Opinion

Patrick Murphy: When politicians get drunk on power we all get a hangover

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

The RHI scheme put huge pressure on government budgets
The RHI scheme put huge pressure on government budgets The RHI scheme put huge pressure on government budgets

The most surprising thing about the evidence given to the RHI inquiry is that anyone finds it surprising. In fairness, we might not have foreseen the claim that a Stormont minister was thrown out of an American pub for being drunk (Fairytale of New York meets the DUP - and wins).

Similarly, only the more imaginative among us might have predicted the allegation that a DUP minister "swung a punch" and tried to "break the finger" of his special adviser which, if it ever becomes a film, might be called 'The Sopranos come to Stormont'.

But how could anyone be surprised by the overall theme of the evidence, which reveals a government careering from administrative ineptitude, through policy chaos, to personal and political patronage?

Oh no, you say, it was not the government. It was just the DUP, which has been exposed as dysfunctional and must be reformed. Yes, the DUP acted disgracefully, but its behaviour arises from the Stormont system of government, as agreed by the DUP and Sinn Féin at St Andrews in 2006.

The RHI scandal shows that the agreement's model of institutionalised sectarianism cannot work as a basis for government. It promotes the two most sectarian parties on either side of the divide and allows them to stay there through sectarian patronage, which can always be legally bolstered by a petition of concern.

As the RHI evidence suggests, this allowed party favouritism to take precedence over public policy-making. Unelected and highly paid special political advisers (Spads) carried greater clout than elected ministers in a manner similar to the old communist system in Russia, where the party always came first. Stormont has two such parties, one Catholic and one Protestant. Each allows the other to rule its own sectarian kingdom.

In most parliaments, checks and balances on the abuse of power operate through elections. In the Assembly, elections are based on sectarian opposition to the other side, so no matter how they behave in Stormont, or in wider society, SF and the DUP will always top the poll. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, perpetual power is not far behind.

So, apart from the size of the taxpayer's bill, RHI was not unique. It was an almost inevitable culmination of a decade of government scandals, which were rarely challenged because of the mutual cooperation between the two main parties for their individual electoral benefit.

Rubbish, you say, SF closed down the RHI scheme as soon as they knew about its failings. It was all the DUP's fault. Er, no, actually. In February 2016, Sinn Féin claimed credit for extending RHI's closure date by two weeks, leading to the inclusion of an additional 289 boilers in the scheme.

In December 2016 they refused to vote for Arlene Foster to stand down, even though six months earlier the Northern Ireland Audit Office reported that it could not obtain enough evidence that the £30.5 million in grants paid during that year "had been incurred for the purposes intended."

In southern politics, strokes like this are labelled "cute hoorism". In Stormont they just left out the cuteness.

So RHI was just another in a long line of Assembly scandals. For example, in 2010 minister Nelson McCausland tried to reverse the housing executive's (NIHE) decision to terminate a maintenance contract with Red Sky for unsatisfactory performance. Jenny Palmer, then a DUP member of the NIHE Board, said she was pressurised by McCausland's Spad to oppose the housing executive decision on the basis that "the party comes first".

The Assembly merely "noted" that McCausland had acted inappropriately. Sinn Féin did not rock the boat. In 2014, it claimed £700,000 in expenses for using a consultancy company run by its own finance department. The DUP did not make an issue out of it. No one resigned. No one was sacked. Both parties had power without responsibility and that culture created RHI.

You might remember Assembly Speaker Robin Newton's role on a steering group which awarded £1.7 million to Charter NI, an organisation to which he later admitted he offered advice.

Mr Newton is currently paid £85,000 annually as Speaker of a non-existent Assembly. Former deputy Speaker, Caitriona Ruane, was still receiving her annual salary of £55,000 six months after she resigned.

You see, being drunk on alcohol in New York is just an extension of being drunk on power in Belfast. Alcohol usually allows you to become sober the next morning, but power, particularly if it is perpetual, is more addictive. Those drunk on it rarely sober up, which is why the RHI scandal arose and why wider society here (but not politicians), suffers from a permanent political hangover.