This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

The official report into Northern Ireland’s cash-for-ash scandal has issued a blistering indictment of incompetence by the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), special advisers and civil servants at Stormont.

The findings of the public inquiry, published on Friday, laid bare a “multiplicity of errors and omissions” behind a bungled green energy scheme that shattered confidence in politicians and fuelled doubts about the region’s ability to rule itself.

Q&A What is Northern Ireland's 'Cash-for-ash' scandal? Show Hide The renewable heat initiative (RSI) started in 2012 as a well-intentioned UK-wide effort to reduce carbon emissions by switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources. The scheme was overseen by Northern Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, which was then run by Arlene Foster, who is currently the leader of the DUP. It made the subsidy more valuable than the cost of wood pellets used to heat boilers and did not cap the total subsidy. Word spread that 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 either oblivious or complicit. A whistleblower notified Foster about abuses in 2013 and again in 2014 to no avail. The scheme continued and was extended, with the UK Treasury assumed to be footing the bill. People close to DUP special advisers, it emerged, made handsome profits. Andrew Crawford, a long-serving special adviser to Foster, has admitted sharing inside information with relatives. His brother and two cousins, for instance, had 11 boilers between them. One farmer who heated an empty chicken shed anticipated making £1m over 20 years. Only in 2016, 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. Estimates of the overall cost range from £60m to £800m.

Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigned in protest over the DUP's involvement in the scheme in January 2017, which led to a snap election. On 19 January 2017, Finance Minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir established a public inquiry into the RHI scheme. After considerable delay this was due to report in March 2020. Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent

Sir Patrick Coghlin, the inquiry chairman, faulted Arlene Foster, the first minister and DUP leader who presided over the scheme, for not reading her own department’s legislation.

“To do so is a core part of a minister’s job,” he said, and criticised the behaviour of some ministers and special advisers as “wholly inappropriate”.

However,Coghlin absolved participants of corruption, a crucial finding that will limit the political fallout from the renewable heat initiative (RHI).

“Corrupt or malicious activity on the part of officials, ministers or special advisers was not the cause of what went wrong with the NI RHI scheme … rather, the vast majority of what went wrong was due to an accumulation of errors and omissions over time and a failure of attention, on the part of all those involved in their differing roles, to identify the existence, significance or implications of those errors and omissions.”

He added: “There is no guarantee that the weaknesses shown in governance, staffing and leadership revealed by the inquiry’s investigation of the NI RHI scheme could not combine again to undermine some future initiative.”

Coghlin delivered his long-awaited verdict to a packed, hushed audience at Stormont, the estate outside Belfast that hosts Northern Ireland’s assembly and executive.

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

But Northern Ireland lifted cost controls, turning wood pellet boilers into a de facto licence to print money – hundreds of millions of pounds over 20 years, according to some early estimates – in the mistaken belief British taxpayers would pick up the tab.

“Responsibility for what went wrong lay not just with one individual or group, but with a broad range of persons and organisations involved, across a variety of areas relating to the design, approval, management and administration of the RHI scheme throughout its life,” said the report.

“Across those different areas, there was a multiplicity of errors and omissions. There were repeated missed opportunities to identify and correct, or seek to have others correct, the flaws in the scheme.

The report comprises three volumes of 656 pages, with 319 findings and 44 recommendations.

The scandal’s origins lie in a 2012 decision by Northern Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (since renamed the Department for the Economy), then run by Foster, to make the subsidy more valuable than the cost of wood pellets used to heat boilers. Nor did it cap the total subsidy.

Word spread that 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.

The debacle prompted Sinn Féin to pull the plug on its power-sharing administration with the DUP, creating a damaging three-year political vacuum that ended in January when political parties agreed to restore the assembly and executive.

Foster made no immediate response. Speaking before publication, she said the people of Northern Ireland deserved evidence-based answers over what happened.

“We will all get clarity today and I think that is very good,” she said.