Headline writers are celebrating this evening after the Stormont Executive raised its crisis alert first from Amber to Red, then to Dark Red with a hint of Purple.
The new crisis related crisis came about after Sinn Fein withdrew their support for proposed Welfare Legislation, accusing their partners in government, the DUP, of acting in ‘bad faith’, thus causing the crisis. This prompted Peter Robinson to respond that “The Stormont House Agreement will fall because (welfare reform) is a key element of it. If the Stormont House Agreement falls, then we are back into a crisis.”
This latest crisis has led to much discussion among historians, as they try to find the last time that Stormont, or the peace process, was NOT in the middle of some kind of crisis. “We have been looking at parliamentary records” says Professor James Blunt of Ballymena University, “and have discovered, hidden in the archives, a period of approximately 27 minutes on March 3rd 2011, when everything was pretty much OK.”
“Aside from this brief window of normality we have basically been lurching from one executive threatening crisis to the next,” he explained. “We’ve had parades, flags, parades, on-the-runs, parades, welfare reform, and parades. Before that we had more parades, then flags and then parades about flags.”
The Sinn Fein leadership have refuted claims that this new crisis has anything to do with the coming election, and the fact that they think that this issue will play particularly well in North Belfast. Meanwhile the DUP has denied that it has come about as a result of the Executive being composed of a bunch of twats who couldn’t be trusted to babysit a hamster.