It's him who's "no longer fit for purpose", not the Northern Ireland
Assembly. Peter Robinson, the Pentecostal rabble-rouser turned commander-in-chief of Britain's six counties in Ireland.
This is what Northern Ireland has to show for itself. A DUP-Sinn Fein single coalition state. An ochlocracy, not a democracy. The bullies and the rabble are in the saddle. Former-terrorists and theocratic whackos and their client communities have the helm. Years of mob rule and a prohibition on multi-party, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional politics have exiled, internally decamped and lobotomised all persons and faculties for reason and moderation. It's W.B. Yeats' two fowl and festering boots of Catholic and Protestant bigotry, institutionalised.
Pusillanimous Peter and his party, the DUP, have capitulated to the riot and flag wagging constituency; a client community with a veto over law, order and political progress.
Sinn Fein, the architects of the 'Catholic, Dissenter, and Protestant-free' branch of republicanism have rebranded themselves as the party of the honourable civil rights campaign and have forsaken Northern Ireland in the hope of Southern and all-Ireland redemption.
This is Northern Ireland has to show for itself. A chief executive of peerless incompetence. One who spent his youth romping round the country in the lap of the "brutish Calvinist street thug", a demagogue who opposed every moderate politician and modest reform, and mobilised republican recruitment, sponsored hate, fanned bigotry and forever backwardised Northern Ireland.
Under Paisley's trench coat he was party to foaming opposition to Catholic civil rights, the Sunningdale Agreement (1973), the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1986) and (1998) the Good Friday Agreement, only to u-turn and accept it all (2007) after 40 years of civil catastrophe.
Then there was the slinky, slimy, obsequious flirting with paramilitaries through their proxies. Yea the UDA was a "counter-terrorist" organisation", HA!... "Peter punt" came after he led a shower of pike-wielding troublemakers into Clontibret, Ireland.
There was never a clear break from street protester to parliamentarian but rather the extension of both. In high office he has overseen managed calamity. Overseen repeated snipes and swipes against the independence of the judiciary; Repeated incursions against the freedom of the press and speech; Repeatedcalamitous misjudgements against the freedoms of ethnic minorities; Repeated incursions against civil liberties. And associated with repeated incursions against the LGBT community. Stood over a party sees it fit to use the freedoms of a liberal democracy to deprive people of those freedoms.
He has bound a whole catalogue colossal strategic face-plants. This is a man who has a mandate from the people of Northern Ireland but is unrecognisable in the Northern Ireland I know. It's that unfortunate habit, enforced by circumstance, that the moderate, balanced and broad-minded have to leave, and do and have done for decades, en masse. Into that vacuum step the fools and the fanatics. Northern Ireland is the Joycean trope, the sow that eats her own farrow.
So we're left with a leader that is devoid of leadership capacity, lumbered with the charisma of a damp rag, the vision of a mole and all the on-camera tact of a 14 year old pubescent man-child. A sepulchral sod. Goodness knows the manner off-camera.
So let me say it again, it's the man, not the House, who's no longer fit for purpose.