morning she decided to go right to the top – to Arlene Foster. O’Hagan sent an email to DETI’s generic email address, marking it for the attention of Arlene Foster. It was a general email setting out her company’s attempts to facilitate energy efficiency and asked for a meeting with Foster to discuss the issue. Moments after hitting ‘send’, she had second thoughts. Would an email to a generic email inbox get picked up? And, if it did, would it ever make its way to the minister?
O’Hagan decided to try another route. Searching the DUP website, she found an email address where Foster could be emailed about constituency issues. Five minutes after sending the initial email, she sent a second to Foster but added the line: ‘Given the benefits of RHI, we find that many of our potential customers are no longer worried about becoming more efficient, because they are now more sustainable.’ It was a cryptic reference to the problem, but her intention was to secure a meeting at which she could explain RHI’s central flaw. Eight days later, there had been no response to either email.
Undeterred, O’Hagan sat down again and emailed [email protected]. This time she was more direct, telling the minister: ‘Given the benefits of RHI, we find that many of our potential customers are no longer worried about becoming more efficient, in fact it pays them to use as much as they can – in fact the incentive to use more is leading to misuse in some cases.’ Now, just ten months after the launch of RHI, Foster had been warned explicitly that it was in itself a perverse incentive to waste heat and was being actively abused. O’Hagan never received a reply to that email and there is no electronic record of it ever having been passed on to DETI – unlike the initial email, which Foster had forwarded to her private office. However, two days later O’Hagan was contacted by a DETI official who said that Foster could not meet her but a meeting would be arranged with officials. The businesswoman was in no doubt that it was her second and more direct email to Foster that led to the response.
O’Hagan had not known what to expect and was pleasantly surprised to be told that she was being offered a meeting. A month later, she was sitting around a table in DETI’s Netherleigh House headquarters with the triumvirate of civil servants who knew more about RHI than anyone else – Fiona Hepper, Joanne McCutcheon and Peter Hutchinson. The fact that all three met her for an hour at a time when the civil servants say they were overworked suggests that this was thought to be more important than simply a businesswoman with a commercial complaint.
But their disposition in the meeting left O’Hagan despondent. On leaving the rambling DETI headquarters, she felt that she had wasted her time. As in her email to Foster, O’Hagan had warned them of the perverse incentive to run boilers around the clock with windows open. With lurid language, she told the civil servants that she was surprised people weren’t mounting radiators on the outside walls of buildings, such was the financial incentive to waste heat. The response – she thinks it was from McCutcheon, but certainly from one of the three – never left her: ‘We don’t think people will do that.’ O’Hagan shot back: ‘Well, they can, and they will, and I’m surprised they’re not mounting them on the outside.’ She was certain of her facts because she had compared Stormont’s scheme to the one in GB and she also had first-hand experience of how those with biomass boilers reacted to the offer of cutting their fuel bill, as well as what others in the energy industry were saying. But she also had something else.
Just two months earlier, O’Hagan had approached BS Holdings, the biomass installer which had within weeks worked out that the scheme was a money-maker, with a proposal to work together – the heatboss system would be installed along with the biomass boiler, thus saving money on two fronts. But ahead of the meeting, the boiler installer sent her an email to caution that for its RHI customers ‘the more heat generated, the more funding’. The implication was clear: a product which cut their heating bill was going to reduce their income, so it wasn’t going to be attractive. At the meeting, it was suggested to her that if BS Holdings was to trial some of her promotional literature with its customers then the leaflets should be rewritten to remove the references to savings. Instead, the suggestion was that she should market her product to RHI users as a means of ensuring ‘control’ and ‘comfort’. But at the meeting with DETI officials, O’Hagan was told that it was their ‘assumption’ that if a business was going to invest in an expensive biomass boiler it would be the last stage of an attempt to become more environmentally friendly and would have been preceded by efforts to become more energy efficient.
Based on what they told O’Hagan, the civil servants don’t seem to have been able to comprehend that a business might be more interested in making easy money than cutting its carbon emissions. Yet the explanation which they gave to O’Hagan did not fully add up because in their own paperwork for the RHI scheme they had identified the risk of fraud and overcompensation. And it is harder still to understand why they were so dismissive of her central claim because by now Hutchinson, at least, had firm evidence about how the early claimants were using their boilers far more than had been anticipated. Although DETI’s small RHI team was not monitoring it in the hands-on way that Whitehall was examining trends in the GB scheme, they were receiving sufficient information in RHI’s first year to raise eyebrows.
As early as seven months into the scheme, Hutchinson was estimating that boilers could be used for as much as 35% of the year – more than double the 17% CEPA had estimated. It was also clear from the data coming through to DETI by then that the only real interest was in biomass. That in itself ought to have been a red flag because the scheme had been set up to incentivise a host of green technologies, and the subsidies were meant to have been calculated so that there would be no predominance of a single technology.
Hepper later told the public inquiry that O’Hagan had only raised ‘anecdotal’ evidence. She said that the businesswoman had been encouraged to contribute to a consultation on the expansion of the scheme. But when O’Hagan looked at the consultation, most of it related to the domestic scheme and she felt that she had already explicitly told the key DETI figures about the central problem. If they wouldn’t believe her when she told them in person, why would they react differently if she filled in a consultation response form? O’Hagan later told the inquiry: ‘I just keep thinking a blind man on a galloping horse would have seen it. You know, how could they not?’
It would be the emergence of O’Hagan’s email to Foster, three and a half years after it was sent, that would trigger former DUP minister Jonathan Bell to speak out and then the process of Foster’s toppling as First Minister, the collapse of Stormont and the public inquiry.
O’Hagan, who stressed that she had no political motive for what she did and who was not involved in the leaking of her email in December 2016, could never have imagined where her attempt to raise the alarm would lead. Although she later came to be referred to as a whistleblower – and at various points had later referred to herself as such – she told the inquiry that she did not think that she was in truth a whistleblower, because she was not blowing the whistle from the inside but was rather a ‘concerned citizen’ who could see there was a problem. For that reason, she did not seek anonymity when she approached the department. Her 2013 attempt to alert those in authority to the problem was the first of multiple efforts to get DETI to open its eyes to what was going on. The dismissive response from officialdom shook her confidence in the machinery of government. She later reflected: ‘It seems to me that the effective route is probably to go to the media.’
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The civil servants’ refusal to believe that RHI was open to widespread abuse makes even less sense because of something which had happened just three months before they met O’Hagan.
After receiving CEPA’s report on expanding RHI, DETI opened a public consultation about doing so. Yet, one section of the July 2013 document – some eight months after the scheme had opened – proved that there was an awareness of the need for cost controls and that Foster was personally aware of this. In a foreword to the 45-page document, Foster made clear that she knew about the
