The political impasse in the North is likely to lessen the respect for politics, writes Carmel Hanna.
It's invariably at the end of the statement from a Northern Ireland government department announcing the well-paid appointment of Mr X (or, less frequently, Ms X or Miss X) to a government quango: "Mr X has not engaged in any political activity in the past five (or 10) years." Some anonymous and definitely unelected public servant thinks that the people will take comfort from the statement that Mr X has not been involved in political activity.
The unstated assumption is that being involved in politics, which in a healthy society should be an honourable civic duty, is in Northern Ireland in some way a grubby and reprehensible activity.
Ambivalence about political involvement highlights a lot of what is wrong about the North. With the Assembly more likely than not to shut in November, organised political activity in the North, never robust, is likely to go into sharp decline for years, if not decades, as happened after the collapse of the 1975 Convention.
Some commentators will be delighted, heaping opprobrium indiscriminately on all the parties rather than being honest enough to admit that the problem lies with the deadlock between DUP and Sinn Féin, for whom 58 per cent of the people voted.
If the Assembly goes, people will get what they voted for, including for some the unintended consequence of the destruction of Strand One of the Good Friday Agreement. If political activity goes into deep freeze the culture of lack of responsibility-taking in the North will become even more deeply entrenched. The ensuing vacuum will inevitably be filled by extremists who have no interest in the essential political arts of debate, discussion, compromise and decision-taking.
At this year's "Twelfth", Ian Paisley, the man who commands more votes than anyone else in the North, hammered home the point that "compromise, accommodation. . . are the road to irreversible disaster".
Gerry Adams has spent nearly two decades persuading the physical force nationalist movement, "the republican movement", to climb down off the ledge of political abstentionism and he still hasn't conclusively won the argument.
The origin of the word "idiot" comes from ancient Greek as a description of a person who took no interest in public affairs.
That ambiguity about the worth of being politically active was seen during the Troubles when some poor unfortunate was murdered and it was customary for some well-intentioned neighbour coming on camera to say "he was never involved in anything, he kept himself to himself".
The sub-text was that engaging in political activity was as likely to invite an attack as being engaged in nefarious paramilitary activity.
Northern Ireland has never had good governance. The periods when there was democratic, cross-community governance enjoying widespread support in the North can be counted in a handful of months. Following the Act of Union in 1801, the first politician in the world to use the power of democratic mass mobilisation, Daniel O'Connell, set out two aims: first to win Catholic Emancipation (which he achieved in 1829) and, second, to repeal the Union (which he never achieved).
In working towards the first aim, he instituted the Catholic Rent, a kind of political fighting fund which also had the unfortunate effect of solidifying the identification of Irish nationalism with Catholicism. In the days when there were 240 pennies to a pound, he urged every family in Ireland, no matter how poor, to contribute a penny a month.
Within a few years he had amassed the massive sum of around £50,000 which he used to paralyse the British administration in Ireland.
However, the counties where he had most difficulty in raising the rent were for the most part those six counties which later became Northern Ireland.
A few years ago the American Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone developed the idea that community involvement, not just political activity, but being a member of sports clubs, musical societies, residents' and tenants' groups etc was the essential glue that bound a community together and that once that became unstuck society was in deep trouble.
The Taoiseach is said to have been greatly influenced by Putnam. The title of Putnam's book came from the idea that individualism in the US had developed to the unhealthy stage that some people, because they were working too hard or whatever, were so disconnected from their community that they could not even find a bowling team to join and so had to "bowl alone" at the local alley.
There are people reading this column who will welcome the demise of the Assembly with a kind of "plague on all (or both) your houses" attitude.
Maybe they should think again: to paraphrase John Donne: "ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for your community."
Carmel Hanna is an SDLP MLA for South Belfast and was minister for employment and learning in the suspended Northern Ireland Executive.