I believe that I read that Northern Ireland hasn’t had a working legislature since 2017.
Things aren’t politically peachy there.
No, but at least they aren’t kicking off, and both sides seem to understand that they only have themselves to blame for that particular predicament, not the people of Great Britain or the UK government. If we forced NI outside the UK without consulting the people of NI first, they WOULD blame us, so a referendum has to be done to give it legitimacy.