THERE was good reason for establishing a power-sharing system of government in Northern Ireland.
The idea originated in the mind of Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume. He shared that prize with David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader who agreed to such a system in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
The logic was simple. The Irish-identifying, mainly Catholic community had, since the partition of Ireland in 1921, been vulnerable to discrimination by successive unionist governments.
Routinely referred to then as the minority community, the simple democratic electoral procedures that worked for the rest of the UK and Ireland would exclude that community permanently from power.
Fifty years of unchanging unionist rule was perceived as a dictatorship of the majority.
However, that entrenched Catholic minority is no longer the problem....
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