Related: GPs are exhausted, A&E is overrun and hospitals are broke.
Many of these councils are coming because they have no other means of raising serious cash: three decades after Thatcher's rate caps, and four years into the most painful cuts faced by local government, they are flat broke.
In 2010, notwithstanding the notorious note left by the retiring chief secretary to the Treasury, we were not broke.
Worse still for the "united Ireland now" lobby is the undeniable fact that the Republic is flat broke and would be unable to afford the billions the UK Treasury pumps into Northern Ireland each year.
Last season, Republic, who play at USL level, broke league attendance records on their way to winning their first championship.
Hillary Clinton's family was "dead broke" and saddled with legal bills when she and her husband, Bill, left the White House, the former first lady has revealed.
Broke by the early Fifties, he kept working and has prospered ever since, having one of the longest careers in film history.
Above all, in Baghdad there was a pervasive air of deskbound caution, buck-passing, and ass-covering, in contrast with the Wild West atmosphere that broke out, for better and for worse, in Saigon in April of 1975.
Yet even when the security forces did actually recruit or send agents of the state into real terrorist organisations in the north of Ireland they too all too often crossed the line and broke the law.
"I was 19 when the war broke out," Piechowski says.
There was a certain randomness to the goal that broke the deadlock early on.
