by Sam McBride
Now Sinn Féin’s position became fascinating. On paper, the party’s Finance Minister, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir – the most powerful Stormont minister after Foster and McGuinness – had a key role in signing off on Hamilton’s plan to cut costs. But he lingered over the decision for weeks, alarming his officials who feared that the legislation might not be passed before Stormont collapsed. Unknown to the public, Ó Muilleoir was in constant contact with unseen – and therefore publicly unaccountable – senior republican figures about the complex legal question facing him, even though they were neither legal nor energy experts. In an insight into where real power lay within Sinn Féin, the minister did not seem able to take the decision based on the advice of his civil servants and his own party-appointed spad.
The revelation only emerged at the inquiry because of its power to compel the release of internal Sinn Féin emails and text messages. It added weight to the belief of the DUP and others that Sinn Féin’s Stormont operation was so ultra-centralised that even its ministers were operating in an environment in which they were being effectively overseen by unseen republicans.
On 18 December, three days after Bell spoke out, Ó Muilleoir met Hamilton in Belfast City Hall to discuss RHI. No minutes were taken of the ministerial meeting – just the way the DUP and Sinn Féin liked it. Three days later, Mr Ó Muilleoir emailed senior republican Padraic Wilson to provide a detailed summary of the meeting. Wilson, a former ‘officer commanding’ of the IRA prisoners in the Maze Prison, had been caught in possession of a bomb and after his release from jail had been given crucial roles by the IRA. Sinn Féin denied that the IRA still existed in any form. However, just over a year earlier, a major security assessment for the government said that the IRA Army Council remained intact and that IRA members believed that it controlled Sinn Féin. Ó Muilleoir told Wilson: ‘It’s up to [Hamilton’s department] to come up with a solution … that gives us a certain distance from the DUP attempts to say we were all in this together.’
By 4 January, Ó Muilleoir was emailing other Sinn Féin figures, including Ted Howell. When asked by the inquiry who Howell was, Ó Muilleoir described him as ‘the former chair and chair of every negotiation Sinn Féin’s been involved in around these institutions and political processes since 1997’ and a member of Sinn Féin’s ard chomhairle [executive] who was ‘brought back from retirement at the request of Martin McGuinness to chair a crisis committee to deal with the crisis’ over RHI. What Ó Muilleoir did not tell the inquiry was that Howell was another figure trusted by the IRA leadership. Howell had acted as a go-between on behalf of the IRA when the terror group was beginning to make connections with senior US figures in the early 1990s. The veteran journalist Ed Moloney, author of A Secret History of the IRA, described Howell as ‘[Gerry] Adams’s most trusted advisor and counsellor’ but also ‘a highly secretive figure’ who was ‘arguably one of the most influential figures in the Provisionals’.
Another individual being updated by the Finance Minister was Martin Lynch. Lynch and Wilson were described by Panorama’s John Ware as ‘two of the IRA’s most senior representatives’ in 2003 when they had a key role in handling the Scappaticci informer affair for the IRA.
Within two days of his email to Howell, Ó Muilleoir wrote a letter to Hamilton criticising his approach – and released the letter publicly. A draft of the letter had been circulated among the group of senior republicans.
On 16 January, Ó Muilleoir wrote again to the unseen figures to say: ‘I will shortly sign off a submission from officials agreeing that the interim solution of Simon Hamilton stacks up.’ But he then received a text message from Howell three days later to tell him that ‘the hole in our case is “what is the SF cure?”’ if it rejected Hamilton’s plan. Ó Muilleoir replied in detail to Howell setting out his preferred approach.
By 23 January, the Assembly was sitting for the penultimate time before dissolution. Hamilton brought his retrospective subsidy cut legislation to the Assembly – but without Ó Muilleoir having signed off on the business case, a highly irregular situation. Hamilton told the Assembly it was ‘deeply troubling’ that the business case had not been approved and challenged Ó Muilleoir as to why that was the case. Ó Muilleoir told the Assembly that the reason was down to the lack of EU state aid approval. He made no mention of the off-grid role of senior republicans. He also assured the Assembly that his decision would be ‘politics-free’ – just weeks after suggesting to the IRA veteran Wilson that his strategy was heavily influenced by political considerations.
Ó Muilleoir’s refusal to sign off on the business case was repeatedly mentioned during the Assembly debate and it raised the possibility that the legislation would fall. If all the opposition MLAs voted against Hamilton’s legislation – and Sinn Féin abstained – then it would not pass. Going into an election, that would have left the DUP unable to argue that it had at least fixed the problem. However, in the end every MLA outside the DUP abstained, leaving the DUP to pass the legislation on an oral vote – a highly unusual situation.
The following day, Ó Muilleoir emailed Howell again to tell him ‘there is now no further reason for me to delay holding up [sic] this business plan … would you be content if I were to sign off the business plan on Wednesday afternoon?’ Here was the Finance Minister – one of Stormont’s most powerful democratically accountable figures – asking an unelected and entirely unseen republican with long links to the IRA whether he was ‘content’ for the minister to take a complex decision worth hundreds of millions of pounds, even after the legislation had been agreed by the legislature. By this stage, the minister had clear advice from his officials that he should approve the subsidy cut as the only possible solution available. Ó Muilleoir insisted that he was not requesting permission and was simply informing Howell of what he would be doing, acting as ‘a courtesy … giving him his place’.
But just three days earlier, Ó Muilleoir’s behaviour had caused such concern for his most senior civil servant, David Sterling, that he expressed alarm about the situation. In a text message to McCormick, Sterling said that his minister had been ‘unforthcoming’ and added: ‘I can’t say whether the “will” is there and wonder whether he knows himself. He may be acting under instruction.’ Even after asking if Howell was content, Ó Muilleoir did not immediately get a green light. Instead, Howell summoned him to a meeting with ‘the usual suspects’ at Sinn Féin headquarters on the Falls Road. Within three minutes, the minister’s spad agreed that they would attend. The meeting, of course, was not minuted so we do not know what was discussed, but the minister belatedly approved the business case.
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With Sinn Féin having collapsed Stormont, an election campaign now began – and the DUP was desperate to move the focus from RHI. Unable to fight the election on her record in government, Foster explicitly made it the most tribal contest in years. When asked about RHI, Foster repeatedly talked about Gerry Adams’s ‘radical republican agenda’. In McGuinness’s resignation letter he had not just demanded that Foster step aside over RHI but had also revived a list of mostly forgotten Sinn Féin demands, including an insistence that there should be an Irish language act. At the launch of the DUP campaign, Foster used a phrase which some saw as a gaffe but which may well have been a deliberate attempt to take the focus off RHI. Asked by veteran Belfast Telegraph political correspondent Noel McAdam if she would agree to Irish language legislation, Foster visibly bristled and said to loud cheers from her candidates: ‘I will never accede to an Irish language act … if you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back and looking for more.’
Sinn Féin was delighted at the remark. Hours later, Gerry Adams beamed as he dismissed Foster’s animalistic analogy, simply saying: ‘See you later, alligator.’ Sinn Féin activists donned crocodile suits to campaign. But many nationalists – who had until then not been pressing for Irish language legislation – saw it as an example of Foster’s arrogance and her disdain for those who cherished the langu
age.
Two weeks later, as Foster launched the DUP’s manifesto, she mentioned Sinn Féin 32 times, with a further 12 mentions of Gerry Adams and five references to republicans in the 20-minute speech. But there was no talk of RHI – and no chance to raise it because Foster, blaming a sore throat, took no questions from the media. Less than a year after a positive campaign in which Foster’s face adorned all DUP literature and the party’s candidates were described as ‘Arlene’s candidates’, now the party was reduced to simply stopping Sinn Féin and giving Foster as little media exposure as possible.
The DUP’s one attempt to tackle RHI head-on was wildly inaccurate. The party produced a leaflet which claimed to ‘go behind all the spin’ – but it was a poor piece of propaganda. It claimed that there would be ‘no future overspend’ when Hamilton had admitted that there was still an overspend of about £2 million a year. It also claimed that ‘Arlene Foster has been vindicated by an independent senior civil servant’, a claim which infuriated McCormick, to whom it referred, because he was in no position to ‘vindicate’ her. He felt that the party was selectively quoting him when it suited – while distancing itself from other things which he had said.
The election result was seismic. Although the DUP vote held up, nationalist turnout soared, propelling Sinn Féin to a position of unprecedented power. What had been a ten-seat gap between the parties became just one seat as the DUP lost ten MLAs. The election was the first since the cut in MLAs from 108 to 90, but even allowing for that it was a disastrous result for Foster. More significantly, the outcome presented a fundamentally altered political reality: unionism was no longer a majority in the Stormont chamber for the first time since the creation of Northern Ireland almost a century earlier. At the time of writing, more than two years later, the DUP and Sinn Féin have been unable to agree to return to Stormont.
Former DUP minister Edwin Poots bluntly accepted that his party had played a part in enraging a previously apathetic section of nationalism, driving them to vote for Sinn Féin. He said: ‘Unfortunately nationalists and republicans turned out in a way they haven’t done for a long time. We made a contribution to that. We have managed to get nationalists and republicans angry and that has led to them winning more seats as well and that’s something that we have to reflect on.’
The election ended Bell’s hopes of a continued political career. Standing as an independent candidate in his Strangford constituency after being suspended by the DUP, he pulled in just 3.8% of the vote – down from more than 10% of the vote which he had secured under the DUP banner the year before and well short of the 16.6% quota needed to win one of the five seats. It was a disappointing result for a candidate who had been given an exceptionally high profile after his Nolan interview and who had paid for large ‘time for the truth’ billboards as part of his re-election campaign. Bell quickly returned to his former life as a social worker, adopting a low public profile. The DUP had been reluctant to publish the full list of RHI claimants. That fed the narrative that there was a darker truth than mere incompetence. By the time the party decided that it was in its interests to publish the list rather than have individual names leak out one by one, it faced a legal challenge from some claimants, slowing the process. Eventually, most of the claimants were named – and the scale of their payments made public – on 24 May 2017, almost two months after the election. But, for reasons which have never been fully explained by the department, the names of those claiming for 48 boilers were not made public.
The list showed that one farmer had been paid almost £660,000 from RHI in less than four years. Paul Hobson, a Dungannon poultry farmer who supplied Moy Park, installed his first biomass boiler just eight months after RHI launched in late 2012 and went on to put in a further 12 boilers. The scale of Hobson’s income showed how eye-wateringly lucrative the scheme was, even for those who like him are using it for a legitimate purpose. In an interview with the author, he freely answered every question and explained that the total installation cost had been £380,000. Over the period covered by the figures Hobson said that he had spent £426,000 on wood pellets, £75,000 on electricity to run the system, £12,000 on boiler servicing, £10,000 on parts and £57,000 on interest payments for the loans which financed the investment. That meant that in less than four years Mr Hobson had made about £80,000 in profit.
Three months before the list was published, Crawford texted his friend Mark Anderson again to ask if he knew details about the inspection of boilers which Stormont was planning. Anderson replied to say that no one would be able to meet the department’s terms for the inspections contract – something subsequently borne out by events. That delayed any attempt to quickly identify fraudsters. Anderson added bluntly: ‘And if someone does farmers are f****d hi [sic]’.
CHAPTER 21
NO HIDING PLACE
Having spent weeks arguing against a public inquiry, Sinn Féin’s U-turn was so abrupt that it caught the party’s chairman, Declan Kearney, embarrassingly off-guard. On the morning of 19 January, Kearney had been, yet again, on the radio arguing in defence of his party’s refusal to support a public inquiry. Just before 4pm that afternoon, the Sinn Féin Finance Minister, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, suddenly announced that he was setting up a public inquiry under the Inquiries Act. He said that the about-turn was because it was clear that with Stormont being dissolved the following week there was no alternative route to investigate the scandal. Yet that had been clear for some time. What would also have featured in Sinn Féin thinking was that the DUP, which had initially also bitterly opposed a public inquiry, had in the preceding days swung to supporting such a move, and the Economy Minister, Simon Hamilton, was exploring setting up the inquiry himself.
It would have been politically damaging for Sinn Féin if the party most responsible for RHI moved ahead to launch the most rigorous inquiry possible while Sinn Féin opposed it. Sinn Féin had long been opposed to the Inquiries Act 2005 because it argued that an inquiry under that legislation was inadequate for investigating controversial Troubles incidents – and especially the murder of the solicitor, Pat Finucane, for which republicans had long campaigned. But it was difficult to see that as the real reason for the party’s aversion to an RHI public inquiry. If Sinn Féin was arguing that the Inquiries Act did not go far enough, clearly its preference for a less rigorous form of investigation would be even less likely to get to the truth. And when the party ultimately did its U-turn to set up the public inquiry, far from there being any major backlash from within republicanism, there was a sense of relief that the party’s embarrassing flip-flopping was at an end.
The following week, Ó Muilleoir announced that the inquiry would be chaired by Sir Patrick Coghlin, a recently retired judge from Northern Ireland’s Court of Appeal who had been nominated for the role by the Lord Chief Justice. Ó Muilleoir told the Assembly: ‘Rest assured, every stone will be turned and there will be no dark corners where the light won’t be shone.’ The minister probably did not envisage at this point that the unflinching pursuit of the truth would involve his own actions being scrutinised in painful detail.
Having decided to instigate the inquiry, Ó Muilleoir now set it up with the most sweeping terms imaginable. Despite the terms of reference stretching to four pages, Ó Muilleoir gave Coghlin the power to add to his remit if he felt it appropriate.
Ó Muilleoir pledged that the inquiry would be ‘free of ministerial control or interference’, stressing that after his signature to establish the inquiry ‘it will now progress entirely in the hands of the chairman. Sir Patrick Coghlin will … have absolute control over the scope and execution of the inquiry’. But in doing so, there was an irony. In setting up the inquiry into the absence of RHI cost controls, Ó Muilleoir had set up the inquiry without any cost controls. The inquiry was entirely open-ended, both in time and expense, although Coghlin had been told that both should be ‘reasonable’. The minister had done so for a noble reason – to prevent outside interference. That would prove w
ise, given how deeply the inquiry would delve into politicians and civil servants. But it would have been shrewd to find some mechanism to protect the public purse, perhaps through an independent figure such as the comptroller and auditor general having to sign off on spending beyond a certain figure. Initially, an indicative budget of just over £4 million was set aside for the inquiry, but from the outset that always appeared an optimistic figure for such a task involving so many lawyers.
Having given Coghlin a vast remit, Ó Muilleoir had a hopelessly optimistic view of when he would conclude his work. Stressing that the timeframe would be a matter for Coghlin, the minister told MLAs: ‘I would think it appropriate for us to have a report six months after the inquiry starts.’ The inquiry would not even begin its public hearings within that timeframe – and to anyone with a passing knowledge of the complexity of RHI or the nature of public inquiries, there was never any prospect of it concluding within six months.
Ó Muilleoir was not the only person to be overly optimistic about how long the process would take. Coghlin himself told a senior civil servant in March that he hoped to begin evidence sessions in ‘the second half of May’. The first witnesses would in fact not be called to give evidence until the final days of November.
In more than four decades at the bar or on the bench, the Cambridge-educated Coghlin had developed a reputation for independence. Displaying a robust – sometimes even abrupt – manner in court, Coghlin was not the sort of figure who was going to sit back quietly while a witness spent hours obfuscating. Before being promoted to the Court of Appeal, Coghlin had also played a part in a trial which caused alarm across the UK media. In 2000, The Irish News had published a scathing review of Goodfellas Pizzeria in West Belfast, savaging every aspect of the establishment. The restaurant sued for libel and Coghlin was the trial judge. There was shock across the UK media when the jury found that the review had been defamatory and awarded £25,000 to the restaurant. The media argued that the law had been misinterpreted to an extent that if the finding was to stand it would jeopardise all reviews.
