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PREFACE

It was a Tuesday night three weeks before Christmas in 2016 and I was tired after a long day covering Stormont for the News Letter. That afternoon there had been a debate in which almost half of Assembly members from the opposition parties were incredulous that public cash was going to an alleged UDA (Ulster Defence Assocation) boss, while the rest of MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly), from the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) and Sinn Féin, were incredulous that the issue was even being raised. But all of that – along with the Stormont edifice within which Northern Ireland’s politics had been contained for almost a decade – was to be blown away by a scandal triggered that night by a BBC Spotlight documentary on something called the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).

For about a fortnight there had been rumours within political and media circles that Spotlight was investigating a significant story about one of First Minister Arlene Foster’s special advisers, Stephen Brimstone, who had suddenly quit his £92,000 role and was said to have had an RHI boiler which was being investigated by the police.

In fact, Brimstone did not feature in the programme. But the story Spotlight told – of extreme incompetence by civil servants and of a bungled subsidy which was to cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds despite a whistleblower personally having warned Foster – was shocking, even by Stormont’s standards of ineptitude.

In almost a decade reporting Stormont, I had seen at close quarters both the individuals and the flawed system central to the scandal. Yet for some reason, there was something about the scale and nature of this squander which meant that as a taxpayer I was angry watching BBC reporter Conor Spackman casually tossing bundles of cash into a fire as he set out the perversity of what had happened.

But there was a particular reason why that night I was less dispassionate than might otherwise have been the case. Just weeks earlier, my mother-in-law had been given a fatal diagnosis: a doctor told her that she had motor neurone disease. Despite having spent much of her life voluntarily helping others as a nurse in Africa, she was now a victim of the NHS’s vast neurological waiting list and had to pay to be diagnosed by a doctor at a private hospital. (The diagnosis, made by a doctor whose work has led to the recall of 3,500 patients and a Department of Health inquiry, would later turn out to be wrong.)

It was the juxtaposition of what seemed like the feckless profligacy – or worse – of senior figures in Stormont with the consequences of that money not being available to the health service which drew me into the story.

In the weeks that followed, the more that I examined what had gone on, the more suspicious it seemed. The weekend before Christmas I used comparison software to contrast the 2011 RHI legislation in Great Britain and the Stormont legislation signed off by Arlene Foster the following year. Having done so, it was difficult to give credence to the official explanation for the absence of cost controls in the Northern Ireland scheme – that putting in cost controls would have been complex and time-consuming.

Scrolling through page after page of the two pieces of legislation, it was clear that Stormont had copied and pasted about 98% of the GB law, with minor changes. The vast majority of what changes there were involved technical changes to reflect Northern Ireland legislation, such as changing ‘authority’ to ‘department’.

And yet, when I got to Part 5 of Section 37 of the GB regulations, the copy and paste stopped. There were 107 missing words and it was those missing words which at that point were estimated to cost taxpayers about £500 million. It was clearly someone’s conscious decision to stop copying at that point, before resuming the process for the remainder of the bill.

This book is the culmination of my desire to establish who made that decision, and why. Since then, the scandal has led to the collapse of devolved government in Northern Ireland, which at the time of writing some two and a half years later has not been re-established. It has led to a public inquiry which has exposed long-hidden incompetence and misbehaviour not just among Stormont’s political class but within the Northern Ireland Civil Service, the institution which more than any other has shaped Northern Ireland since its creation in 1921.

And the scandal has also exposed the disproportionate influence of a vast, monopsonistic company which received preferential treatment from government – simply because of its size. The preferential treatment helped it grow still bigger, thus increasing its influence and creating an inescapable circle antithetical not only to capitalistic theory but to basic principles of fairness.

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What follows will make uncomfortable reading for some DUP members who never expected their actions to be exposed. Few of us, even if not engaged in nefarious activity, would relish our candid text messages, emails, phone records and flaws being pored over in public as has happened to them. But with the power, prestige and handsome salaries which those individuals enjoyed as public servants comes the requirement to be accountable. Their personal discomfort has to be weighed against the wider public interest, as some of them have come to accept.

I have never set out to traduce the DUP or any other party but have followed the evidence where it has led – from the DUP, to the civil service, to boiler owners, to Sinn Féin, private consultants and elsewhere. The truth is too important to be the plaything of those who either want to cover up the DUP’s role in this affair or to use RHI as a stick with which to beat the party.

To those who have formed a negative view of the DUP based on the actions of some of its members who feature in this story, consider this: key pieces of information in this book have come from DUP members. Some of them spoke publicly at the RHI Inquiry; many others spoke privately to the author. Without them, some of what we now know would have forever remained hidden. All parties are a mixture of those driven by high principle and those who have baser motives.

This book should be read with the knowledge that we all make mistakes – and there will be too many in what I have written. Therefore, I hope that this is not perceived as a puritanical denunciation of those who have erred honestly, but as an attempt to understand how and why RHI fell apart. It is only by frankly addressing each individual’s role that we can piece together why what now seems obvious did not seem that way to at least some of those most closely associated with the scheme at the time.

To anyone adversely affected by any of my errors, I apologise in advance. If any book was to wait for perfection, it would never be published. I trust you will accept that I have made an honest – if imperfect – effort to understand what transpired.

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There is one final important context in which this book should be read. Northern Ireland is not a society riven with gross corruption of the sort which daily afflicts hundreds of millions of people’s lives around the world. Driving from Belfast to Dungannon, one is not stopped by police eager for bribes, as would happen on the road from Lagos to Abuja, nor do companies have entire divisions devoted to paying political bribes, as has been the case in Brazil.

Therefore, some of the worst behaviour set out in this book – which will to many readers appear morally corrupt, even if it is not in breach of the law – is in my experience the exception, rather than the norm. It is inaccurate to take the worst practices revealed by RHI and extrapolate that all politicians and civil servants are inept or worse. That is patently not the case – it was politicians and civil servants who ultimately played key roles in exposing RHI. In Stormont there are capable and honourable public servants. As one of many examples, Aine Gaughran, the Department for the Economy’s senior press officer at the time of the crisis in 2016 and 2017, was unerringly professional as chaos unfolded. Over scores of phone calls, emails and other queries, she responded politely and promptly, never once seeking to suppress the truth or apply inappropriate pressure.

But when bad behaviour is discovered, it should be shocking. It is only by expressing outrage at serious malpractice that we can deter its recurrence. Once a society becomes endemically corrupt, it is a cancer which is almost irreversible. One of the most dangerous, but now widespread, public views about politicians is that ‘they’re all the same – they’re all in it for themselves’. They aren’t – but if we assume that they are, then it is barely newsworthy to report on bad behaviour and we are unwittingly hastening the fulfilment of our bleak analysis.

The work of the inquiry, along with other material now being published for the first time, allows the truth about RHI to be known in considerable part. But even after the multi-million-pound inquiry – and the modest efforts of the author and other journalists – there are elements of this story which defy explanation or which hint at darker truths than those which can for now be proven. Now we know in part, but some of this story remains unknowable and that is one of the reasons why it is so compelling.