In the days after the funeral of the murdered journalist Lyra McKee, ‘talks about talks’ aimed at restoring power-sharing were announced. A former diplomat laments that political leaders on both sides lack the imagination and courage to raise their sights above the old tribal imperatives

The tragic murder of Lyra McKee in Derry stopped the clocks in Northern Ireland. Poignant though it was, there was something depressingly familiar about the question put by Fr Martin Magill in the address at her funeral – “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 us to this point?” It could have been any priest or pastor, at hundreds of funerals during the Troubles – Troubles which supposedly ended in the 1990s, when Lyra was just a child, and perhaps before her killer was even born.

Is the progress made in the 21 years since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement illusory? Do the exuberant murals depicting Derry Girls simply conceal an uglier but more enduring truth limned in the old gable-end wall images of separateness, self-pity and militarism? Will Northern Ireland’s people ever achieve Seamus Heaney’s “great sea-change/On the far side of revenge” ?

I grew up in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, during the Troubles. It’s very hard for me to question the faith we have put in the implementation of the 1998 Agreement as the only alternative to those pitiless years. And it is hard not to see that hopeful era when transformation did indeed seem possible as our entitlement, which “the politicians” must give us back. But we should try for an honest perspective and ask hard questions, as McKee did.