It appears as if Northern Irish politics needs to be shut down and re-booted. To add to the growing list of seemingly insurmountable challenges - welfare reform, dealing with the legacy of the past, and identity and culture - to name but a few, last month's report on paramilitary activity, ordered by the Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, has further hampered political progress.
The report was commissioned following the Ulster Unionist Party's graceless exit from the Executive, undertaken as an act of protest in response to the 'news' that the IRA structures of the 1990's remain intact. The report confirms the Chief Constable's statement, and indeed, what almost every conscious member of Northern Irish society knows: paramilitaries remain a part of Northern Ireland's social and political landscape.
Intense talks – which, we are told- are our only hope of ‘saving’ a broken system, once again dominate the news. Why are we at this point of deadlock? Seventeen years after the historic Good Friday Agreement, which won Ulster Unionist Party and Social Democratic and Labour Party leaders the Nobel Peace prize for their role in shaping it, the major Unionist parties have awoken, as if from a moral coma, and begun to question the continued existence of the IRA.
