The idea that IRA terrorism was justified is one that has been building for a long time

Maybe Ms O’Neill does not have the instinct to be generous to the other community or maybe she just lacks the political confidence to be so.

But whatever the reason, it is extraordinary to think that relations between unionist politicians and nationalist ones are at a lower ebb now, when a woman from a new generation and with no IRA involvement is at the helm of republican politics, than when an ex terror commander was so.

For all his terrible past, Martin McGuinness was far more skilled at navigating the community with which the Stormont system required him to share power, knowing for example when to make himself scarce or when to stay silent.

But while Ms O’Neill has been a disastrous leader in terms of inter-community relations, and while she is deeply implicated in the upswing in triumphal Sinn Fein celebrations of IRA murderers, she cannot be blamed alone for the growing retrospective view that past republican violence was legitimate.

This perspective on the past has been a long time brewing.

There is good data on past levels of support for the IRA. Sinn Fein began contesting elections on both sides of the border in the early 1980s, yet until end of 1990s it typically got around 2% or 3% of the vote in the Republic and typically 35% to 40% of the nationalist vote in Northern Ireland (but an even smaller percentage of Catholic votes, because a small but clear number of voters from such a background voted Alliance). Thus those who lived through the violence would not support who endorsed it.

Now, decades later, plenty of voters have no memory of IRA terrorism. It is a tribute to British generosity that children are not taught to dwell on the fact that republicans killed by far the most people in the Troubles. But few of the endless legal cases, or documentaries or other forms of focus into allegations of past wrongdoing against the state, are challenged.

So for example the collusion lie (of widespread state support for loyalist killers) is barely countered and an ever expanding generation only hears of distortions about a wicked UK state, against which violence seems to have been a fair response.