With just over two weeks to go until the Eleventh Night, there are promising signs it could be - whisper it - a relatively quiet bonfire season.
Early fears of a long, hot summer of discontent fusing loyalist frustration over Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol with the annual pyres and parades has not materialised.
Although issues can flare up very quickly, at this stage it seems this will be another year in which bonfire controversies have been dialled down a notch.
Read more: Brendan Hughes: A year since the DUP's leadership turmoil, how is the party faring?
It is welcome that it appears fewer bonfires make headlines each year for offensive displays such as the burning of flags and effigies. The use of toxic materials such as tyres has also become much more of a taboo for many bonfire sites.
It shows some progress is being made in communities to address criticisms.
But while many bonfires pass off without major incident, there remain huge public safety concerns over some structures due to their towering size.
The scale of the problem was highlighted this week when Belfast Live revealed summer bonfires have cost the public purse more than £800,000 in clean-up, repair and protection bills in the past three years.
Street-cleaning, staffing, equipment such as diggers, tractors and skips, and the re-seeding of grass were among the costs incurred by councils and the roads service.
By far the most alarming aspect was that the majority of the spending to address damage from bonfires was by the Housing Executive.
The public housing body spent more than half-a-million pounds - including almost £214,000 boarding up properties to protect them from the flames and heat.
This plainly demonstrates that some bonfires are simply too big and too close to homes and property. They are unsafe.
Despite this, the yearly competition for size and scale in built-up residential areas continues to put property and lives at risk.
These costs do not even include the amount spent by the Fire Service tackling July bonfires, which reached almost £670,000 between 2010 and 2015.
We live in a warped society when firefighters are hosing down buildings to keep them cool rather than extinguishing the flames putting those properties at risk.
The huge drain on public resources is particularly hard to fathom in a cost-of-living crisis.
Bonfires may be considered culturally important to unionist areas, but melting the window frames off your neighbour's house does nothing to serve your community.
The regulation, restriction and removal of problem bonfires could be upheld by a multitude of existing laws including waste control and public order legislation, but authorities are reluctant to enforce them.
The reasons for this are well-rehearsed, from political expediency to fears over staff safety and sparking public disorder, as well as some bonfire sites being linked to paramilitaries.
A long-delayed Stormont report published last December on tackling annual flags and bonfire disputes offered the mildest of ways forward.
The Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition (FICT) proposed a set of conditions for bonfires built on public land, including that the distance of a pyre from any physical structure should be five times its height - a restatement of current Fire Service guidelines.
It also recommended that wood for pyres should be made exempt from being classified as controlled waste, in the hope that this would allow landowners who give permission for bonfires to set their own conditions.
However, the FICT report was published without the first and deputy first ministers' office agreeing an action plan on implementing any of its recommendations.
The £800,000 report looks destined to join many other Stormont papers in gathering dust on a shelf.
Without consensus, it seems likely that disputes over divisive bonfires will increasingly play out on a case-by-case basis in the courts - bringing further expense to the public purse.
In some areas the approach has been community regeneration, in which new facilities such as housing, football pitches and landscaped greenways are built over the top of problematic bonfire sites.
But in the absence of political leadership, any progress will be piecemeal, incremental and reactionary as new problems arise every year.
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