Champagne bottles won’t be cracked open today to mark the 15th anniversary of the first meeting of the Northern Ireland Executive. If required to by the few desperate photographers hanging around in the hope of a breakthrough in the latest talks about grievances old and new, First Minister Peter Robinson (of the Democratic Unionist Party) and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness (of Sinn Fein) – who quite reasonably loathe and distrust one another – will produce wintry smiles and self-serving platitudes.
They agree on little these days, except that everything that’s going wrong is the fault of “them’ums”, i.e. the followers of the other.
