Jim Allister, with his usual oratorial competence, while standing in his usual position at the rear of the Assembly chamber, reminded us that people and governments reap what they sow.
The reaping and the sowing is, of course, a Biblical quotation. Jim was using it in reference to the open Irish border and the row that has broken out between the British and Irish governments.
Jim was taking some pleasure in describing the embarrassment of the Dublin government, which had successfully ensured that the Irish border remain open in the Brexit negotiations, but was now complaining that migrants were using that same open border to travel to the Republic in great and unwelcome numbers.
This is the type of political spat that normally could be passed off with a glance and a shrug of the shoulders. But the roots of this issue, which is certainly beyond the competence and influence of Jim Allister and the Irish and British Governments, are so historical and so volatile that it would be foolish to ignore their import.
For a start, this spat could not be happening at a worst time. All the predictions are that the world is going to face tough times in the short and medium term. The negative forewarnings are plentiful. War in Europe and the Middle East, hunger in Africa, anger in North America and continuing instability in South America, to name just a few of the present problems.
We are also facing into a series of elections; some local, some national and, if my eyesight is still dependable, I would swear that I saw a poster for European elections as I drove through Donegal the other day.
Elections are the foundational basis of our democratic institutions, but they are also a sure guarantee that no practical policies will be devised or implemented until the politicians are back at their desks, governments back in power and posters removed from the polls.
Normally politics has a way of sorting out entangled problems, even when the sorting out is tardy and untidy. But what is scary about the issue behind this recent spat is that politics and governments, individually and collectively, do not have a clear vision of how to respond nor the willingness to address the problem at the radical level that it demands.
The terrible reality is that the migrant problem has only just begun and is going to get much worse in the coming decades.
And the seeds were sown a long time ago. History records that the western world, most especially the powerful colonising empires, enriched themselves at the expense of the southern countries of the world. But what is about to face the world is far out and beyond the economic destruction that colonialism has wrought. It is climate change.
We are only beginning to get a taste of what climate change is going to bring to the world
We are only beginning to get a taste of what climate change is going to bring to the world. Drought, fire, floods, pestilence are spreading and, of course, are wreaking the greatest damage in the poorer areas of the world. The stream of people who are making their way to Europe and to North America is going to grow rather than decrease. The words and the descriptions that will increasingly embed themselves in our vocabulary will indeed be Biblical, most readily found in the book of the Apocalypse.
It is often and rightly said that we get the politicians and the politics that we deserve. They mostly reflect the values and the standards of their voters. The only slim hope is that a growing number of that electorate challenge their politicians to grow up and become mature participants in an extraordinarily serious issue.
It would be a start to get them to accept that all of us have sown seeds that are already beginning to produce a harvest that is capable of strangling our world and, as yet, we don’t know what to do about it.