The last few weeks have not exactly provided firm evidence that our political structures are delivering significant and clearly demonstrable advances on behalf of all our citizens.
Key projects have either been abandoned or scaled down by the Northern Ireland Office and the Stormont executive’s long-awaited draft programme for government has received a noticeably cool response.
However, while it is always important that the authorities are held to account, we also need to remember that we have the huge advantage of living in the kind of largely settled and peaceful society which many of our parents and grandparents would simply not recognise.
I had the privilege last week of speaking at the launch of a book, Ghosts Of A Family, which sets out compelling new information about one of the darkest periods in 20th century Ireland.
Author Edward Burke, an historian at University College, Dublin, spent the last five years researching the sectarian massacre of six Catholic civilians in their north Belfast home on March 24 1922.
The basic facts of the McMahon case are still shocking, just over a century later, and go to the heart of the relationship between the newly created state of Northern Ireland and its minority Catholic population.
A well-armed group of five men, wearing some form of auxiliary police uniforms, forced their way into 3 Kinnaird Terrace, at the bottom of the Antrim Road, in the early hours of the morning, lined up the male occupants and ordered them to say their prayers before shooting them without mercy.
The fatalities were Owen McMahon, a prominent and respected publican aged 55, his sons Bernard (26), Frank (24), Patrick (22) and Thomas Gerald (15), and an employee, Edward McKinney (26).
Another son, 19-year-old John, was also shot but survived to provide an account of what happened. His brother, Leo, aged 14, was in hospital at time, while the youngest McMahon, Michael, aged 11, miraculously survived by hiding under a large table.
Mrs Eliza McMahon, who was 49, her daughter, Lily, aged 13, and an 18-year-old niece, Mary Catherine, were spared but traumatised.
No-one was ever charged with the atrocity, which came during the most violent six-month period in the history of the state, with a death toll far higher than any comparable stage of the Troubles which followed in the late 1960s.
In addition to the McMahons, and the two RIC members who were shot dead some hours earlier, there were many hundreds of other victims during the height of what became known at the Pogroms, with savage internecine bloodshed mainly in working class areas of Belfast leaving Catholics, Protestants and police officers dead, and the term collusion emerging for the first but not the last time.
The police investigation into the Kinnaird Terrace slaughter made little progress, despite the statements offered by John McMahon and the many firm indications that the perpetrators were members of the Ulster Special Constabulary, an overwhelmingly loyalist 20,000 strong auxiliary police force which had been formed two years earlier.
The basic facts of the McMahon case are still shocking, just over a century later, and go to the heart of the relationship between the newly created state of Northern Ireland and its minority Catholic population
Burke’s painstaking work involved combing through an enormous range of records on both sides of the Irish Sea, including previously sealed British military intelligence reports, and he eventually travelled to Canada to finalise his conclusions.
His book names and includes photographs of David Duncan, a World War One veteran and former member of the Black and Tans, as the organiser and the main gunman at the Kinnaird Terrace slaughter.
Burke comprehensively explains Duncan’s connections, motivations and actions, why he managed to escape justice, and how he managed to later disappear off to the French Foreign Legion, serving as far away as Tunisia, before he returned to Belfast and was then provided with first class travel on a luxury liner to Canada where he eventually died in a mental hospital.
While every killing from the 1920s to the present day was wrong, cruel and only capable of causing grief and bitterness on an enormous scale, the McMahon murders raised fundamental and still familiar questions about policing, with massive wider consequences at the time.
Michael Collins decided to intervene after his own investigations and ordered the assassination by the IRA in London, in June 1922, of the former head of the British Army, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, previously a military adviser to unionist prime minister James Craig in Belfast.
This was in turn was a catalyst for the immediate outbreak of the Irish Civil War, with Collins himself shot dead in his native Co Cork just weeks later, changing the course of the country’s history.
Ghosts of A Family is an extraordinary book, addressing themes which transcend the decades, and it will reach out to all those who want to fully understand the Ireland of the 20th and indeed the 21st century.
Ghosts Of A Family, by Dr Edward Burke, is published by Merrion Press.
