At the service of thanksgiving for my friend Lyra McKee in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, last week, we stood to applaud Father Martin Magill’s address. “I commend our political leaders for standing together in Creggan on Good Friday,” Fr Magill said of the show of unity in Derry, which had seen Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin, Alliance and Green Party leaders pay their respects after Lyra was shot and killed during rioting on the Derry housing estate. “But I am left with a question: Why, in God’s name, does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman, with her whole life in front of her, to get to this point?” As the congregation inside the cathedral got to their feet clapping they were joined by the crowds in the square outside listening via audio link. The ovation lasted for several minutes.

Depressingly familiar though the words were, as Paul McGrade points out opposite, that it took a priest to condemn the entrenched sectarian divides which still plague Northern Ireland was stark. The politicians tasked with moving communities forward in the new landscape opened up by the Good Friday Agreement 21 years ago have been locked in a grim stalemate since the power-sharing agreement in Stormont collapsed in January 2017. Even though the conflict that ravaged Northern Ireland is lazily characterised as sectarian, it is more political than it is religious. My friend’s funeral, with the Dean of the Protestant cathedral leading the prayers and a Catholic priest giving the address, was symbolic of the role many religious leaders and laity have forged in the work of reconciliation and peace-building.