While some of the media, including this newspaper, will continue to diligently cover Northern Ireland’s politics over the next three weeks in the lead-up to the Assembly Elections, people in the Republic will be largely indifferent to the campaign.
Such indifference, although bemoaned by many north of the Border, is hardly surprising. This is the second such election in eight months.
There has been a historic indifference “down here” to politics “up there” since partition.
In more recent times, a post-peace process fatigue has set in. The response, if any, of most in the Republic to the collapse, again, of the Stormont Executive was one of frustration, along the lines of “‘would they every just get over themselves and get on with it”.
Yet occasionally a snippet or clip of the North’s politics registers with the wider audience in the Republic. Over the last month there have been three such moments.
The first was the news coverage of Martin McGuinness’s announcement on January 10th that he was resigning as deputy first minister.
Because of illness McGuinness had not been seen in the media for several weeks, and his frailty in the footage was shocking.
It touched at the heart of conflicted views which many in the Republic hold about McGuinness – instincts of basic human decency intermingled with respect for his work as a peacemaker and rejection, even revulsion, for his history as a gunman.
The second moment, which was both viral and memorable, came 10 days later on BBC Northern Ireland's flagship politics programme The View.
Presenter Mark Carruthers asked Ian Paisley MP for his reaction to McGuinness’s confirmation that day that he was retiring from the Assembly and not contesting the election.
Paisley (jnr) said, first of all, he wanted to wish McGuinness well in his retirement, and hoped he would get over his health issues to enjoy his retirement with his family.
Stability and peace
Second, Paisley said he wanted to say “thank you” to McGuinness, because the stability and peace which Northern Ireland currently enjoyed would not have happened were it not for the work McGuinness had put into the peace process and power-sharing.
Paisley added that “the remarkable journey that Martin McGuinness went on has not only saved lives, but has made the lives of countless people of Northern Ireland better”.
Some viewed Paisley’s remarks as motivated by a desire to have a dig at Arlene Foster, but in truth they were much more than that.
His contribution to the programme was carefully considered. His remarks were intelligent, warm and progressive.
This were more than public posturing. They reflected Paisley’s genuine attitude to McGuinness, who, at a crucial early stage, had delivered on a historic power-sharing arrangement with his father.
The third moment of this Assembly election campaign which is likely to endure made for more depressing viewing for people in the Republic.
It came on Monday last when, at the launch of the Democratic Unionist Party’s campaign, Arlene Foster was asked for her party’s attitude to the introduction of an Irish language Act in Northern Ireland.
The DUP leader replied that her party would never agree to the passage of an Irish language Act at Stormont.
She accused supporters of such legislation, including Sinn Féin, of “using the Irish language as a tool to beat unionism over the head”.
Churchill quote
An Irish language Act, she said, would serve only a tiny minority of people who chose to use the language, and she went on to argue that if Northern Ireland were to have an Irish language Act it should maybe also have a Polish language Act since there were more speakers of the latter.
Then, raising her voice, she said that appeasing was not the way she did business, and then, paraphrasing and somewhat distorting a famous Churchill quote, she added: “If you feed a crocodile it will only come back looking for more.”
Foster was playing to her own tribal political audience, but to those of us in the Republic the clip exposed publicly the arrogance and antagonism which Sinn Féin and others had long told us they have had to endure in private.
She also displayed a failure to appreciate how, notwithstanding its limited use, the Irish language is an important cultural identifier for Irish nationalists North and South.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Republic, even though they seldom if ever use the language, instinctively took offence at her deriding it.
The clip of Foster finally dispelled the notions which some had clung to that gender or generation might have shaped a more modern and open unionism.
There may be more memorable clips to come in the show reel of this Assembly election campaign.
Yet watching its key moments from across the Border, we are left with a sense that while there are some signs of change, much stays the same.