of life's fragility and preciousness?
Ultimately, meaningful reflection about life is central to addressing questions of personal motivation.
The writer, Emma Hannigan, who sadly passed away at the weekend aged just 45 after surviving cancer for over a decade, recently summed up a perspective of purpose in life that could melt the hardest of frosts: "Faced with very little time can I tell you what screams out at me? Love. Nothing else has much meaning anymore... Life is so very precious.
"We never know the day or hour that it will be whipped away... Stay away from the drains, we all know them... Instead gravitate towards the light and the laughter."
Surely it's not beyond us to absorb such clarity of wondrous insight into our own modest reflections on ideas to improve this society's progress? And surely such wisdom should equally be influencing the individuals and issues through which such social progress will become visibly translated?
Perspective, dignity, reflection: some ideas that might just help a thaw to begin.
