NI secretary to hold talks with parties on restoring executive

The Northern Ireland secretary will hold roundtable talks with local political parties in Belfast later about efforts to restore power sharing.

It comes on what would otherwise have been the date for a snap election, but it was delayed into next year.

Last week, legislation took effect making 19 January the new deadline for reforming an executive.

Chris Heaton-Harris said he would bring the parties together in a bid to improve relations.

He remained of the view that there was no reason for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to stay out of the executive, he said.

Northern Ireland has been without a functioning government since February, when the DUP walked out of the executive in protest against the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Unionists argue the post-Brexit trading arrangement undermines Northern Ireland’s position in the UK, as it keeps the nation aligned with some EU trade rules to ensure goods can move freely across the Irish land border.

There have been five failed attempts to restore the executive since the last assembly election in May, when Sinn Féin won the largest number of seats for the first time.

The DUP has repeatedly refused to vote for a new speaker – a position that must be filled before any other business can be heard and maintains that it has a mandate from voters not to return to power-sharing until the protocol is changed significantly.

It won’t be lost on the parties meeting the secretary of state this morning that they could have instead been waiting for the verdict of voters – a prospect few of them relished so close to Christmas.

Having pushed back the threat of another election, Chris Heaton-Harris has also faced accusations of doing little to push the DUP to re-enter government.

When he said he’d be bringing the parties together in his office this week – for the first time no less – there was also the promise of “tea and scones”, but little else.

The parties may well prefer to hear when the long-delayed £600 energy bill payment will be sorted and what’s happening with the protocol negotiations.

It may be no coincidence then that the UK and EU teams will also meet face-to-face in Brussels today though a solution to all this still seems some way off.

On Thursday, it is expected UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly will meet the EU Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic in Brussels.

Talks have been happening at a technical level for some months, but a resolution does not appear imminent.

Teams on both sides have said a window of opportunity exists to agree a deal but have not specified a timetable.