prevails at Stormont, the hill overlooking Belfast which is home to Northern Ireland’s devolved administration. It is not the return of a power-sharing government that has people scratching their heads; it is how that government’s leaders are behaving. Imagine Joe Biden and Donald Trump suddenly working together in harmony, and you have a sense of the strangeness.
Warm gestures are welcome but no guarantee of success. When Ian Paisley, a loyalist firebrand, and Martin McGuinness, a formercommander, led a devolved administration in 2007, the former foes were known as “the chuckle brothers” for their laughing and joking; less than ten months into office, Paisley was ousted by the party he had founded. Now, as then, the greatest vulnerability to the power-sharing government comes from within the.
There is little sign that the Stormont executive, which also has ministers from the Alliance Party and the Ulster Unionist Party, is ready to take hard decisions. The British government offered more than £3bn if devolution returned, including a £559m debt write-off if the executive raised £113m of its own revenue.