Welcome to Red Lines, the new podcast from BBC Northern Ireland's politics team.

As you will know very well, Stormont hasn't been sitting for nearly three years.

Westminster's just been proroged for five weeks and nobody, nobody knows for sure what's happening with Brexit.

In some ways, we are looking into a big black hole And today we are launching our new podcast.

I am Mark Carruthers.

With me are Mark Devenport and John Campbell.

Mark, it's either the best of times or the worst of times to be doing this.

Which is it?

Well, it means that we can pontificate our nauseam and nobody will know whether we're right or wrong.

Because I don't think really anyone knows quite what's

going on. There are so many different sort of moving parts at the moment. Things are so chaotic

that you could be right one day and completely wrong the next. And I'm not sure that anyone will

necessarily agree with what we've got to say. But who knows?

I think we should apologise in advance for this whole programme

because the idea in our producer's minds was that Misha Barnier was in Belfast this week.

Mark was going to land the big exclusive interview.

It would be like the Nick Robinson podcast.

Mark would be sitting here. They'd be cheered to the rafters by

the managers for having got this big interview

and launching the podcast. As it is, we've basically

got nothing. It's me

and two marks. So if

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