A ceasefire here might be a good idea. I don't mean avoiding talking about divisive issues, but maybe the idea should be to get a better understanding of why it is other people might see things differently, and vice versa, not getting into verbal fist-fights.

There's a piece in today's Guardian by Jonathan Freedland that I think deserves reading. It tries to tease out the issues involved, and here's a taster:

"Leaders on all sides are predicting the imminent suspension of the self-government they established in 1998 - with perhaps no way back. Their accounts of how they got here differ entirely; and it is into the gap between them that all the valuable, even heroic work of the last four years could fall. The tragedy of it is that gap is not nearly as wide as it looks."