rel="nofollow" href="#uc2085fdd-3576-5fa2-a0bb-e352f2822073">6.Cash for Ash Begins
16.Let’s Claim it was a Success
18.Fire, and Brimstone’s Problem
26.Minister for Photo Opportunities
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 where 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 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:
