On November 29, 2017, three weeks after the RHI inquiry began, I wrote this in the Irish News: ''What the RHI saga highlighted was the very worrying discovery that the civil service/advisory side of the governing arrangements wasn't much better than the political side. Listening to the evidence from the inquiry is a bit like listening to a series of blind and deaf Laurel and Hardy tribute acts. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that we have an entire generation of politicians and civil servants who have very little hands-on experience of devolved, locally accountable government but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that...criticisms of the arrangements apply just as much to the civil servants as the politicians. Heaven alone knows how other departments are reaching decisions; or how many other problems are piling up around us.''
It's got worse since then. Just before flying off to Washington for the St Patrick's Day hoopla, David Sterling, head of the NI Civil Service told the inquiry: "A feature of the devolved administration here has been that the two main parties have been sensitive to criticism and I think it's in that context that as a senior civil service we got into the habit of not recording all meetings on the basis that it is safer sometimes not to have a record that might, for example, be released under Freedom of Information which shows that things that might have been considered unpopular were being discussed."
Earlier, he had told the inquiry, "There are things (about the scheme) that I cannot satisfactorily explain"; which seemed to be his way of saying that there was no way to substantiate two conflicting versions of events from Arlene Foster and one of her senior officials.
Yet in a letter to Michelle O'Neill - published in the Irish News two days ago - Sterling says: "Indeed, I am happy to state for the record that no minister who I served in any of the departments in which I worked during the period from May 2007 until the present day ever issued any general or specific instruction to me not to record meetings between officials and ministers."
It might have helped if, in his role as head of the Civil Service, he had been able to provide clarity on whether or not non-recording was, as he told the inquiry, "fairly common across all departments."
During her evidence Arlene Foster admitted that she hadn't actually read the RHI regulations when she brought them to the Assembly in 2012. Bad enough you might think, but since she wasn't exactly put under pressure in either the executive or the Assembly by anyone else - meaning that no one picked up any potential problems - the obvious conclusion is that very few people had actually bothered to read it.
Her adviser, Andrew Crawford, hinted at innuendo re the non-taking of minutes, then admitted that in his ten years as an adviser he had never seen minutes of a meeting. Why not? And if he had no access to minutes - and one must assume that there were no minutes re non-RHI issues either - how exactly did he, as a key adviser to the minister, keep a paper trail regarding decisions, discussions etc?
And with so much of the evidence seeming to consist of the he-said-she-said variety surely the keeping and reading of minutes would have been the sensible thing to do? I have never belonged to an organisation which didn't keep some sort of record of decisions taken - and by whom.
What we know so far - and the inquiry will probably run for another few months - is that no one is going to emerge trailing clouds of glory. The word 'dysfunctional' has already been used to describe events. Pinning a tail to the donkey is going to prove extraordinarily difficult.
It's still unclear to me what, precisely, a special adviser does; and it's equally unclear to me the exact nature of the relationship between the minister and the department's advisers and specialists when it comes to making decisions.
For the life of me I don't understand why someone hasn't been able to walk into the inquiry with box loads of files on RHI and say: "Here's the paper trail. Minutes of every meeting. A record of decisions taken. Evidence from everyone involved. The costings. The legislative framework. And all available papers from executive discussions and Assembly debate."
This strikes me as cock-up and incompetence on a monumental scale. What worries me even more, though, is that it probably isn't restricted to one department and one policy.