Agreement must be kept alive

Though the cold reality of the results in the Northern Ireland elections may be ominous, they were hardly a bolt from the blue.

Once the elections were called, in the aftermath of the deadlocked negotiations aimed at progressing the peace process, in the just weeks prior to that announcement, it was anticipated that the eventual result was easily anticipated.

That it cam to pass radically altering the political landscape is a corollary of the failure of those negotiations, once billed as a monumental breakthrough.