Burned Read online

  ‘A monumental work of solid reportage, measured, elegant and thorough. This is a story of political ineptitude and waste. That Stormont sought to use a scheme for saving the environment as an opportunity for the lavish squandering of money and energy speaks of ignorance and cynicism. Sam McBride, throughout this story, has been one of the journalists who stayed with it and explained it best through his articles and broadcasts. Now that work coalesces into an exemplary work of journalism. If politicians had maintained their standards with a similar responsibility, this book would not have needed to be written.’

  Malachi O’Doherty, journalist and author

  ‘The RHI scandal played a significant role in bringing Northern Ireland’s experiment in devolution to its knees. Future historians will ask how did this happen? Sam McBride’s book will be their first port of call. He has been at the heart of the journalistic coverage of this crisis and it shows in every page.’

  Lord Bew, historian and Emeritus Professor of Irish politics at Queen’s University, Belfast

  ‘This is one of the most important books in the history of Northern Ireland. To devastating effect, it sets out the path of RHI, a scandal that highlights profound problems with how we are governed in the 21st century.’

  Ben Lowry, deputy editor, News Letter

  ‘Superbly researched and explained with clarity and precision, Burned tells the tale of a grossly mismanaged green energy scheme which brought down Northern Ireland’s power sharing government, tarnishing its internationally-acclaimed reputation for partnership and peace-making. The sorry saga of incompetence, groupthink, buck-passing and failure to pay heed to warnings unfolds like a slow motion car crash. Sam McBride’s book should be required reading for those working in the public and private sectors far beyond Northern Ireland as a manual on how not to run major projects and how not to govern a society.’

  Mark Devenport, political journalist and broadcaster

  ‘This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Stormont institutions were brought down by a scandal of enormous proportions. It clearly, coldly and comprehensively sets out a series of astonishing events involving incredible sums of public money and deserves to be studied by all those interested in our political process.’

  Noel Doran, editor, The Irish News

  ‘As Brexit dominates politics in Westminster and Dublin, Sam McBride’s lucid and compelling account of the nightmarish reality of devolution in Northern Ireland shows us that there will be no easy solutions in Belfast. This triumph of investigative journalism from one of the UK’s most important reporters spares nobody. Anybody who wishes to understand how the DUP and Sinn Féin’s great experiment failed should read it – not that they will want you to.’

  Patrick Maguire, political correspondent, New Statesman

  ‘An intriguing forensic examination of the RHI scandal which brought down Stormont. It should be an essential textbook for politicians , advisers and the civil service. Sam McBride’s book clearly points out this must never happen again if faith in politics is to be restored.’

  Ken Reid, UTV Political Editor

  ‘Unlike the RHI legislation she introduced, I hope Arlene Foster actually reads this. Sam McBride brilliantly untangles the facts about RHI to reveal a jaw-dropping and occasionally hilarious omnishambles. The author has taken the fiendishly complex RHI scandal and made it both comprehensible and shocking. If I were a civil servant, or a DUP spad or worked at Moy Park I would demand that all copies of this book were burnt in a 99kw wood pellet boiler.’

  Tim McGarry, comedian

  ‘One of Belfast’s most authoritative journalists has produced a fascinating and detailed account of one of the city’s most controversial episodes.’

  David McKittrick, journalist and author

  ‘One of the most important books on Northern Ireland politics since the Good Friday Agreement; and certainly the most important on the Assembly and the function — and dysfunction — of devolution. Disturbingly revelatory.’

  Alex Kane, columnist and commentator

  BURNED

  BURNED

  THE INSIDE STORY OF THE ‘CASH-FOR-ASH’ SCANDAL AND NORTHERN IRELAND’S SECRETIVE NEW ELITE

  SAM McBRIDE

  First published in 2019 by

  Merrion Press

  An imprint of Irish Academic Press

  10 George’s Street

  Newbridge

  Co. Kildare

  Ireland

  www.merrionpress.ie

  © Sam McBride, 2019

  9781785372698 (Paper)

  9781785372704 (Kindle)

  9781785372711 (Epub)

  9781785372728 (PDF)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  An entry can be found on request

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  An entry can be found on request

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Typeset in Minion Pro 11/15 pt

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  1.On his Knees

  2.In the Beginning

  3.Let’s Spend Big

  4.Two Fatal Errors

  5.Licence to Bill

  6.Cash for Ash Begins

  7.Whistling in the Wind

  8.Burning Food

  9.Out of Control

  10.Bell and the Big Balls

  11.Family First

  12.In the Shadows

  13.The Spike

  14.You’re on your Own

  15.Get it Shut

  16.Let’s Claim it was a Success

  17.Spotlight

  18.Fire, and Brimstone’s Problem

  19.Things Fall Apart

  20.A Brown Envelope

  21.No Hiding Place

  22.Too Big to Fail

  23.Even the Winners Lose

  24.Free Money

  25.The Special World of Spads

  26.Minister for Photo Opportunities

  27.The Legacy

  Key Players

  Abbreviations

  Timeline

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  For Anna, Kate and Patrick, without whose generous patience this would not exist, and for my parents whose labours freed me to dig with a pen, rather than the spade of my forebears.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some of the facts in this book will seem so lavishly far-fetched that I feel it necessary to assure the reader that none of this is fictitious. I have sought to lay out the evidence so that the reader can form their own view of not just what really happened but, crucially, why. While much of what happened is factual, the reason that it happened is less straightforward. I have attempted to leave it to readers to decide why events turned out as they did and in order to do so I have sought to incorporate the views of all the key individuals in an effort to explain – even if it does not excuse – why they acted as they did.

  What follows draws heavily on the tens of thousands of pages of evidence published by Sir Patrick Coghlin’s public inquiry into the scandal, which involved remarkable work by a small team without whose work this book would be missing multiple key sections. Much of that evidence has never before been reported. Frequently, I have specified that a piece of evidence emerged in written or oral evidence to the inquiry. For stylistic reasons, on other occasions I have not made this explicit even wher
e I am reporting what transpired at the inquiry or in its voluminous evidence bundles.

  Unless otherwise referred to, all references to RHI refer to the non-domestic Northern Ireland RHI.

  For simplicity, I have referred to the Department of Finance throughout even though its name was the Department of Finance and Personnel until May 2016.

  My gratitude goes to the scores of sources who have fed through information on an unattributable basis, some of whom continue to hold senior positions and whose actions are at some risk to their own positions. Without them, this book would be shorter and far less complete.

  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 Party), 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.

  ***********

  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.

  ***********

  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 ser
vants 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.

  CHAPTER 1

  ON HIS KNEES

  Deep in the belly of Broadcasting House, Jonathan Bell’s silver-white head was bowed in prayer. On his knees, the man, who just seven months earlier had been part of the DUP’s powerful team of Stormont ministers, was being prayed for by two elderly associates who laid their hands on the politician’s shoulders as the television cameras rolled.

  BBC staff looked on bemused as one of the men – who despite being under hot studio lights was still wearing an overcoat necessary on a cold Belfast night – prayed: ‘We ask for the power of thy Holy Spirit to come upon Jonathan and those who interview him, that you will direct them in all that they think and say, that at the end of the day we all will have been done [sic] for the glory of Christ. Father, hear our prayer, for Christ’s sake. Amen.’