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 Irish News