NORTHERN IRELAND will head to the polls on March 2 to elect a new assembly after the country’s power-sharing government collapsed last night.

The deadline for a deal to prop up Northern Ireland’s institutions was 5pm, exactly a week after Sinn Fein deputy first minister Martin McGuinness quit.

The only chance of avoiding a snap election was for the republican party to stage a U-turn, but it stuck to its declared position.

MLA Michelle O’Neill told the Stormont Assembly yesterday morning that the party wouldn’t nominate someone else for Mr McGuinness’s vacant job.

It was the result, she said, of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) treating “these institutions and sections of the community with contempt and arrogance.”

Ms O’Neill said Sinn Fein would only return to the north’s government if there was “real and meaningful change.”

The collapse of power-sharing at Stormont, which will be dissolved on January 26, means that power will be transferred to the British government’s Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire.

Mr Brokenshire was required by law to set a date for elections after Sinn Fein refused to replace Mr Guinness.

The final straw for Sinn Fein was the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal, which was set up by DUP First Minister Arlene Foster when she was enterprise minister.

The scheme was meant to push businesses to buy new boilers that burned biomass instead of dirtier fossil fuels — but subsidies were set so high that businesses have been running them constantly and getting paid for it.

But there were other problems. Mr McGuinness’s resignation letter blasted the DUP for “never fully embrac[ing]” the Good Friday Agreement and showing “a shameful disrespect towards many other sections of our community,” particularly women, LGBT people and Irish-speakers.

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