THE last few days have stretched power sharing to its very limits.
The DUP, doggedly intent on lifting some if not all of the recent Covid-related restrictions, has played a high-risk game that is likely to sour relations within the executive for some time to come.
Why the party is so determined to ignore the medical advice is anybody’s guess.
Everybody yearns for a return to something approaching normal but any strategy that involves ‘living with the virus’ must begin from a position of strength.
While the four-week restrictions that expire tonight have been largely successful in arresting the upward trajectory in infections, more needs to be done in order to send them downward.
Two weeks more, or even the one-week compromise tabled yesterday by health minister Robin Swann, would undoubtedly have helped, yet for the DUP – with science sceptic and nationalist bogeyman Edwin Poots apparently at its vanguard – this wasn’t acceptable. And so a cross-community veto was deployed for the second time in 24 hours.
Given that the minister proposing extending the restrictions on the basis of medical advice is also a unionist, it’s impossible to see the use of the veto as anything other than a cynical abuse of a mechanism design to protect minorities.
Yet another aspect of Stormont’s dysfunctional system crying out for reform.
Despite being outnumbered and outvoted in the executive, the DUP last night looked likely to achieve its aim of lifting restrictions as the circuit-breaker clock winds down to midnight.
But if the medical and scientific advise is to be believed, it is likely to prove a Pyrric victory, with its constituency appeased in the short-term but another Covid crisis brewing further down the line.
What chance then for a doubly divided executive, where even compromises are shunned, to combat a virus that pays no heed to cross-community considerations?
