THE Westminster parliament resumes on September 1 and a leisurely week later, on September 7, Stormont resumes business as usual – bickering and blocking.

In another sense it won’t be business as usual, for there’s no budget and little prospect of one.

So much for the Programme for Government. Remember that? The pages of waffle with, how many was it, nine priorities so that there’s no priority, no targets, no timetable.

A poisonous six months beckon.

Sarah Creighton: I don’t say this lightly, but the Stormont system needs to go

Tom Kelly: The Parades Commission chair must go – but loyalism’s tantrum squad should shut up too

Into all this steps our new proconsul. He seems a decent, affable guy, anxious to please, careful not to cause offence, but of course he hasn’t a clue, is hurriedly reading himself into the complexities of Irish history and politics, and so remains a pawn of pro-unionist NIO bureaucrats.

Who knows, he may sooner or later come to his own conclusions, or maybe not?

One sensible conclusion he has not come to is that the Assembly isn’t working and isn’t going to work.

We know that because he has started repeating the mantra his civil servants have given him about Stormont raising more taxes – “some self-help”, he calls it, that’s “got to look like some revenue raising”. Fat chance.

The new proconsul says: “We just can’t go........

© The Irish News