HILLSBOROUGH, Northern Ireland — Northern Ireland’s budgetary crisis reached an embarrassing milestone Friday with no agreement on future spending — and increasingly bitter arguments over who’s to blame.

The U.K. region’s cross-community government of British unionists and Irish nationalists was supposed to have agreed a multi-year budget by January. But after months of bickering, a legal deadline passed Friday that triggers an automatic cap restricting Stormont’s 2026-27 spending to 5 percent below last year’s expenditures — billions below what local leaders insist they need to keep hospitals, schools and other critical services running.

Those leaders delivered a chorus of financial demands during their first meetings Friday with the newly appointed secretary of state, Chris Bryant, a Northern Ireland novice who last week replaced the previous seasoned officeholder, Hilary Benn, as part of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s clear-out of Keir Starmer loyalists.