Patrick Murphy. Irish News ( Belfast). Saturday, May 30, 2015

It will, of course, continue to exist (there are other films to be made) but in the context of governance, it has failed in three broad areas: integrity, policy outcomes and public confidence.

In terms of integrity, the new Stormont is even less ethical than the old one (which is quite an achievement). It failed to censure Nelson McCausland for his handling of the Sky contract with the Housing Executive (NIHE) and was unable to discipline DUP special adviser, Stephen Brimstone, for his behaviour towards a member of the NIHE board.

McCausland was protected by a petition of concern. Brimstone was promoted.

Sinn Féin and the SDLP complained about injustice but failed to acknowledge that they were complicit in designing a system which insults the elementary ethics of governance. Both now enjoy that same abuse of power which sparked the Civil Rights campaign.

Then there is the equally shameful practice of secretly appointing 19 special party advisers, irrespective of competence, experience or qualifications. Their annual salaries, which we pay for, are also largely secret, although they can reach £90,000.

Former unionist prime ministers could only dream of such political patronage within government. Sinn Féin and the SDLP apparently believe that equality means giving them the right to behave like Unionists.

Stormont has also significantly failed to deliver on its plans and promises. Where, for example, are the 8,000 social and affordable homes, the Education and Skills Authority and the developed Long Kesh site – all promised in the programme for government?

Whatever happened to ‘the range of measures to tackle poverty and social exclusion’, the promise to reduce child poverty and the new police training college? (The last one was scuppered by what Sinn Féin called “dark forces”, so that’s all right then.)

Meanwhile, the assembly tackles social and economic inequality by feeding us on a diet of golf.

Finally, Stormont has failed to retain public confidence. While MLAs fail to deliver for us, they cling on, leech-like, to their subsidised food, their dubious party expense claims and fancy titles. Ironically, the most politically principled among them is hard-line unionist Jim Allister.

So where did it all go wrong? You will remember that the new Stormont was welcomed by Churches, trade unions, business, the media, world leaders and the massed choirs of social and political commentators, all of whom should have known better.

The new institutions, we were told, heralded a land, flowing with milk, honey and MLAs’ expenses. The peace process, they said, was good. They were half right. The peace was good, but the process was politically fraudulent, because it was built on the principle of accommodating sectarianism. (In fairness, Stormont does that rather well.)

It also failed to include social and economic issues in the Good Friday Agreement, even though by 1998 it was clear that both the Conservatives and Labour had begun dismantling the welfare state.

This column tried to point out over many years that perhaps the king was wearing no clothes – an often unpopular opinion. The great and the good complained. Now they complain that a system which was designed to prevent normal politics is not delivering normal outcomes. What did they expect?

Two other factors make the system unworkable. It operates on the basis of promoting parties rather than serving people and it does not contain enough competent individuals with basic administrative and management skills. The budgetary crisis, we are told, is to protect the most vulnerable. After the publication of the Stormont House Agreement in December, this column argued that Sinn Féin had abandoned its opposition to welfare reform and that Stormont had officially embraced Thatcherism.

Three months later the party apparently accepted that view and did a U-turn, which suggests internal tactical uncertainty over the forthcoming southern general election.

It is an uncertainty which now permeates the assembly, all Stormont government departments, every public sector body and the overall economy.

Following 30 years of counter-productive violence, our 20 years of cajoling, begging and praising politicians here has merely produced a generation of spoiled political children. That is our inconvenient truth. The British and Irish governments might like to be the first to acknowledge it.