TWO parties threatened last weekend to quit the executive.

Alliance leader Naomi Long, addressing her party’s annual conference, said participation is a balanced calculation that could change if there is continued “foot-dragging” by others.

The DUP is most obviously blocking Alliance’s key objective of environmental reform – it is preventing the creation of an independent environmental protection agency.

However, Sinn Féin and the UUP are as reluctant as the DUP to tackle agriculture pollution, while Sinn Féin has ruled out all realistic options to fund modernising the water system.

The other threat came from Sinn Féin national chair Declan Kearney.

He was vaguer than Alliance about quitting, but specific it was the DUP’s fault.

Writing in An Phoblacht, Mr Kearney accused the unionist party of being “hellbent on pursuing a wrecker’s agenda within the Assembly and Executive, no matter what the consequence”.

He added that the Good Friday Agreement is “a peace settlement, but not a political settlement”.

Its institutions “are important mechanisms to try and make change on behalf of all citizens, but they are not an end in themselves”.

This was a clear enough warning by Mr Kearney’s waffly standards.

The Executive would survive an Alliance departure – even the official opposition would remain unchanged, as the deadline to join it passed last month.

But a Sinn Féin departure would bring down devolution, again.

Under a New Decade, New Approach rule change, the Executive now takes six months to collapse if one of its two main parties leaves.

Although this makes Stormont more stable most of the time, it creates a perverse incentive to walk out within six months of an election – or eight months, including the election campaign – in the hope of creating a relatively painless crisis that is all about your own agenda.

The DUP did this before the last election over its sea border fiasco.

So Mr Kearney’s warning should be taken seriously. But is he correct about a DUP ‘wrecker’s agenda’?

Sinn Féin is failing on its three key pledges to nationalist voters: Casement Park, the A5 and expanding student numbers at Magee.

None of this is the DUP’s fault, despite increasingly desperate attempts to point the finger.

No unionist dug the hole Casement is in.

Gordon Lyons, the DUP communities minister, may be standing beside the hole with his foot on a shovel, whistling innocently, but there is nothing more he can do without extra funds or cuts elsewhere, neither of which Sinn Féin will support.

The A5 is a complete Sinn Féin own goal, to a bizarre degree.

The DUP has offered to change the emissions targets that have stalled construction, but Sinn Féin refuses to countenance going against environmental fashion.

Its young urban voters in Belfast and Dublin are apparently more important to it than its constituents west of the Bann – unless they want to pollute Lough Neagh, confusingly.

On Magee, Sinn Féin controls every relevant department but will not fund expansion by raising tuition fees or making cuts elsewhere.

If the DUP is not obstructing any Sinn Féin objectives in particular, it is still gumming up the works in general, as Alliance’s frustration demonstrates.

The DUP will not agree the budget, although the UUP was as bad for the first half of this Executive’s term.

It appears to be struggling with internal decision-making. The DUP is still living in the ruins of its 2021 leadership contest, which Edwin Poots won by promising to purge the party’s all-powerful headquarters staff, revealing deep division and dysfunction.

Last August, Michelle O’Neill expressed her frustration with the DUP by saying “I’m in control of my ship. I make the decisions”.

In reality, each main party is run by a committee – Sinn Fein’s committee is just far less prone to delay.

That does not mean the DUP is useless. Its education minister, Paul Givan, is delivering significant curriculum reforms, Mr Lyons has taken a strong line against welfare fraud, and Emma Little-Pengelly is a popular deputy first minister.

The DUP provides effective scrutiny at assembly committees, where challenging other parties’ ministers is a requirement.

It has done nothing as confrontational as Sinn Féin’s pointless calls for Mr Givan and Mr Lyons to resign.

There is an extent to which Sinn Féin and Alliance are objecting to the DUP for simply being the DUP and pursuing a conservative unionist agenda within the system we have.

That is an argument for other parties to do better, or to reform the system.

They should not be using it to excuse their own shortcomings.

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