Chris Heaton-Harris is right to criticise Stormont MLAs for over spendsing

The DUP yesterday accused the Sinn Fein of causing the financial shortfall to which Chris Heaton-Harris referred yesterday.

The secretary of state was scathing about the way in which MLAs had spent so freely as to create a nearly £700 million shortfall.

The DUP is right to point out that SF has latterly held the finance ministry under Conor Murphy.

The republican party adopts the politics of the primary school, of depicting almost all financial prudence as cruelty and of always promising various people and sectors and interest groups more monetary support.

But while Sinn Fein has inflicted lasting political damage on Northern Ireland in the five years since Martin McGuinness died, playing a destabilising role in the country that it does not want to exist, it is by no means the full picture to cite SF's populism.

Republican over-spending at times does almost seem to be a ploy to create finacial problems, and thus a sense that NI cannot work as an entity, yet the other parties can be almost as spendthrift.

There are always demands for high profile spending on multiple public services, for which local politicians then seek to get credit.

There has rarely been serious discussion in the assembly about how to control or reform expenditure.

Many financial demands are sentimentalised as opposed to properly examined.

Mr Heaton-Harris is right to point out that NI gets better funding per head from the state coffers than the rest of the UK.

Even if some of this advantage is fair on the grounds of NI being one of the poorer regions of the nation, it has long risked a backlash from other places which are net contributors to the Treasury, not net beneficiaries.