Northern Ireland’s political crisis deepens as First Minister Peter Robinson

The intensive talks were launched after revelations the IRA still existed and members shot a man dead in Belfast last month.

Political crisis talks in Northern Ireland are due to start again on Monday.

“I think that decision would be above her pay scale”, said the Sinn Féin president.

THE resignation of Northern Ireland’s First Minister Peter Robinson has been met with backlash from his Stormont colleagues.

The Assembly has not been functioning properly for more than a year, in part because of Sinn Fein’s refusal to accept British-mandated welfare cuts, but the current problem stems from the murder last month of a former Irish Republican Army figure, Kevin McGuigan. All three men were released, unconditionally on Thursday evening.

Both the police and London’s Northern Ireland secretary,

Theresa Villiers,

said the IRA still existed but was not involved in terrorism.

Mr Robinson has bought the institutions and negotiators a limited period to find a resolution.

Commenting publicly on his arrest for the first time, Mr Storey said: “I absolutely reject the attempts of the unionist parties to cynically use these murders and my wrongful detention to threaten these political institutions”. “As he was saying in the House on Thursday that he want to see all politicians in Northern Ireland working together” a spokeswoman of Prime Minister David Cameron said.

The majority of his ministers have also resigned.

The exit of Mr Robinson along with three of the DUP’s four other ministers has left the 13-minister administration in freefall.

The departments of health and social care; social development; enterprise, trade and investment; and regional development are now effectively rudderless. That means the status of the IRA and Sinn Fein’s denial must be addressed as a matter of urgency, not relegated to the bottom of the agenda, as it was this week. Before stepping down, Robinson appointed a temporary first minister.

Robinson said: “The continued existence of the IRA and the arrests that followed has pushed devolution to the brink”.

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams strongly criticised the move this morning, reiterating his party’s belief that the NIE should not be suspended.

Mr Robinson said: “Our objective was not to bring down the assembly and wreck the institutions”.

McGuigan’s family and other republican sources in the city dispute this, and say members of the mainstream IRA carried out the murder in revenge for Davison’s death.

Speaking to a gathering of his party in Gormanstown, Co Meath, Mr Adams repeated his “grave concerns” at how he believes the political crisis has developed and been exploited.

“I think it would be gravely destabilising if a Jeremy Corbyn led Labour party chose to depart from that”, she added.

But Mr Robinson said the talks had to “take place in the proper atmosphere” and that his party was talking to the government to see how the negotiations would be set up.

One of the hopes of the political process that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland was that it would normalise politics in the Province.