WE’RE told that Micheál Martin raised the matter of reform of the Assembly and Executive when he met Andy Burnham in Manchester last Friday.

Before the meeting, Martin said: “Most political parties in the north now support reform of strand one. So, after the next Assembly elections, it shouldn’t be up to any one party to veto the convening of the Assembly and the appointment of Executive… I think the two governments working at lockstep can bring a lot of progress to the situation.”

There are a number of fallacies in that.

First, it doesn’t matter if “most political parties now support reform”, because if the largest party representing one community opposes reform, it won’t happen.

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At its party conference last weekend, the DUP leader stated unequivocally that “we will never support reforms which are designed to strip unionists of our consent for our governing arrangements”.

Of course by ‘consent’ he means a unionist veto, which unionist parties continue to deploy shamelessly through the petition of concern, though that’s not what it was........

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