Coalition at heart of Northern Ireland's peace deal crumbling

DUBLIN -- Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government faced imminent collapse Monday as rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic leaders accused each other of wrecking the coalition at the heart of the territory’s peace process.

Minutes after the Northern Ireland Assembly convened for potentially the last time, the Irish nationalistSinn Fein party refused to nominate anyone to fill its top position in the government, effectively ensuring its destruction in favor of snap early elections that could only complicate efforts to revive power-sharing.

Monday is the last day that Sinn Fein’s vacant position can be legally filled.

Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, health minister in the nearly decade-old unity government, accused her Protestant colleagues from the Democratic Unionist Party of forcing the breakdown because of bigoted attitudes toward Irish nationalists and reckless incompetence in office that had wasted hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money.

“We will not tolerate the arrogance and disrespect of the DUP,” O’Neill said. Beside her, silent and downcast, sat Martin McGuinness, the former Irish Republican Army commander whose resignation last week as deputy first minister - effective co-leader of the government that sought to mend decades of division - triggered the crisis.

Speaking outside the debating chamber, former First Minister Arlene Foster accused Sinn Fein of pursuing a surprise election to advance its own political ambitions. “They have forced an election that risks Northern Ireland’s future and its stability and suits nobody apart from themselves,” said Foster, the Democratic Unionist leader.

Analysts agree that Sinn Fein hopes to overtake the Democratic Unionists and become the No. 1 party in Northern Ireland for the first time, gaining the symbolically potent right to hold Foster’s top post.

Power-sharing between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority is the cornerstone of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord. That U.S.-brokered pact sought to end three decades of bloodshed over the British territory that claimed nearly 3,700 lives. Most outlawed paramilitary groups observe cease-fires, But some IRA factions continue to mount attacks, and parts of Belfast remain divided by high barricades called “peace lines.”