The previous devolved administration, eventually formed in the wake of the Belfast Agreement, agreed a Programme for Government in the spring of 2001.

This did not contain any substantive ideas on improving "community relations" but it did promise a review - the Harbison report duly appeared the following January.

But between then and October 2002, as its own divisions were stretching to breaking-point, the Executive failed to discuss Harbison, this in spite of graphic reminders of the problem in almost nightly confrontations at the east Belfast interface - just a few miles from Stormont.

The Northern Ireland Office looked on perplexed, and by January 2003 had published a consultation paper on "community relations" called A Shared Future, leading by March 2005 to a policy document of the same name.

This represented the first time any Government in Northern Ireland since partition had declared sectarian division unacceptable. A 'triennial action plan' followed.

The consultation meetings, however, had often thrown up the comment "The turkeys won't vote for Christmas". However rational such a policy to foster the common good, would it be in the interests of those Northern Ireland politicians who had thrived for decades on communal division?

These fears proved well-founded. After devolution was restored in May 2007 an Alliance Assembly motion to support A Shared Future was successfully amended by the DUP merely to "note" its existence.

Effectively the policy was shelved and the DUP changed the slogan to "a better future". Rather than face the moral and social challenge of sectarianism, it preferred instead to focus on conventionally conceived economic development - just when the global capitalist crisis was throwing convention out of the window and workers across Northern Ireland onto the streets.

Research commissioned under direct rule, meanwhile, which explored the costs of division, was suppressed by the Executive committee at the behest of Sinn Fein.

That party seemed uninterested in how the maximum potential saving identified of £1.5bn-a-year could in these straitened times be redirected in social programmes to its mainly low-income supporters.

A successor to A Shared Future was promised in this administration's Programme for Government and it was expected to be launched at a Community Relations Council (CRC) policy conference in April 2008. It never appeared.

The document was to incorporate issues addressed in the Racial Equality Strategy, also shelved. So when Northern Ireland again won worldwide opprobrium in June over the expulsion of more than 100 Romanians from south Belfast, ministers had nothing practical to offer beyond words of condemnation.

SF lost patience with the DUP last month, claiming that party did not accept equality, and published its own version of the missing policy, Rights and Respect. The former junior DUP minister Jeffrey Donaldson responded by publishing an October 2008 official draft, Building a Better Future.

The draft was more vague and aspirational than A Shared Future. But the SF document filleted even this of all suggestions that the future lay in an integrated, rather than divided, society.

References to tolerance and, in particular, to the role of the CRC, were replaced with demands for "respect" for communally defined "cultures".

With SF increasingly rendered impotent by the DUP's exercise of the communal vetoes it secured in the St Andrews Agreement of 2006, the party is threatening to bring the devolved house down once more unless there is agreement by Christmas on the devolution of policing and justice.

The DUP has refused a deal unless and until there is a satisfactory financial sweetener and the prospective Tory administration at Westminster signs up to it - which the Conservative leadership, zealous for deep expenditure cuts, has refused to do.

So there we have it. More than a decade on from the Belfast Agreement we have governance arrangements based on "parity of esteem" rather than "a shared future", which lead to political parties endlessly talking past each other.

The result is no policy for tackling division, 88 peace walls in Belfast and a re-emerging threat that the system for sharing power out - rather than genuinely sharing power - could collapse once more of its own contradictions.