Northern Ireland is again set to hold fresh elections, after Stormont on Thursday failed to elect a new leader.
A deadline for members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) to form a new power-sharing executive expires just after midnight – with elections due December if none is agreed.
There has been no proper government in Northern Ireland since February this year and elections held in May have apparently been unable to break the deadlock.
The log-jam in the assembly comes after the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) declined to participate in the process because of concerns over the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol.
Many unionists are angry that the protocol, negotiated by Boris Johnson, erects barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The UK and EU are currently in technical talks to make changes to the implementation of the agreement.
Northern Ireland’s power-sharing system, introduced alongside the Good Friday Agreement, requires cooperation from both sides of the political divide to form an executive.
Rishi Sunak earlier urged the parties to come to an agreement to restore an executive.
The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “There’s still time for the DUP and executives to get back to Stormont and we urge them to do so because the people of Northern Ireland deserve a fully functioning and locally elected executive which can respond to the issues facing the communities there.
“That was the Northern Ireland Secretary’s message to all party leaders when they met yesterday but clearly the Northern Ireland Secretary has a statutory duty.”
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said his party was given a mandate at the last elections that it “would not nominate ministers to an executive until decisive action is taken on the protocol to remove the barriers to trade within our own country and to restore our place within the United Kingdom internal market”.
He added: “That remains our position and so today we will not be supporting the nomination of ministers to the executive.”
But Sinn Fein Stormont leader Michelle O’Neill said the DUP had “have left us all at the mercy of a heartless and dysfunctional Tory government”.
Ms O’Neill claimed those watching proceedings in the Assembly would be “bewildered”, adding: “Most of us here want to do the job we were elected to do. Today our caretaker ministers rally to take decisions, within tight limits, before their civil servants are left in an impossible position come midnight where they are expected to run our essential public services yet have no budget and no powers.”
Opinion polls currently give Sinn Fein a signifiant lead in the assembly, likely to win around 30 per cent of the vote and be the largest party. The unionist vote is split between DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party, and the hard-line TUV. The non-aligned Alliance Party also looks set to win a significant share of the vote, perhaps around 15 per cent.
