Politics in Northern Ireland is getting a little interesting.
This is partly due to growing disaffection with the current power sharing system.
For the sake of peace, agreement was reached that pro-British Unionism and Irish Nationalism should govern jointly.
So, we have a duopoly and it is horribly inefficient.
Some degree of amity has been established between former enemies.
There is little violence, almost none at all in the political sphere.
But factions which grew out of protest and thrived in contention have yet to prove that they can actually function as pragmatic administrators of the region.
And they have had more than a quarter of a century to learn.
To their shame a list of unfinished projects grows longer.
They said they would reorganise the health service and didn’t. So we have the worst waiting lists in Britain for procedures like hip replacements.
Recently I was sent to hospital with stroke symptoms and had to wait six hours in A and E before I saw a doctor.
Fortunately, I hadn’t actually had a stroke, but I’m not assured I’ll get urgent care if I do have one someday.
Lough Neagh, which provides nearly half of our drinking water, is horribly polluted and nothing is being done about it yet. The matter is being discussed and explored but that, so far, makes no difference.
Our water system is so poor that an urgent need for new housing can’t be met because the sewage pipes aren’t in place to service them.
We have big infrastructure projects on hold. A new road, the A5, connecting Derry, past Omagh to the border, to speed up travel to Dublin, was to be completed in 2012. The current road is hazardous.
The current obstacle to getting started on it is the Assembly’s own environmental legislation.
A court ruled that the law would be breached by the scale of work required for the road. No one had thought about that.
Another big project on hold is the building of a GAA sports ground at Casement Park in Andersonstown.
All three governments, the Irish, the British and the devolved Northern Ireland executive have agreed to part fund the project, as they did for grounds for soccer and rugby.
But the site is currently derelict and there is no agreement yet on when work can start.
A smaller, less expensive project is the plan announced by our infrastructure minister to erect Irish language signage at our brand new bus and rail station.
This was contentious within what loyalist activist Jamie Bryson calls a culture war.
Identifying as British, as he is entitled to do, he says that the spread of public signage in Irish is diluting the character of the region, making it all look Irish.
Interestingly, when he challenged the decision, a court ordered the executive to come to a joint decision.
Joint decisions of culturally sensitive issues are well beyond the capacity of our big parties, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party.
But the court makes a valuable point, that it is time the executive started proving itself capable of making collective decisions rather than each minister acting alone with only party approval.
However, rather than learn that lesson the two big parties, which thrive on contention over expressions of identity, will both likely gain by arguing over Irish language signage and thereby evade their responsibilities to provide good government.
But something else is happening. The contest for the middle ground in Northern Ireland is heating up.
The third largest party, the Alliance Party, does not identify as Nationalist or Unionist and therefore does not take up a position on whether we should have a united Ireland, with all of the island governed from Dublin.
But smaller parties of Unionism and Nationalism, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social democratic and Labour Party are both now turning their main fire on Alliance.
They accuse the party of incompetence in its departments.
One of those is Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs. This is the department which needs to clean up Lough Neagh.
The other is Justice, with responsibility for prisons. Naomi Long, the minister, upon whose eloquence the growth of the party probably depends, has been attacked because she allowed a prison Magilligan to have a dog.
There was genuine concern that a dog in the care of the prison service should be properly looked after, but it hardly seemed to most of us like an issue on which a minister should be called to account.
One reason for staging big fights on the middle ground is that there are thousands of voters who are so disillusioned with the big two that they look for an alternative.
The tragedy is that these middle ground parties can’t pull together to creative a unified political force that would curtail the duopoly.
And why can’t they? Because two of those parties, UU and SDLP are divided against each other on the same identity and constitutional concerns that plague the executive, and because Alliance, depending on transfers from both sides won’t stick the boot into either
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