BELFAST, Northern Ireland — The Northern Ireland Assembly’s palatial building in Stormont, in the hills that overlook Belfast, is an eerie place these days.

This time last year, its grand lobby bustled with lawmakers, lobbyists and civil servants, but this week it is empty and lifeless. Further inside, a few tourists warmed the blue seats of the debating chamber, rather than the 90 lawmakers elected to work there. Even their microphones had been removed.

“It’s a total ghost town,” said Claire Hanna, one of those lawmakers. “It’s dead.”

And so it has been since as long ago as January, when Northern Ireland’s governing coalition collapsed. That created a power vacuum at Stormont that has still not been filled, paralyzing the region’s already pinched institutions and threatening a 1998 peace deal that largely ended three decades of fighting between nationalist and unionist factions.

Since that deal, known as the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland has been run mostly by a devolved regional government that must, in effect, be led by a coalition between the region’s largest nationalist party and its largest unionist counterpart.