A Stormont scrutiny committee has called on the North's Finance Minister to stand aside pending the outcome of a probe into a party colleague's backchannel contact with an inquiry witness.

Stormont's Finance Minister has insisted he knew nothing of a party colleague's controversial contact with a witness to an inquiry into the North's largest ever property deal.

Sinn Féin has suspended a party member after he allegedly made contact with a witness to an inquiry into the North's largest ever property deal.

Sinn Féin has suspended a party member after he allegedly made contact with a witness to an inquiry into the North's largest ever property deal.

A former Sinn Féin Assembly committee chairman has resigned following allegations that he communicated with loyalist Jamie Bryson before he gave explosive evidence about the Nama property deal.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan has questions to answer after keeping Stormont counterparts in the dark over proposed payments to a former adviser to Nama, a watchdog claimed.

Nama chairman Frank Daly has denied that the Irish taxpayer was “robbed” or that the agency’s €1.6bn Northern portfolio sale — called Project Eagle — was a “corrupt” process.

A US investment fund that bought Nama’s assets in the North for in excess of £1bn will not appear before a Stormont inquiry investigating the controversial sale.

Nama is expected to resist attempts to force the bad bank to appear in Belfast and answer questions about the sale of its entire Northern property portfolio.

Stormont has demanded that Finance Minister Michael Noonan put pressure on Nama to give evidence to a probe in the North of the agency’s sale of the Project Eagle loan portfolio.

Nama was toughing it out last night amid calls from Stormont and in the Dáil that it review the process behind the controversial sale last year of €5.7bn of loans to a giant US fund.

Unionists have demanded answers after an Irish Tricolour was run up the main flagpole of Parliament Buildings at Stormont.

Stunned neighbours of a man shot dead in the North have spoken of their horror at the killing.

Britain pledged to devolve corporation tax setting powers to Northern Ireland as soon as next year but only if Belfast can break a political deadlock on budget cuts, a condition described as “breathtakingly arrogant” by nationalist Sinn Féin.

A father of three remained in a critical condition in hospital today following a farm accident that claimed the life of his eight-year-old son.

Business and community leaders have broadly welcomed the British Government’s economic pact which aims to rebalance the North's beleaguered economy and tackle sectarian division.

Police in the North have been given an extra 36 hours to question a 26-year-old man after a Ballymena man drowned in the River Bann at the weekend.

Two men in Northern Ireland have been fined for posting anti-Catholic messages on Facebook.

A man has today been fined £250 (€303.08) after posting sectarian messages on Facebook.

The PSNI today defended a decision to re-route a parade during a security alert.

Two Orange halls were attacked with petrol bombs in Co Antrim, police said today.

The SDLP and Sinn Féin in north Antrim are calling on unionist leaders to speak out against a spate of sectarian attacks in the area.

An ambulance crew which left a neo-natal patient to hospital was kept waiting there for six and a half hours before she was moved elsewhere, it was revealed today.

A police shoot-to-kill policy against dissident republican terrorists would be accepted by the community in the North, Policing Board member Ian Paisley Jnr claimed today.

Police in the North are investigating an alleged assault on a 16-year-old girl at a bonfire in Ballymena, Co Antrim.

A 21-year-old man has been arrested and charged in connection with an attack on a Sinn Féin assembly member in Co Antrim, police said today.

The DUP's Ian Paisley Jnr is coming under pressure today over fresh revelations about his links to property developer Seymour Sweeney.

POLICE failed to properly deal with death threats made against Catholic solicitor Rosemary Nelson before she was murdered, a report revealed yesterday.

A man was found dead in Antrim today after taking a suspected heroin overdose.

The North's top police officer resisted demands for an unarmed force today as Sinn Féin questioned him in public for the first time.

Sinn Féin representatives will today quiz the North's police commanders in public for the first time.

Sinn Féin's three nominees are due to attend their first full meeting of the North's Policing Board later today.

A former Sinn Féin mayor of Derry is to join the party’s first three Assembly representatives on the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

Sinn Féin has included a former long-serving republican prisoner among the nominees for its three seats on the North's Policing Board.

A number of republicans in the North have been told their details are in the hands of unionist paramilitaries, it was claimed today.

“THINGS fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” — well the fallout from the Belfast Assembly poll is not quite as bad as WB Yeats’s words suggest, but he was spot-on about the middle ground parties going south.

The DUP and Sinn Féin were making significant gains in the Northern Ireland Assembly Elections.

A jubilant Ian Paisley punched the air after again topping the poll in North Antrim and immediately declared: "We beat the Shinners."

Loyalist paramilitaries behind a double pipe bomb attack in a Northern Ireland village planned to kill, police said today.