Dear Michelle and Emma. You’ve done the PR. Now when are you going to tackle public services? – Patrick Murphy

Dear First and Deputy First Ministers.

Congratulations on your appointments. We wish you well in your new jobs.

While we realise that you consider it important to create a celebrity image for yourselves, you will understand that the long-suffering people here have more pressing priorities than showbusiness-style glitz.

You have done the public relations. When are you going to tackle the public services?

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Your performance to date suggests that your two parties have asked you to focus on populist, mutual backslapping. Presumably this is why they thought it was important for the two of you to attend a soccer match, for example.

Forgive us for pointing out the obvious, but it might have been more relevant to have been pictured at a food bank.

Maybe we should explain what a food bank is. You know the way MLAs get subsidised food in Stormont? Well, that’s a sort of a semi-food bank for the political elite. Those who are not so well off have to rely on groceries from food banks to feed their families. It’s called poverty.

You must remember poverty? Your two parties promised an anti-poverty and social exclusion strategy in the St Andrews Agreement 18 years ago. They have reneged on their promise every day since then. As a result, 20% of our children live now in poverty. Did you tell them that in America?

Or you could have had your photographs taken with any one of the 700,000 waiting for medical treatment on the NHS. Rather than a soccer match you might have identified with the 37,000 women waiting for gynaecological treatments, 2,000 of whom have been waiting for three years.

Perhaps you could have highlighted women with breast cancer. The target of 100% urgent referrals within 14 days has not been met since 2012. Or maybe you should have been photographed with a parent trying to contact a GP’s surgery about a sick child?

Of course, the danger with any of those suggested photo opportunities is that it might have raised the question of how our society has become so unequal. Sadly, the answer is that your two parties are primarily responsible for the injustices we now suffer.

They have both repeatedly played the sectarian card to foster their own electoral self-interests, including collapsing Stormont for five of the past seven years.

In fairness, the more inequality they have created, the greater has been their electoral success. Sectarianism wins elections, but ruins lives.

By highlighting those injustices, your parties would have had to acknowledge responsibility for effectively collapsing the welfare state. No, we don’t want an apology (Apologies are just an excuse for doing nothing). We want your parties to undo the harm they have done.

Oh, and spare us the bit about tackling the problems in society. Both of your parties refused the take the health ministry. That tells us a lot about their priorities.

When no child goes to school hungry, when there are no NHS waiting lists, when poverty has been consigned to history and when no-one is waiting to be housed, then and only then will you deserve praise

You say that you are showing that unionists and nationalists can get on together. You are 60 years too late.

Before both your parties contributed to the onset of the Troubles, I knew Ballymena unionists who travelled to the Railway Cup hurling final on St Patrick’s Day in Croke Park. I knew young people of all religions and none from east Belfast who went youth hostelling throughout the 26 counties and it was no big deal.

During the Troubles, Rev Ian Paisley’s bigoted rantings provided a platform for loyalist violence and Sinn Féin supported the IRA’s anti-civilian bombing campaign. Meanwhile ordinary Protestants and Catholics worked together to keep our society functioning.

In the NHS (which was still in good shape before the Good Friday Agreement) medical staff did not distinguish between victims of violence on the basis of their religion.

In higher education, staff and students from all backgrounds taught and learned together for the advancement of knowledge. I wrote at the time that our colleges and universities were political asylums, safe from the outside world, which was an asylum of a different sort.

Bus drivers, binmen and bricklayers all worked together when your two parties were supporting civil and political strife. It is the long-suffering public here who deserve a standing ovation.

So when no child goes to school hungry, when there are no NHS waiting lists, when poverty has been consigned to history and when no-one is waiting to be housed, then and only then will you deserve praise.

With respect, we do not need political personalities. We need political action. Today would be a good day to start.