Stormont sitting axed in wake of talks collapse
Last updated 27th Mar 2017
A scheduled sitting of the Stormont Assembly to nominate new leading ministers has been axed after talks to restore a powersharing government collapsed.
The decision of the party whips to pull the plenary makes it all but inevitable that Monday's 4pm deadline for forming an executive will pass without agreement.
Focus will then shift to Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire.
Under legislation he is required to call another snap election if the deadline passes.
However, he is not obliged to set a poll date immediately, rather within a reasonable period''.
Mr Brokenshire may therefore delay calling an election to give a few more weeks to reach consensus.
He could countenance the nuclear option of reintroducing direct rule from Westminster, but that move - which would require emergency legislation - looks unlikely at this stage.
Talks collapsed on Sunday night after Sinn Fein announced it would not be nominating a deputy first minister in the Assembly on Monday.
Without both first and deputy first ministers it is impossible to form an executive.
In the absence of a functioning devolved government, a senior civil servant is set to take control of the region's public finances on Wednesday, albeit with limits on his spending powers.
Green Party leader Steven Agnew voted against axing the Assembly sitting in the whips' meeting.
"Today was an opportunity to explain to the public what has been happening since the election, since they gave us a resounding mandate to get the Assembly and institutions back up and running,'' he said.
That opportunity has been wasted and an agreement among the parties to not hold the sitting today denies that openness, that transparency and that accountability.''
Reacting to the latest developments, Mrs Foster claimed Sinn Fein's inflexible'' approach to negotiations was to blame.
The DUP leader said she did not believe another election would solve anything.
We wonder whether Sinn Fein were serious about reaching agreement at this time,'' said the former first minister.
We are just disappointed that Sinn Fein did not come to the talks in the same spirit as we came to the talks.
We respect everybody's mandates, let me make that very clear, but if we wanted to form an executive, then there had to be a spirit of compromise and unfortunately that didn't exist.''
Mrs Foster claimed while her party entered talks in good faith'', Sinn Fein were not inagreement-finding mode''.
These talks did not fail because of a lack of time, these talks failed because there wasn't a recognition of everyone's mandates and there wasn't a spirit of compromise to get back into the executive,'' she said.
Noting potential cuts to public services if the civil service takes control of a reduced budget allocation, the DUP leader accused the republican party of putting its narrow political agenda'' above people's livelihoods.
The government of Northern Ireland is not a game, it is actually very serious and the fact we do not have an executive being formed today is very regrettable,'' she added.
A symbolic handshake between Mrs Foster and Sinn Fein's Stormont leader Michelle O'Neill at the funeral of Mr McGuinness last week had raised some expectation the talks might end more positively.
DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said Sinn Fein had not followed through on the gesture.
"That handshake represented a reaching-out but the inclusivity that that represents was not then carried forward into the talks,'' he said.
The SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said that the talks had been doomed from the outset by what he claimed was a partial chair in NI Secretary of State James Brokenshire.
"We are saying again today that there has to be a new process and there has to be a chairperson that can pull all this together,'' he said.
Outgoing UUP leader Mike Nesbitt said the talks process was a "shambles''.
Referring to the prospect of the permanent secretary of the Finance Department taking control of Stormont spending, he said an "unelected civil servant'' was about to become "arguably the most important man in Northern Ireland''.
He questioned why there had been no round table meeting of all the parties during the negotiations.
Alliance leader Naomi Long said the lack of politically agreed budget would have a serious impact on the community.
"It is unthinkable that we would see a project that is 25 years of investment, of time and energy and hope for this community being destroyed in the way that it has been over recent months,'' she said.
"We cannot throw it away lightly, we must not throw it away lightly and it is now time for us to redouble our efforts and ensure that a deal will be reached.''