God loves a tryer, they say, but He or She must be getting tired of some tryers. There are tryers who not only try our patience but in fact give us a glimpse of what might be their insanity.

Cast your mind back to, let’s say, 2011.  That’s when Martin McGuinness announced his intention of running for the Irish presidency. From that moment, in the media and in life,  a barrage of accusations were directed at McGuinness about his past as a member of the IRA. There were two particular highlighted moments: when Miriam O’Callaghan asked him on TV when he’d last been at confession, and when a man ambushed McGuinness on live TV and called him a liar because he said he didn’t know who had killed this man’s father.

The intention was to batter McGuinness with the violence charge, and let’s be honest: it worked, in that McGuinness didn’t become President.

That was over thirteen years after the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the conflict. This week, some twenty-four years after the GFA, they ‘re still at it, this time attempting to batter a woman who, at the time of the conflict, was still attending school in Dublin.

Today, The Irish News publishes a story headed ‘Sinn Féin leader refuses to condemn IRA attacks on security forces in Northern Ireland’.

Will we ever hear an end of this sort of tripe? Will Mary Lou McDonald’s grandchild be confronted with his reaction to his grandmother’s failure to condemn the IRA?

But soft. This is the season of goodwill to all, even Irish News scribes. It might be better to greet this constant tactic –  Leo Varadkar uses it, so does Micheál Martin – not with  contempt but rather with pity.  People who keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result are seen as exhibiting signs of insanity. So maybe we should be draping a sympathetic arm around these people and speaking to them in gentle, compassionate tones. Because God loves crazies as well as tryers, and maybe so should we.