Despite being elected to administer devolved government here, and then refusing to do so, the North's Assembly members are currently being paid 70 per cent of their salary and expenses, writes David Adams.
It must qualify as the most generous remuneration ever for a workforce that has voluntarily withdrawn its labour. MLA s have monthly entitlements of the order of £7,400 in salary and expenses, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Yet the public has reacted with little more than a collective shrug.
It's as though we no longer know, or care, how ordinary politics is supposed to work or what real politicians are supposed to do. For us, political activity amounts to little more than Jeffrey Donaldson's ongoing war of attrition against David Trimble or, more recently, the novelty of a vaudevillian-style good-cop/ bad-cop routine from Robinson and Paisley.
All accompanied, of course, by the perpetual background noise of Sinn Féin continuing to prove that, no matter how preposterous it might initially sound, if you say something often enough, it becomes accepted as truth.
At best, politics here has become an embarrassing sideshow; at worst a game of one-upmanship being played by two religious tribes. So low have our expectations of political probity become, that an unearned £800,000 being pocketed monthly by our MLAs isn't something that many of us will get particularly agitated about.
Assembly members, if they deign to address the issue at all, will argue that their wages are justified by the volume of constituency work they do. Absolute nonsense. For the past 30-odd years councillors have, with little or no salary at all, dealt more than adequately with the day-to-day needs of constituents. And still do.
MLAs were, and are, expected to take direct responsibility for more lofty matters, such as inward investment, agriculture, tourism, education, healthcare, housing, roads, rail, water, sewage, etc. Instead, they have wangled a situation where a handful of unaccountable direct-rule ministers have taken on the burden of government while getting paid for doing little more than bickering on the sidelines.
And we accept it all as part and parcel of what passes for politics here.
High-sounding points of principle are regularly trotted out by some MLAs as justification for their continued failure to make the Assembly work. But the same principles don't seem to apply in council chambers the length and breadth of Northern Ireland where unionists and republicans happily administer local government together.
Neither does there seem to be any principle at stake in refusing to do what they were elected to do while continuing to take substantial wages for not doing it.
To be fair, the MLAs are just the latest group to take full advantage of a government that seems to operate on the premise that any problem can be solved by merely throwing money at it.
When interface violence in one district attracted £5 million or £6 million for "community development", it was hardly surprising other interface areas, some of which had lain dormant for decades, suddenly erupted into orgies of inter-community violence.
Self-appointed "community activists" from both sides weren't slow in learning the lesson, particularly when there was an opportunity to get their hands on government money.
Bribing an unruly child will only encourage it to misbehave further and provoke others to behave in a similar fashion. The same principle applies when you try to bribe unruly communities.
As I have said here previously, over the past 10 years the government has overseen the bankrolling of the peace process to the tune of about £6 billion of European and North American money. (Not to mention the incalculable amount it has contributed itself.)
Despite a large portion of this funding being earmarked for community enhancement, aside from a few notable exceptions there is little or no on-the-ground evidence that our most needy communities have benefited to any extent. If anything, the opposite seems to be the case.
A recent survey, "Bare Necessities", by amongst others, Queen's University and the University of Ulster, found that 37.4 per cent of all children under 15 in Northern Ireland are living below the poverty line. Obviously, the peace dividend hasn't reached a third of our children.
In stark contrast, within most working class areas a tiny elite certainly have benefited - the four-wheel-drive vehicles and sudden adoption of lottery winner's lifestyles makes the more dubious community activists easily identifiable.
But most ordinary people aren't even aware that vast sums of money have been pumped into their neighbourhoods. What looked in the beginning like merely negligent policing of community funding by government, now looks suspiciously like a deliberate attempt to bribe some of society's more unruly members.
Like bad parenting, the government must surely have learned that bribery only encourages bad behaviour - from politicians and community activists alike. They should reflect on the findings of the Bare Necessities report and, while they're about it, consider posting a few copies to our freeloading MLAs.