WITH clanging inevitability the DUP on Wednesday once again foiled attempts to elect a Stormont Speaker and get the politicial institutions up and running. 

The temptation is to shrug the shoulders and say, ‘So what?’ After all, the Sinn Féin Stormont recall was destined never to succeed and all we were ever going to see was the draining ritual of MLAs marching up the hill and marching back down again.

But never underestimate the power of symbolism, and while the sight of the DUP thwarting the will of the majority in pursuit of a problem which they themselves created is always going to be another blow to the party’s battered reputation, the charade this time round comes freighted with much more significance and import.

Hours after the DUP’s latest slap in the face for the people of the North, industrial action started which was a general strike in all but name. 175,000 public service workers across a wide range of sectors walked out, effectively bringing the place to a halt and causing widespread inconvenience and  difficulty to the public. Happily, the ordinary people on the street are much more in line with the public service staff than those wannabe Tories who were once again spouting their anti-worker bile in an attempt to demonise those who only want what they deserve and what is right. The strikers enjoy an unprecedented amount of respect and support – unlike the DUP, which outside its hardcore base of the staunch and the permanently furious is increasingly becoming a lightning rod for the disaffection and disillusion gripping the people here.

As anger reaches fever pitch, want and need hit unprecedented levels, wages are effectively in freefall and conditions deteriorate daily, the sight of DUP MLAs locking the place up again and trotting home to watch daytime TV while drawing their salaries is infinitely more galling than it has been hitherto. And there will be a price to be paid for that.

Every time we arrive at this sorry impasse, we hope – in an all too familiar urge to whistle past the graveyard – that what we are seeing is part of a wider choreography designed to provide the DUP with a soft landing when it eventually and inevitably takes its seats again in the Stormont chamber. That hope seems a particularly forlorn one at present, and while it is still possible that DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson is about to take his courage in his hands, the damage already done to the concept of a functioning polity here in the North is immense.

A returning Stormont will bear those scars.

As ever, we stand with the workers; we applaud their commitment in taking a financial hit at a time when their finances have never been tighter; and we restate our call for them to be given raises not only commensurate with the cost of living but acknowledging the effective cut in wages imposed by lengthy pay stagnation. The workers will win – it’s just a matter of time. And when they do they will remember who stood with them in their struggle.