Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Whatever the final RHI report says, some have already damaged themselves

RHI inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin. Oral hearings are set to conclude this week
RHI inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin. Oral hearings are set to conclude this week RHI inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin. Oral hearings are set to conclude this week

This is scheduled as the last week of oral hearings at the RHI inquiry, the tribunal investigating the Renewable Heat Initiative.

Today’s witnesses are billed as including Simon Hamilton, the DUP economy minister tasked with trying to mitigate the scheme’s losses, and the only Sinn Féin minister to be called, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who launched the tribunal though his party at first argued for a less powerful inquiry.

Civil service disciplinary proceedings are apparently on hold until after the tribunal reports. Sir Patrick Coghlin and colleagues Dame Una O’Brien and Dr Keith MacLean will study legal submissions from witnesses in December and should then retire to write their report. Whatever it says, some have already damaged themselves.

Many civil servants no doubt work hard, are smart, and honest with their colleagues. Unfortunately several of senior rank, no doubt well-paid, have told us under oath, civilly, and apparently without embarrassment, that they did a bad job. But the Treasury would pick up the tab, wouldn’t it? At times the ignorance seemed almost wilful, as it did from the DUP ministers questioned.

Sensation during the hearings mostly concerned political figures. Perhaps ‘para-politicals’ would best cover those known as spads, the ludicrously highly-paid ‘special advisers’ clearly hired by the DUP and Sinn Féin for their presumed loyalty.

The DUP version arrived straight out of university, or while still studying. Most of the SF variety came with Maze credentials. At least one or two appear to have been shaken out of their cushy berths, which is more than can be said about others uncovered by their own words.

The NI Civil Service on parade has been as dismaying a phenomenon as Jonathan Bell and Arlene Foster, Dr Andrew Crawford and Timothy Cairns, and the smooth-tongued Timothy Johnston, Ace of Spads (in academic Jonathan Tonge’s neat nickname), he who was best protected by the patchiest of paper-trails.

‘Responsible but not accountable’: that was Foster of herself. In a more subdued, grey-voiced way it was as alarming to hear today’s civil service boss David Sterling reveal last March that no, meetings were not minuted.

The two dominant parties were sensitive to criticism, he said. That meant it was safer not to have a record that might be released in response to a Freedom of Information request, which showed discussion of ‘things that might have been considered unpopular’. No minister banned minutes, he confirmed later. It just became a habit not to take them.

Whose servants are civil servants meant to be? Is the clue not in the first part of the name? Is their loyalty not meant to be to society, rather than to a passing administration? Hard to hear the no-minutes admission as other than servile; from a man confirmed six months after the Executive collapsed but on the website of ‘the Executive’, as ‘Head of the NI Civil Service’. Which grand title, the announcement explained, means ‘he leads around 23,500 civil servants.’

With bureaucratic determination and deadpan panache, if that is not a contradiction, the website chunters on to proclaim that Sterling is ‘also Permanent Secretary of the Executive Office and Secretary to the Northern Ireland Executive. In these roles, he is the most senior adviser to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister.’

You will remember that those two roles no longer exist. The civil service may be a parallel universe. The website has forgotten.

Westminster this week is supposedly moving to legalise decisions by ‘our’ civil servants in the absence of Stormont ministers. But in the teeth of over-promoted spads and ministers civil servants might have saved the RHI day. Like neglected, ignored whistle-blower Janette O’Hagan, they might have detected the fatal flaw in the scheme before the havoc. Not a chance.

Dr Andrew McCormick, then head of the most relevant department, told the tribunal that O’Hagan after just five minutes research had ‘exposed the fundamental error’. It had been ‘glaringly obvious’. He could not understand why she had been ignored. Baffled, he was. Dr McCormick is now director general of international relations for Brexit. Who knows what that is supposed to mean.

Last Thursday’s evidence showed the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) misleading the Department of Finance, by letting them think in June 2015 that DETI had reviewed the scheme when they hadn’t. A review would likely have found that fundamental error. ‘Things might have turned out differently,’ said Dame Una, former head of a Whitehall department, ‘if you had been honest with each other at the time’. Indeed.