The DUP leader was assured, but inquiry has revealed ‘what bad government looks like’

It sounds like Game of Thrones: the big budget TV drama filmed in Northern Ireland with a sprawling plot involving power, pillage and fire.

There is a vacant throne, a beleaguered female leader surrounded by backstabbers, a kingdom with a deep treasure chest across the sea and the risk that everything will be reduced to ash.

This is not the HBO series and there are no dragons. It is Northern Ireland’s cash-for-ash scandal, a farrago of official incompetence and alleged corruption relating to a renewable heat initiative (RSI) scheme which has paralysed the region’s politics as Brexit looms.

The former first minister Arlene Foster appeared at a public inquiry this week to rebuff accusations that she was to blame for a fiasco which led to the collapse of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, and which may cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds.

“I’m accountable but I’m not responsible,” Foster said when asked about a special adviser’s possible criminal conduct.

The televised testimony in a hushed, marbled chamber at Stormont, marked an attempt to stop her leadership of the Democratic Unionist party, and by extension her sway over Theresa May’s government, which relies on DUP votes in Westminster, going up in smoke.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arlene Foster denied blame for cash-for-ash fiasco Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Under questioning Foster, a lawyer, sought refuge in carefully phrased qualifiers – “I stand to be corrected … it’s my understanding” – to distance herself from disastrous decisions which led to the collapse of the DUP’s power-sharing with Sinn Féin in 2017, leaving a power vacuum at Stormont.

It was a cool, controlled performance in front of Sir Patrick Coghlin, a retired court of appeal judge who is chairing the inquiry, and probably helped avert fresh calls for her resignation. However, the testimonies of other DUP officials revealed dysfunction at the heart of the party and Northern Ireland’s government.

Foster and other then ministers barely read important documents, if at all; civil servants cut corners and ignored signs of problems; unelected special advisers essentially ran Stormont and in some cases helped relatives access – arguably loot – public funds.

While leading a trade mission to New York, Jonathan Bell, then a DUP minister, allegedly fell asleep in a bar before being escorted back to his hotel singing Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the top of his voice.

“The Northern Ireland public is getting a first-hand view of what bad government looks like, and once seen it will be very hard for them to unsee it again,” said Mick Fealty, the founder of the political blog Slugger O’Toole.

At a time of existential uncertainty, with Brexit and Stormont’s paralysis shaking the constitutional pillars of the Good Friday agreement and fanning talk of a united Ireland, the region’s politicians are focusing on drip-drip revelations about wooden pellets, biomass boilers and chicken sheds.

The renewable heat initiative started in 2012 as a well-intentioned UK-wide effort to reduce carbon emissions by switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The fiasco over the scheme led to the collapse of the power-sharing government at Stormont. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

But Northern Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, then run by Foster, made the subsidy more valuable than the cost of wood pellets used to heat boilers. Nor did it cap the total subsidy.

Word spread: boilers meant profits, and the more boilers and the more you burned the richer you became. The result was a scramble to install boilers and run them 24/7, with officials and politicians in Stormont oblivious or complicit.

A whistleblower notified Foster about abuses in 2013 and again in 2014 to no avail. The scheme continued and was extended.

The UK Treasury was assumed to be footing the bill.

The inquiry uncovered an email in which Andrew Crawford, a long-serving special adviser to Foster, shrugged off the spiralling cost. “I am a little confused over what the problem is,” he told a fellow adviser. “If we go over our 4% target all that will happen is that we will get more than our fair share of the UK pot … I would have thought that this is to Northern Ireland’s advantage.”

Some civil servants seemed equally cavalier about cash from across the sea.

“People see this as free money,” Mark Durkan, a former deputy first minister and finance minister from the Social Democratic and Labour party, told the Guardian. “It led to lazy thinking by the civil service.”

The blunders followed Foster to her later posts as finance minister and then first minister, said Durkan. “Arlene is the Forrest Gump in this; there at every occasion, but always finding a scapegoat.”

People close to DUP special advisers, it has emerged, made handsome profits. Crawford’s brother and two cousins, for instance, had 11 boilers between them. He has admitted sharing inside information with relatives.

Only when the UK Treasury made clear that Northern Ireland would in fact foot the bill for cost overruns did civil servants and politicians pull the plug in 2016 – but not before some in the DUP and Sinn Féin sought an extension for constituents late to the party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Under the scheme, one farmer heated an empty chicken shed, anticipating to make £1m over 20 years, the inquiry heard. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It was Enron reborn on Craggy Island. Estimates of the overall cost range from £60m to £800m. One farmer who heated an empty chicken shed anticipated making £1m over 20 years.

Many honest people signed up to the scheme for legitimate reasons and have ended up having their reputations dragged through the muck, said Andrew Trimble, who chairs an association of RHI participants. “They’ve been ostracised, expelled from churches. It’s completely unfair.”

The scandal has exposed a gung-ho culture of entitlement and informality among young DUP special advisers, said Dr Margaret O’Callaghan, a historian and political analyst at Queen’s University Belfast. “This is large-scale fiddling with the kitty analogous to the expenses scandal in Westminster.”

The party appeared unwilling to take significant action against one of its MPs, Ian Paisley, Jr over an unrelated expenses scandal because it felt exempted from standards in public life, said O’Callaghan. “They think they are kingmakers on Brexit. Propping up May has meant [the] DUP call all the shots here in defiance of the Good Friday agreement.”

The DUP did not respond to an interview request for this article.

In her testimony this week Foster said the late Martin McGuinness knew of a whistleblower’s warnings about cost overruns before he pulled Sinn Féin out of Stormont and collapsing devolution last year. The party has vehemently defended the former deputy first minister’s integrity.

It also emerged this week that a Sinn Féin Stormont assembly member, Mairtin Ó Muilleoir, claimed credit in February 2016 for delaying the scheme’s shutdown. Sinn Féin would do its “utmost to have as many projects as possible green-lighted”, he told an applicant in an email.

The former Belfast lord mayor denied any equivalence with the DUP behaviour. “We call that nonsense. RHI was birthed, midwived, fostered and developed by the DUP,” he said.

• This article was amended on 5 October 2018. We misquoted Dr Margaret O’Callaghan as saying that “the party appeared unwilling to take significant action against Foster and against one of its MPs, Ian Paisley, Jr…” The reference to Foster has been removed.