Second paragraph of third chapter:
Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.
This is a tremendous expose of the colossal scandal that brought down the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive government in early 2017, taking another three years before it was restored (and then it was gone again in two years, being restored only a year ago). The guts of the story are that a subsidy for using renewable heat sources for commercial purposes was perversely structured so that the state effectively paid users to burn biomass; “cash for ash” as it was dubbed.
McBride was at the forefront of breaking this story through the News Letter, and the BBC was also particularly strong on the case (to the point that when I bumped into Arlene Foster in 2019, with a BBC journalist by my side, she chatted pleasantly with me while totally cutting my companion). It still doesn’t get to the bottom of the question – did anyone consciously legislate for this bottomless subsidy to arise? – but there is one obvious key beneficiary.
Once it became clear that far from subsidising the vast cash giveaway, the UK government was going to claw it back from the Northern Ireland budget, the shit hit the fan and politicians and ministers began manoeuvring not just to avoid blame but also to extract the maximum amount of money from the system before it was closed. As a BBC journalist put it:
‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh Hospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses [between Ballymena and Ballymoney], the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’
McBride despairs over the incompetence of the Civil Service in allowing the system to have arisen in the first place, and the incompetence of ministerial oversight. Jonathan Bell, the DUP minister who actually exposed the scandal in the first place, is himself exposed as bad-tempered and over-indulging in alcohol, under-briefed and displacing responsibility. Arlene Foster, on whose watch the scheme was set up and who then became First Minister, seems to have been curiously indifferent to the potential problems.
If Arlene Foster had followed the example of Peter Robinson, and stepped aside for a few weeks for a preliminary investigation to clear her of personal misconduct, devolution would have continued and the DUP would likely still be the largest party in Northern Ireland. As it was, she let ego override strategy, not for the first or last time. Sinn Fein also come in for criticism for their management of the financial side, and for the fact that ministerial decisions are still apparently being signed off by non-elected individuals.
I won’t embarrass them, but I am glad that the two people who I know best out of the whole disappointing story, a senior DUP special advisor and a senior civil servant (now retired), come out rather well; my DUP friend was only peripherally involved by all accounts, and my civil servant friend was one of the first to realise how badly things had gone wrong and, crucially, to accept responsibility.
I felt at the time that it was actually quite healthy for a Stormont government to fall over an actual issue of governance, rather than something related to the Norn Iron Problem – the only precedent is the deposition of John Miller Andrews in 1943. McBride however shows that the Norn Iron Problem includes the problem of a very small pool of political and administrative talent in a territory with such a small population, and this was one of the factors in the RHI scandal.
This is something that I have observed in my dealings with other small states. The issue isn’t whether the polity is economically viable, it’s whether there are enough smart people around to run it properly. I think the critical mass is probably around 2 million, the size of Slovenia, unless you have positive immigration boosting the numbers (eg Luxembourg). Northern Ireland, at 1.7 million, isn’t quite there yet.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; you can get it here. Next on that pile is A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell.