Editorial: Stormont recall was another example of futile gesture politics

Yesterday’s recall of the Stormont assembly showed Northern Ireland politics at its worst.

​It was a pointless exercise, proposed by Sinn Fein and supported by the SDLP and Alliance.

The DUP has refused to allow a speaker to be nominated to the Assembly since February 2022, when it first walked out of Stormont because it was required to implement an Irish Sea border.

For that reason, the parties knew their motion amounted to a futile stunt, but they insisted on doing it anyway.

In Northern Ireland, unfortunately, we are used to provocative gesture politics. Our local councils, for example, routinely vote on issues that have nothing to do with them and over which they have no authority.

This Assembly recall coincided with a notional deadline for the secretary of state to call a new Stormont election. The MLAs knew already, though, that Chris Heaton-Harris intended to further delay any poll.

It also fell the day before serious public sector strikes. But even the most militant of trade union leaders had already acknowledged that it was the secretary of state who had decided not to release money for pay rises in Northern Ireland.

It is worth remembering that the parties to this recall all previously called for the ‘rigorous implementation’ of the NI Protocol. They continue to ignore the fact that our politics is in chaos precisely because of those arrangements, which they cheered on, that cut this part of the UK off from the rest of our country’s economy.

For all the hand-wringing, evasion and sanctimony that we witnessed at Stormont yesterday, it is still the Irish Sea border that is the biggest source of instability in Northern Ireland.