At times like this, most of us would settle for a degree of steadiness and maybe leadership in Ireland south and north. In the Dail, FF and FG have chokehold on power and they’re never voluntarily going to allow anyone else to replace them as choke-holders-in chief . The North is a bit more fragile – we’ve gone through protracted periods where our MLAs haven’t been around, and like a school when the principal is off, things managed to stagger on in more or less the same way.