LITMIR.BIZ

      PREFACE

      It was a Tuesday night three weeks before Christmas in 2016 and I was tired after a long day covering Stormont for the News Letter. That afternoon there had been a debate in which almost half of Assembly members from the opposition parties were incredulous that public cash was going to an alleged UDA (Ulster Defence Assocation) boss, while the rest of MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly), from the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) and Sinn Féin, were incredulous that the issue was even being raised. But all of that – along with the Stormont edifice within which Northern Ireland’s politics had been contained for almost a decade – was to be blown away by a scandal triggered that night by a BBC Spotlight documentary on something called the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).

      For about a fortnight there had been rumours within political and media circles that Spotlight was investigating a significant story about one of First Minister Arlene Foster’s special advisers, Stephen Brimstone, who had suddenly quit his £92,000 role and was said to have had an RHI boiler which was being investigated by the police.

      In fact, Brimstone did not feature in the programme. But the story Spotlight told – of extreme incompetence by civil servants and of a bungled subsidy which was to cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds despite a whistleblower personally having warned Foster – was shocking, even by Stormont’s standards of ineptitude.

      In almost a decade reporting Stormont, I had seen at close quarters both the individuals and the flawed system central to the scandal. Yet for some reason, there was something about the scale and nature of this squander which meant that as a taxpayer I was angry watching BBC reporter Conor Spackman casually tossing bundles of cash into a fire as he set out the perversity of what had happened.

      But there was a particular reason why that night I was less dispassionate than might otherwise have been the case. Just weeks earlier, my mother-in-law had been given a fatal diagnosis: a doctor told her that she had motor neurone disease. Despite having spent much of her life voluntarily helping others as a nurse in Africa, she was now a victim of the NHS’s vast neurological waiting list and had to pay to be diagnosed by a doctor at a private hospital. (The diagnosis, made by a doctor whose work has led to the recall of 3,500 patients and a Department of Health inquiry, would later turn out to be wrong.)

      It was the juxtaposition of what seemed like the feckless profligacy – or worse – of senior figures in Stormont with the consequences of that money not being available to the health service which drew me into the story.

      In the weeks that followed, the more that I examined what had gone on, the more suspicious it seemed. The weekend before Christmas I used comparison software to contrast the 2011 RHI legislation in Great Britain and the Stormont legislation signed off by Arlene Foster the following year. Having done so, it was difficult to give credence to the official explanation for the absence of cost controls in the Northern Ireland scheme – that putting in cost controls would have been complex and time-consuming.

      Scrolling through page after page of the two pieces of legislation, it was clear that Stormont had copied and pasted about 98% of the GB law, with minor changes. The vast majority of what changes there were involved technical changes to reflect Northern Ireland legislation, such as changing ‘authority’ to ‘department’.

      And yet, when I got to Part 5 of Section 37 of the GB regulations, the copy and paste stopped. There were 107 missing words and it was those missing words which at that point were estimated to cost taxpayers about £500 million. It was clearly someone’s conscious decision to stop copying at that point, before resuming the process for the remainder of the bill.

      This book is the culmination of my desire to establish who made that decision, and why. Since then, the scandal

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