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Burned. Sam McBride
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One Stormont source who observed the DUP at the closest of quarters over more than a decade said: ‘Peter could ask Johnny to murder someone and he’d do it.’ That metaphor could not have been used for many of the others around Robinson. He had always been feared and respected within the DUP rather than loved.
Robinson did not have many close friends and was wary of several senior colleagues whose loyalty he suspected. But Bell’s devotion to the DUP leader was such that while still a minister – and around the time that RHI was falling apart – he began work on a PhD about his party leader and told colleagues that Robinson had agreed to turn over some of his personal papers to him for the academic study.
Although Robinson had stood down as DUP leader by 2016, given Bell’s closeness to Robinson, his contact with Paisley – who was from a rival internal faction – stands out.
The picture is further complicated by comments Cleland and Bell made to the BBC journalists as they discussed the story in that period. Both men gave the impression that they were concerned about Foster’s leadership, seeing it as an attempt to liberalise the party and move it away from its religious roots.
If that was a significant motive for what Bell did, it does not sit easily with the idea that Robinson was in any way orchestrating what was going on. Robinson was the man who had spent years gradually modernising and moderating the DUP. He had a vision of the party replacing the Ulster Unionist Party as the dominant party of unionism, and knew that to do so meant reaching beyond the narrow world of Protestant evangelicalism.
When contacted for this book, Robinson was reluctant to explain why he had discussed with Bell whether to go to The Times or Nolan and whether he was encouraging him to speak out as he did.
Instead, he responded – along with other DUP figures to whom separate questions were asked – with a solicitor’s letter which claimed that what had been put to him was ‘replete with inaccuracies and defamatory content’. The letter did not specify anything which was actually inaccurate but threatened that ‘in the event that publication of inaccurate and defamatory material occurs our clients are fully prepared to issue appropriate legal proceedings’. Further attempts to secure answers to the questions drew no response.
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After the BBC Spotlight exposé on 6 December, the foundations of the Stormont Executive – which with the DUP and Sinn Féin jointly at the helm had ruled Northern Ireland for almost a decade – were rocking. By the time the Bell interview went out, they were crumbling. A massive audience had watched the extraordinary programme. When it was broadcast on BBC One NI, 56% of everyone watching TV in Northern Ireland at the time was tuned in. The average for that 10.40pm slot was for BBC One to have 18% of all viewers. The following day, the Sinn Féin deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness phoned Foster to ask her to step aside as First Minister while an investigation took place into the allegations. She instinctively refused, and from that point devolved government in Northern Ireland was on a path to implosion. But to understand why the revelations of December 2016 shook Northern Ireland, we have to go back in time.
CHAPTER 2
IN THE BEGINNING
Fiona Hepper, who had nothing to contribute as an energy specialist, arrived in June 2010 to head up the team of Stormont civil servants responsible for energy policy. In a textbook move for the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Hepper was a ‘generalist’ who shifted from department to department, learning on the job, before climbing the career ladder in an entirely different area.
The psychology graduate began life in the civil service as a statistician, and over a 30-year career had worked on everything from cross-border economic cooperation to labour market policy, communications, telecoms and emergency planning.
This was how Northern Ireland had been ruled from its creation in 1921. While the ministers in charge of departments had shifted from the Official Unionist Party during the first half-century of the fledgling state’s existence, to direct rule ministers flying in and out from London, to power-sharing ministers appointed after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, there had been one constant: the Northern Ireland Civil Service.
The energy team, which Hepper now headed, sat within the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), a relatively small department of about 600 officials but with sprawling responsibilities for tourism, company law, economic development, consumer protection, health and safety law, cross-border trade and telecoms. When Hepper arrived in her new post, she had four hours with her predecessor to be briefed on the new role and was given a bundle of documentation. It was a huge job. Energy policy was in flux. There was a push for renewable energy systems, about which there was limited understanding, alongside proposals to extend the piped natural gas network in Northern Ireland and moves to harmonise the electricity markets between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. On top of that, DETI’s small energy team found itself responsible for transposing EU energy directives into law – a responsibility the devolved Scottish or Welsh administrations did not have to do because energy policy was only devolved in Northern Ireland.
Not long into the post, Hepper decided to create a renewable heat branch within the wider division. But while that might have implied that there was now a significant team working on the issue, it was the equivalent of one and a half full-time staff, with the official in charge of the branch working part time. But no one at the time viewed this as a Father Ted approach to public administration – it was just how things had always been done in Stormont.
Although Northern Ireland had a huge public sector compared to anywhere else in the UK, the reality was that a region of 1.8 million people was always going to be doing things on a shoestring by comparison to Whitehall, the throbbing administrative centre of the British State from which an empire had once been administered and wars directed. But despite Stormont’s small size, there was a culture of civil servants doing whatever it took to please their ministers and a reluctance to hand back power to Westminster.
By the time Hepper arrived at DETI, it had for some time been under pressure to set up a Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) as part of an EU-wide endeavour to financially induce businesses to move from fossil fuel heating systems to sustainable green alternatives. There were two main reasons: an EU directive had set challenging targets for renewable heat. If those were not met by 2020, there would be huge fines from Brussels. The second imperative to launch RHI came from business. The rest of the UK had been moving ahead with a scheme that would launch in late 2011. Without that subsidy being extended by Stormont, Northern Ireland firms would be at a competitive disadvantage. In the aftermath of a major recession, that was a potent argument in favour of action.
The Whitehall department responsible for the GB heat subsidy had in 2008 offered Stormont the chance to piggyback on its scheme, something which would have meant Stormont agreeing for Westminster to legislate for it. Hepper’s predecessor, in consultation with Arlene Foster, the DUP minister who would spend seven years in the department, decided not to avail of that opportunity. They believed that Westminster was rushing unnecessarily and were aware of a wider political concern in Northern Ireland, which at that point was just a year into the restoration of devolved government. The unionists and nationalists who made up the Stormont Executive were agreed that the whole point of devolution was to allow them to decide their own policies. In that context, simply handing back power to Westminster was counterintuitive.
Regardless of that benign logic, which might explain what happened in 2008, from this moment of divergence suspicion would subsequently arise as to why a handful of civil servants and politicians in Belfast had decided to do their own thing and whether someone somewhere in Stormont had spied an opportunity to exploit a funding stream from London.
Civil servants and politicians often consciously chose not to record controversial information, which makes it difficult to be certain what happened in the early years of the scheme. And the fact that the department had a deliberate policy of not recording important information means that if there was any inappropriate decision to deliberately exploit the RHI funding it would almost certainly not be recorded.
After