A real test of how power is used by SF - Stormont welfare impasse

When, in 1597, Shakespeare included the line “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” in Henry IV, Part II, he can hardly have imagined how relevant, how very pertinent and precise, his observation would be on this small island more than four centuries later.

The weekend announcement that the North’s Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, has cancelled a visit to the US for St Patrick’s Day celebrations to stay in the North to lead what increasingly looks like a last-ditch effort to reach a Stormont agreement on welfare reform, underlines the unavoidable and often unattractive obligations of leadership. That First Minister and DUP leader Peter Robinson earlier declared that he would not go to Washington if the welfare budget crisis was not resolved set the tone and underlines the deep seriousness of the situation — especially as much, much more than a relatively moderate programme of welfare reform is in play.

Stormont’s ability to show it can take the hard, unpleasant decisions that define functioning societies facing unwelcome, unattractive economic limitations is the real matter at hand. Are Stormont’s MLAs a grown-up, responsible government or still a cabal of drum-beating, partisan lobbyists? Can the diverse parties, trenchant enemies not so very long ago, realise the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity offered by their shotgun marriage or will they succumb to wishful thinking and denial? Will Sinn Féin insist on being Syriza on the Lagan to the DUP’s party of Germanic retrenchment?