A vote scheduled for Wednesday in the Irish parliament to elect a new prime minister has been postponed for a day after opposition protests over the speaking rights of independent MPs supporting the incoming coalition government caused a chaotic session.
Mihol Martin was set to be elected prime minister following a coalition agreement reached last week between the country's two major center-right parties and a group of independent MPs following the November 29th elections.
The speaker of the lower house of parliament adjourned the session four times before adjourning it until Thursday, as her attempt to initiate a vote to elect a prime minister was stifled by loud protests from opposition lawmakers.
"What we have witnessed today is the undermining of the Irish constitution... This has never happened before in the history of the country," Martin said at a hastily called press conference.
"The most fundamental duty of parliament is to elect a prime minister, and also a government. That opportunity has been denied today by the premeditated, coordinated and planned action of the opposition, particularly the Sinn Fein party."
Outgoing Prime Minister Simon Harris, who was due to take over as deputy prime minister on Wednesday, called the events "completely farcical" and "performance politics in a hurry," Reuters reports.
The re-elected government led by the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties is preparing for Donald Trump's return to the White House and has set his inauguration as the deadline for forming a new cabinet.
This interruption will delay Martin's appointment of a new ministerial team.
The opposition protested the decision of some independent MPs who support the government to retain their expanded speaking rights in parliament even though they sit on the opposition benches. Attempts to resolve the dispute between sessions failed.
"The chaos we have seen today is solely the responsibility of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and a group of independent MPs. The politics of trickery has been confronted head-on," David Cullinan, a prominent MP for the main opposition party Sinn Fein, wrote on social media.
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