Who's actually in charge?

These are testing times for everyone in Northern Ireland,

but where's the grown-up in the room?

The locally elected ministers have taken an early bath.

The Secretary of State and his team are on the pitch,

but it's not entirely clear at this stage what the tactics are,

and the civil servants have a game plan in place,

which gives them nominal control

of departmental decision-making

but it's heavily caveated by a rulebook

that makes it clear their powers

are not as extensive

as those enjoyed by the ministers

they so recently served.

So who is running the place at the moment

and what needs to be done

to make sure we get through

the next six to

12 months in one piece. Sam? That's a rather difficult question to answer because the answer is

that no one is really in charge here and yet lots of people have got some level of involvement.

I think the really surprising and alarming thing here is not so much the bit that we know that there aren't ministers in Stormont. The bit that's alarming, I think, is the state of the Northern Ireland office because they're the people who might at some point step in, whether through direct rule or quasi-direct rule or through changing the rules or whatever it might be and there seems to be a fairly

remarkable lack of competence in there right now. Jess? I think civil servants are very much in

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