WHAT exactly is the difference between allocating a council house to a 19-year-old woman in Caledon in 1968 and allocating the Social Investment Fund's £79 million of public money, on the same basis of political favouritism, 50 years later?
Sinn Féin and DUP supporters will reject any comparison between the old and the new (currently suspended) Stormont.
However, the sad truth is that only two things have changed over the past half-century.
The first is that the scale of Stormont's malpractice is much greater now than then.
The second is that the misuse of public funds is now practised by two parties rather than one.
You will remember that one of the events which sparked the first civil rights march was the denial of a house to a Catholic family in Caledon, in favour of a 19-year-old, who worked for a prospective unionist election candidate.
Discrimination in housing allocation was not confined to religion.
A Protestant man in the same area was denied a house because he was not in the unionist party and others failed to get houses because they did not shop in a particular business (a common trait at that time in housing allocation by both unionist and nationalist councillors).
This system of misusing public resources for electoral gain has not gone away you know.
As the Audit Office reported last week, Sinn Féin and the DUP designed and operated the Social Investment Fund (SIF) on that very basis.
The scheme had no formal application process for projects, it lacked transparency, its design created conflicts of interest, many of which were not addressed and it had "significant failings" in governance.
Eighteen organisations had a representative on the group which awarded them funds.
As this newspaper reported, a UVF killer was employed as operations manager and lead partner in a £881,000 project, while sitting on the allocation group which gave his organisation the money. We fought a 30-year war in the cause of political and administrative incest.
Of course, there is nothing new in the Audit Office report. It effectively said, "You have seen the film, now read the book."
However, as someone who has chaired and served on audit committees on several public bodies, I believe that many will find it a rather insipid and somewhat belated book.
For example, it offers a recommendation that "arrangements are established to promote the highest standards in government".
That's it: we recommend integrity. How very uplifting.
And therein lies the problem: our standards in public life have fallen so much since the new Stormont reconvened in 2007, that we have become conditioned to poor government and a politically contaminated civil service.
The Head of the Service told the RHI Inquiry that his organisation had "multiple failings" and had made "multiple mistakes". It may take a while for the civil service to regain its credibility.
He said that it was "safer" not to keep records of meetings because SF and the DUP were "sensitive to criticism". (I experienced some of that sensitivity in the two parties' reactions to this column's comments on SIF and other malpractices in government, at a time when many were praising Stormont for working so well.)
So what have we learned from all this? We learned that had it not been for the media, particularly this newspaper, much of Stormont's wrong-doing in RHI and SIF would never have been exposed.
George Orwell said that in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Journalists are now the only defenders of the truth.
We learned that the DUP and SF, the two parties which opposed the civil rights movement, practice the same form of discrimination which that movement was formed to oppose.
History will show that the IRA did not fight against sectarian favouritism in Stormont, it just fought to get in on it.
SF's record in Stormont shows that it did not end discrimination, it just adopted it for its own political benefit. To them, civil rights meant the right to behave like unionists.
But, unlike the sixties, no-one will march in protest against SF and the DUP.
No-one will make speeches and no-one will picket their offices, because we are a beaten people, divided by sectarianism and wearied into political apathy by the selfish and the soul-destroying antics of our politicians.
We are back where we started and we killed 4,000 people to get here. Until we overcome sectarian division, the old Stormont will always be with us and we will always be living in 1968 - but without the hope we had then.
