NORTHERN IRELAND went to the polls yesterday in a snap election after the power-sharing executive collapsed over a white-elephant green initiative.

Party leaders cast their votes in their constituencies in the election for a new Legislative Assembly at Stormont.

The prospect of direct rule from Westminster looms if no new coalition government emerges from the elections.

Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill ruled out working with the DUP in the new executive. And DUP former first minister Arlene Foster compared giving concessions to Sinn Fein with feeding crocodiles — a comment seized upon by Irish language advocate Dominic Sherry, who walked to his West Belfast polling station in a crocodile costume.

The unlikely coalition between republican Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) collapsed in January after 10 months over the Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI) scheme, set to cost the Northern Ireland executive £490 million over 20 years. One farmer was reportedly set to pocket £1 million over that period simply for heating an empty barn.

Then Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness also condemned the assembly for blocking funding to an Irish language exchange visit programme for schoolchildren.

Sinn Fein and the Green Party have taken an anti-Brexit stance, with the republicans resorting to scaremongering over the future of the 90-year-old bilateral free movement treaty between Britain and Ireland.

Sinn Fein election leaflets claim the British government would impose a “hard border” with “checkpoints” and close border roads, and demanded the north be given “special status” within the EU.

Communist Party of Ireland chairwoman Lynda Walker pointed out that Sinn Fein also opposes abortion rights in Northern Ireland.

“What we want and what we get are two different things,” she said, while stressing the CPI’s aim was to “keep the DUP out.”

A new left-wing party on the political scene is People Before Profit, whose leader Eamonn McCann cast his vote in Derry.

On the eve of the election, Mr McCann said: “There’s a change under way in a society which has always seemed frozen in its attitudes.

“The DUP has let its voters down, particularly its workingclass voters,” he said.