So if the DUP and Sinn Féin form a new Executive, serviced by the same bureaucracy that facilitated the RHI scandal, who keeps them all in line?
This is no organic legislature, grown out of communal will. One lot was dragged to it, the other had to be coaxed away from the gun. The outsiders supposed to encourage the hard-won model for a settlement only step in for crises – painfully slowly, in this case - and then step out again. Even if a thorough revamp was on offer, that degree of oversight will not do; never has, never will.
The big push with media cheerleading over this new year by British and Irish ministers will at best establish structures with the worst flaws stripped out. If agreed. If defined properly. The big underlying faults in the system will not be touched.
That means over-mighty, unelected, over-paid and over-plentiful Spads will continue to dominate a DUP with a bust leadership. Unless consciences have belatedly developed, the record shows that this cadre will operate primarily for selfish purposes rather than those of society. The IRA elder statesmen who control Sinn Féin will go on dictating to SF ministers. Reflection on SF electoral downturns might inject some strategy and brain-power, and improve staff work. The record, though, is not promising.
Should parties respectively run by self-serving place-holders and retired paramilitaries be cheered into place by people of goodwill? We on the outside learned the reality of Stormont 2007-2016 not from official oversight, because for the most part that has been ineffectual or non-existent. Dirty Spad-work at the crossroads and misjudged and mal-administered public money we discovered from years of journalistic effort but in the main, and spectacularly, from Sam McBride’s ‘Burned’, deservedly a best-seller and also a public service.
The RHI inquiry that the News Letter's McBride has mined so productively thanks to his parallel digging also confirmed how SF tug forelocks to their IRA controllers. Which is as much second nature as the subject of his other systematic exposure; of civil service cravenness and almost unbelievable incompetence. The inadequacies of the main parties are grim but no surprise. ‘Burned’ depicts the complementary malaise of an inadequate, smug bureaucracy. The courteous McBride decorates some senior figures as ‘cerebral’. One is even a ‘mandarin’. Yet chapter after chapter reveals chaos, a churn of personnel, lack of skills. Nobody involved has apparently been penalised. Several have been promoted.
The most humiliating revelation is the supine response that marked dealings between civil service, ministers and Spads. Today’s head of service David Sterling told the RHI inquiry, in public, in straightforward style, that he and his colleagues made no minutes and kept few if any notes – not because they were so commanded but because they knew the DUP and SF did not like it. This plainly shocked the inquiry panel.
Sam’s ‘cerebral’ figure, Andrew McCormick, did tell the inquiry on its last day in penitent tones that their report could give Stormont a ‘new foundation.’ But surely only an outsider, preferably from somewhere else and on their last posting, would possess the authority, skills, independence and resolve to lay that foundation stone.
Boris Johnson’s excitable guru and disruption enthusiast Dominic Cummings is looking for ‘weirdos’ rather than standard recruits, on a new year crusade to up-end Whitehall. So far Northern Ireland seems well below the Cummings horizon.
Nor is it clear that any of the participants in the Stormont talks have argued for a major ‘rid-out’ – of bureaucrats or Spads - before or in tandem with restoration. Worse, might publication of the RHI report have been paused to encourage agreement on restoration?
McBride’s book is an award-winner. He ends it by calling RHI and the collapse of Stormont a warning to the leaders of unionism that unless they ‘change their ways’ there might be a far greater collapse, ‘of Northern Ireland itself’. His ‘Burned’ extends the charge-sheet to the once-vaunted NI Civil Service.
