Stormount

Irish Republican party Sinn Fein attained its highest ever share of the vote in the six counties that make up the Northern Ireland statelet still claimed by Britain, in emergency assembly elections on March 2.

Elections were called after power-sharing between Sinn Fein and the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) collapsed over a corruption scandal involving the public energy program. When DUP leader and Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster had refused to resign over her role in the scandal, Sinn Fein withdrew from the administration.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, writing for his Leargas blog, has warned that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that formally ended more than two decades of armed conflict in the six counties in Ireland's north still claimed by Britain, “hangs by a thread”.