蜜芽传媒

The terrible fire at Grenfell Tower has cast a shadow over our political life. The Chancellor's Mansion House speech was postponed last night. The Queen's Speech is going to be two days late. We may not know until next week whether, and how the DUP will support a minority Conservative government.

But the events of high political drama over recent years often produces a more heated and aggressive form of political debate. Maybe this comes with the seriousness of the choices under consideration. Political debate seems to have become less civilised now, and at times quite raw. Granted, for much of my youth political debate in Northern Ireland was as raw as one could imagine.

But I am concerned about the political attitude, which focuses less on the opposing view and more on the holder of the view. It seems to have difficulty dealing with difference, and the right to be different. Complex nuance is reduced to false binary choice, often aided by social media, which portrays moderation as boring, and the sensational as appealing.

Recent debates on the DUP, or even the case of Tim Farron, have missed the subtly of positions, context, history and even change. While the politics of Northern Ireland is not a model for others to follow, credit has to be given to all parties there for the distance they have travelled over recent decades in pursuit of a peaceful society.

The DUP, like Sinn Fein, has been a major part of that, and despite their often unhelpful roles during the Troubles, as Ian Paisley junior said of Martin McGuinness, it鈥檚 where the journey ends that鈥檚 important, not where it starts.

In such a raw political climate the challenge for us is to give each other the space to grow and to change, to be different and to see things differently. But does that demand too much of us? Does it require a change of heart and perspective? Is that too much to ask?

Christianity teaches it can never be too much. But all too often we fail in that challenge because we demand that others change first. We see the fault in the other but not ourselves. We don鈥檛 always appreciate the role of difference in our democracy and culture or see it as building a society, not diminishing it.

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