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Burned. Sam McBride
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And the scandal has also exposed the disproportionate influence of a vast, monopsonistic company which received preferential treatment from government – simply because of its size. The preferential treatment helped it grow still bigger, thus increasing its influence and creating an inescapable circle antithetical not only to capitalistic theory but to basic principles of fairness.
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What follows will make uncomfortable reading for some DUP members who never expected their actions to be exposed. Few of us, even if not engaged in nefarious activity, would relish our candid text messages, emails, phone records and flaws being pored over in public as has happened to them. But with the power, prestige and handsome salaries which those individuals enjoyed as public servants comes the requirement to be accountable. Their personal discomfort has to be weighed against the wider public interest, as some of them have come to accept.
I have never set out to traduce the DUP or any other party but have followed the evidence where it has led – from the DUP, to the civil service, to boiler owners, to Sinn Féin, private consultants and elsewhere. The truth is too important to be the plaything of those who either want to cover up the DUP’s role in this affair or to use RHI as a stick with which to beat the party.
To those who have formed a negative view of the DUP based on the actions of some of its members who feature in this story, consider this: key pieces of information in this book have come from DUP members. Some of them spoke publicly at the RHI Inquiry; many others spoke privately to the author. Without them, some of what we now know would have forever remained hidden. All parties are a mixture of those driven by high principle and those who have baser motives.
This book should be read with the knowledge that we all make mistakes – and there will be too many in what I have written. Therefore, I hope that this is not perceived as a puritanical denunciation of those who have erred honestly, but as an attempt to understand how and why RHI fell apart. It is only by frankly addressing each individual’s role that we can piece together why what now seems obvious did not seem that way to at least some of those most closely associated with the scheme at the time.
To anyone adversely affected by any of my errors, I apologise in advance. If any book was to wait for perfection, it would never be published. I trust you will accept that I have made an honest – if imperfect – effort to understand what transpired.
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There is one final important context in which this book should be read. Northern Ireland is not a society riven with gross corruption of the sort which daily afflicts hundreds of millions of people’s lives around the world. Driving from Belfast to Dungannon, one is not stopped by police eager for bribes, as would happen on the road from Lagos to Abuja, nor do companies have entire divisions devoted to paying political bribes, as has been the case in Brazil.
Therefore, some of the worst behaviour set out in this book – which will to many readers appear morally corrupt, even if it is not in breach of the law – is in my experience the exception, rather than the norm. It is inaccurate to take the worst practices revealed by RHI and extrapolate that all politicians and civil servants are inept or worse. That is patently not the case – it was politicians and civil servants who ultimately played key roles in exposing RHI. In Stormont there are capable and honourable public servants. As one of many examples, Aine Gaughran, the Department for the Economy’s senior press officer at the time of the crisis in 2016 and 2017, was unerringly professional as chaos unfolded. Over scores of phone calls, emails and other queries, she responded politely and promptly, never once seeking to suppress the truth or apply inappropriate pressure.
But when bad behaviour is discovered, it should be shocking. It is only by expressing outrage at serious malpractice that we can deter its recurrence. Once a society becomes endemically corrupt, it is a cancer which is almost irreversible. One of the most dangerous, but now widespread, public views about politicians is that ‘they’re all the same – they’re all in it for themselves’. They aren’t – but if we assume that they are, then it is barely newsworthy to report on bad behaviour and we are unwittingly hastening the fulfilment of our bleak analysis.
The work of the inquiry, along with other material now being published for the first time, allows the truth about RHI to be known in considerable part. But even after the multi-million-pound inquiry – and the modest efforts of the author and other journalists – there are elements of this story which defy explanation or which hint at darker truths than those which can for now be proven. Now we know in part, but some of this story remains unknowable and that is one of the reasons why it is so compelling.
CHAPTER 1
ON HIS KNEES
Deep in the belly of Broadcasting House, Jonathan Bell’s silver-white head was bowed in prayer. On his knees, the man, who just seven months earlier had been part of the DUP’s powerful team of Stormont ministers, was being prayed for by two elderly associates who laid their hands on the politician’s shoulders as the television cameras rolled.
BBC staff looked on bemused as one of the men – who despite being under hot studio lights was still wearing an overcoat necessary on a cold Belfast night – prayed: ‘We ask for the power of thy Holy Spirit to come upon Jonathan and those who interview him, that you will direct them in all that they think and say, that at the end of the day we all will have been done [sic] for the glory of Christ. Father, hear our prayer, for Christ’s sake. Amen.’
As Bell rose, the two allies who had joined him – the politician’s father, Pastor Fergus Bell, and an intriguing business character called Ken Cleland – slapped him on the back. But while the scene added a layer of spiritual intrigue, which even for Northern Ireland’s religiously infused political landscape was rare, the two protagonists in the studio knew that a brutal political defenestration was about to begin. Bell, a self-confident character who had always been disliked by many of his colleagues, had been around politics for long enough to understand that his words would critically destabilise his party leader, already embroiled in a financial scandal that had been leading news bulletins for more than a week.
Seated opposite the Strangford MLA was a big beast of broadcasting: Stephen Nolan, BBC Northern Ireland’s aggressive and populist presenter, whose daily radio programme reached more people than any other outlet.
For an audience who had been given teasers about the dramatic nature of what was to be said in the interview recorded a day earlier, the first image they saw of the politician – kneeling in a television studio – was compelling. A few moments later, seated languidly across a studio desk from Nolan, Bell’s opening words were dramatic:
I have undertaken before God that I will tell you the truth and yes hundreds of millions of pounds has been committed and significant amounts of money has [sic] been spent. I am authorising every detail, every document, every civil service document that I signed, every submission that I signed to be made publicly available and to be examined exactly as the truth I now give you.
By Wednesday, 14 December 2016, the day the interview was recorded ahead of broadcast the following night, Bell had been talking to Nolan for a full week. When he arrived at the BBC’s Ormeau Avenue headquarters that afternoon, it was amid unusual secrecy. Rather than coming through the front entrance, he drove into the internal car park and was brought into the building through a side entrance. From there, it was a short distance to Studio 1 – a rarely used windowless studio, which had been commandeered for what would be one of the most dramatic political interviews in the history of Northern Ireland.
Inside the studio, one of BBC NI’s most senior editors, Kathleen Carragher, was crouched behind a screen, unseen by the cameras, following what was being said. A few yards away, BBC NI’s veteran political editor, Mark Devenport, and a handful of senior production staff were crammed into a tiny nearby room under a staircase, which had been hastily