Burned

by Sam McBride

  Unused to facing such organised opposition, the DUP and Sinn Féin realised that they would have to prove that they could govern coherently – and set about doing so with gusto.

  The referendum vote for Brexit in June strained the Executive, whose parties were on opposite sides of the argument. But even that was taken in the stride of the new administration. It was, after all, not unusual for there to be such fundamental disagreements among Stormont’s governing parties – the DUP and Sinn Féin did not even agree on whether Northern Ireland should exist.

  In September, the two parties appointed their first ever joint spokesman for what would be a joint DUP–Sinn Féin message. To do so, they secretly changed the law, using prerogative powers which they exercised on behalf of the Queen in order to ensure that they could appoint leading journalist David Gordon as their spin doctor without advertising the £75,400-a-year post.

  Gordon drafted the first joint Foster–McGuinness newspaper article which was published just two weeks before the RHI scandal broke. In words which would soon prove to be worthless, the ministers said: ‘Imagine if we had followed the example of others and decided the challenges of government were just too daunting. That would have opened the door to years of direct rule – Conservative ministers ruling over us without a mandate. Rest assured, this Executive is not going to abandon you to that. We are in this for the long haul.’

  Therefore, when the RHI storm came in December there was an expectation that these two pragmatic parties had invested so much in their relationship that they would ensure it was not destroyed after just a few months.

  Within days of Spotlight, Sinn Féin’s left-wing rival People Before Profit was organising ‘Foster must go’ street protests. It was obvious that Sinn Féin was not. People Before Profit’s Foyle MLA, the erudite socialist veteran Eamonn McCann, blasted Sinn Féin’s inaction: ‘The DUP is up to its oxters in ordure. Sinn Féin holds its nose and props them up … it’s up to the rest of us.’

  On Wednesday, 14 December – just over a week after Spotlight and the day on which Jonathan Bell was recording his explosive TV interview – the Executive met. One source present at the meeting recalled it as ‘positive’, with a ‘collective spirit’ and ‘no ill will at all – far from it’. Another source who was there said that the clear view was that ‘all was well’ and there was ‘a route map’ to getting out of the crisis.

  After the Executive met, there was a smaller gathering of Foster, Martin McGuinness and some of their key advisers. At that meeting they discussed setting up a limited inquiry into the scandal, with a view that this would put a lid on the story. A public inquiry wasn’t on the menu. They agreed to ask David Sterling – one of those implicated in RHI and who therefore had a conflict of interest – to lead the search for an independent investigator.

  Those events contradict later unionist fears that Sinn Féin always wanted to pull down Stormont and did so at the first opportunity. But they also undermine Sinn Féin’s later claims of taking a principled stand when it was made aware of RHI. Both parties’ instinctive reaction was to keep Stormont together, even if that was at the expense of getting to the truth.

  Bell’s interview, in which he alleged shady behaviour at the heart of Stormont, would blow that strategy apart. His demand for a public inquiry led by a judge instantly showed up Sinn Féin’s desire for a tamer probe.

  By Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Bell’s interview, Sinn Féin had shifted its position. The seriously ill McGuinness, who was in London for medical tests, phoned Foster to tell her that she should step aside as First Minister. Foster, a determined character who detested retreat, immediately refused. Within half an hour, a Sinn Féin press release revealed the phone call. It had taken just ten days for their apparently firm partnership to fall apart.

  But even now, McGuinness was only calling for something far short of a public inquiry. Foster’s stepping aside was envisaged as a few weeks while an ‘initial assessment’ was carried out. There was precedent for such a move. Peter Robinson had cannily stepped aside as First Minister in 2010 amid a scandal about his MP wife Iris’s affair and financial dealings with property developers. Doing so took the heat out of the crisis and, after a lawyer provided legal advice which Mr Robinson said cleared him but which has never been published, he returned to office. But with McGuinness having made the call public it was now difficult for Foster to back down.

  Nevertheless, Sinn Féin was not yet ready to topple Stormont. Three days later, the Assembly met to hear a personal statement from Foster about RHI and then to debate an SDLP motion of no confidence in her. The sitting immediately descended into farce. The DUP Speaker of the Assembly, Robin Newton, had already seen his authority diminished over allegations separate to RHI. Before Foster even got to her feet, the hapless Newton faced repeated points of order from across the chamber, challenging him over why Foster was being allowed to speak as First Minister.

  McGuinness had initially consented to Foster’s statement as First Minister, something only possible in her joint office if McGuinness agreed. But over the weekend he had withdrawn that consent after a meeting of Sinn Féin’s leadership, including leader Gerry Adams, in his home city of Londonderry – a further indication of his weakened physical state.

  Newton allowed the statement to continue regardless. Amid chaotic scenes in which the veteran SDLP MLA Alex Attwood was almost shouting at the Speaker – who lacked the authority to expel him from the chamber – Newton lost control and had to suspend the sitting. Eventually, opposition MLAs walked out, leaving Foster to address empty benches.

  Her speech had largely been written by Richard Bullick. Over the weekend, he had been in contact with McCormick to discuss what Foster could say. The DUP wanted to put the maximum distance between itself and the scandal. But that was undermined by McCormick telling Bullick that Crawford had been ‘decisive’ in delaying cost controls.

  In the early hours of 19 December, Bullick was still corresponding with McCormick who advised him that his warnings ‘should be a show-stopper’ about what it was then proposed for Foster to say because ‘the investigation will find too much that will [show] that JB [Jonathan Bell] had a point re last summer’.

  Bullick defended what he had written but McCormick replied: ‘The draft is all true, but misses the fact that AC’s [Crawford’s] influence was decisive. I fear that saying “Jonathan Bell should have stood up to him” won’t be enough. It’s not what it is. It’s what it looks like.’

  To the keen observer, Foster’s speech ultimately alluded to some of what McCormick had told Bullick – but did not make it explicit. Bullick and Foster defended that opacity, saying that they had been given no evidence that Crawford had delayed the changes in 2015.

  But Foster knew much more than she was letting on in public. The previous week, former DUP spad Tim Cairns had phoned Bullick, who was in Foster’s Stormont Castle office, to say that he thought the party’s strategy was misguided. Foster and Timothy Johnston were present so Bullick put Cairns onto speakerphone. During a lengthy call, Cairns said that he was clear that he had acted to delay cost controls after liaising with Crawford at Johnston’s request.

  Cairns said that at the point he mentioned Johnston the senior spad ‘clearly became uncomfortable and the conversation was quickly brought to an end’. That night Bullick phoned him to say that Johnston ‘was uncomfortable with my discussion of the June 2015 meeting, as up until that point he was adamant that he had played no role in RHI. However, my revelation had undermined his position’.

  Johnston rejected that claim. Cairns said: ‘I do not believe that Mrs Foster, either in her Nolan interview … or in her statement, fully expressed the view I had stated to her in the speaker phone call.’

  Initially, Foster told the inquiry that she had no memory of the call. Then, after Cairns’s evidence, her memory improved and she firmly rejected key elements of his story. She said that Cairns’s comment about Johnston ‘was not n
ews to me, so it wasn’t anything noteworthy’ because she had been aware that Johnston had asked Cairns to seek assistance from Crawford in summer 2015 – but not to delay cost controls.

  On paper, the Assembly speech which Bullick had written had a modicum of humility, including the line that RHI was ‘the deepest political regret of my time in this house’. But that was lost amid Foster’s defiant delivery and lengthy sections in which she attacked opponents. She denounced ‘trial by television’ and described the attempt to remove her as a ‘coup d’état more worthy of a Carry On Film’.

  But amid the public theatre in the Assembly chamber, Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd criticised the SDLP no-confidence motion as ‘fatally flawed and premature’ and his party did not vote for it – a symbolic decision because the DUP had already deployed its veto to ensure that the motion would not pass.

  Then, days before Christmas, the DUP Communities Minister Paul Givan axed a £55,000 bursary scheme, Líofa, which provided small grants for those from disadvantaged communities who wanted to learn the Irish language. A message conveying the news said it was due to ‘efficiency savings’ and added: ‘Happy Christmas and happy new year’.

  In Stormont terms, it was an inconsequential sum of money and the DUP’s lack of enthusiasm for the Irish language was well known. But the timing and the tone of the move was disastrous. To nationalists, it seemed that the DUP – having overseen a scheme which was squandering hundreds of millions of pounds – was now seeking to cut funding largely accessed by nationalists. And it seemed to them that far from showing contrition over what had been revealed, the DUP was arrogantly flaunting its power. Givan – who after an outcry reinstated the fund, but too late to undo the political damage – insisted that the row had been unintentional rather than a cynical attempt to take the focus off RHI.

  On the day of Foster’s Assembly speech, McGuinness had insisted that Sinn Féin was not going to topple Stormont. But the backlash over that day’s events and then the Líofa decision piled pressure on a party which was not used to being out of touch with its base.

  For weeks after Spotlight, Sinn Féin had been publicly floundering over how to handle the scandal. In early December, Sinn Féin’s then deputy leader, Mary Lou McDonald, called for a ‘public inquiry as a matter of urgency’ – perhaps her instinctive reaction as an opposition politician in Dublin, without fully realising that as one of the two main ruling parties in Stormont such an inquiry could be embarrassing for Sinn Féin. Former Stormont minister Conor Murphy said a public inquiry should be one of the options considered.

  However, by late December Sinn Féin had consciously taken a public inquiry off the table. While it was prepared to look tough – by calling for Foster to quit, a symbolic gesture which would humble her but not get to the truth – it was unwilling to actually be tough by doing everything necessary to uncover the heart of the scandal. A party spokesman said it believed that holding those responsible to account could ‘be best achieved by an independent, time-framed, robust and transparent investigation undertaken by an independent judicial figure from outside this jurisdiction … it is Sinn Féin’s view that a statutory public inquiry could drag on for years at a significant cost to the tax payers and adding to the cost of this scandal’.

  It was precisely because a public inquiry would rigorously drill into what had happened that it would be expensive and time-consuming. The reverse was true of what Sinn Féin was proposing. An investigation done on the cheap, at break-neck speed, without the power to compel evidence or witnesses, without the ability to take evidence on oath and probably behind closed doors would almost certainly fail to peel back the secrecy which Sinn Féin knew was at the heart of how it and the DUP ran Stormont.

  As much as Sinn Féin wanted to shore up its own credentials for keeping the DUP in check, the party was unenthusiastic about a forensic examination of how Stormont operated on its watch.

  By 2 January, Sinn Féin’s stance moved again, with party chairman Declan Kearney backing a public inquiry. Writing in the party’s newspaper, An Phoblacht, Kearney called for a ‘comprehensive, independent public inquiry’. But, after that was reported, the party claimed that it had been an error, blaming it on a ‘typo’. However, that night Kearney re-released his original article calling for a public inquiry, emailing it to the News Letter from his personal email address with the message: ‘Please share this important information widely’.

  But the following morning the hapless Sinn Féin chairman – who seemed unable to grasp the crucial difference between a public inquiry and an investigation with few powers – returned to arguing against a public inquiry. He blamed ‘some sections of the media and juvenile journalists’ for focussing on Sinn Féin’s multiple positions on the issue. As late as early January, the independent Justice Minister, Claire Sugden, echoed the DUP and Sinn Féin opposition to a full public inquiry, claiming that it could take a long time and ‘let people off the hook’.

  But by 9 January, Foster performed a U-turn, saying that she could now accept a full public inquiry under the Inquiries Act. The following day, in a final act of desperation, she called for that inquiry to be established. Foster – the person seen to be at the heart of the scandal – was now calling for the most rigorous investigation possible, while Sinn Féin continued to oppose that.

  With McGuinness now seriously ill, Adams – who had largely left Stormont and focussed on southern politics – had moved north to take a central role. On the afternoon of Saturday, 7 January, hundreds of republicans packed an upstairs room in the Felons’ Club in West Belfast. Adams addressed the crowd, spelling out what was a final warning to Foster that she must resign or Sinn Féin would take action. After a month in which Sinn Féin had been seen as weak and ineffectual, there was a strongly anti-Stormont mood in the room. A call to ‘bring the institutions down now’ was cheered by an audience which included senior Provisional IRA figures.

  Things were moving fast now. Two days later, a tiny group of journalists was called at short notice to McGuinness’s office in Parliament Buildings. There they witnessed his final major political act, his resignation as deputy First Minister, bringing to an end almost a decade of unbroken devolution – the longest period of local rule since 1972. In doing so, it was clear that this was a calculated abandonment of Sinn Féin’s strategy under the former IRA commander’s leadership and potentially the valedictory act of his political career.

  But aside from the politics, McGuinness’s gaunt appearance and audible physical weakness were in themselves shocking. By refusing to confirm that he would even be a candidate in the election which he was triggering, the public could read between the lines as to the severity of his condition.

  Once seen as an IRA hawk, he had morphed into Sinn Féin’s most accommodating senior figure since ascending to office as Stormont’s Education Minister in 1999. He was no push around, but he was a pragmatist. Since taking over as deputy First Minister with Ian Paisley in 2007, his overt strategy had been to accept all manner of perceived or actual slights by the DUP, or crises for the sake of ‘the process’. In that time, the Stormont institutions were to him sacrosanct. Now they were not.

  His dramatic departure from office gave the imprimatur of the dove in Sinn Féin leadership to a strategy which had come to view the very presence of devolved government in Northern Ireland as a bargaining chip.

  Foster’s hubris had contributed to tearing down the institutions which gave her political power. By refusing to either stand aside or even show contrition, she had fuelled public anger, putting pressure on Sinn Féin to act. Having toppled Stormont in such circumstances, it would be difficult to restore it – even when both leaderships later wanted to compromise to do so.

  ***********

  If Arlene Foster was listening to BBC Radio 4 to get away from the local news on Saturday, 14 January, she would not have liked what she heard.

  Comedians on The News Quiz were regaling an English studio audience with tales of
the RHI scandal. To guffaws, they told how ‘concerns were first raised when a farmer in County Antrim was spotted turning the door knob to his cow shed wearing oven gloves’.

  Stormont was now a national laughing stock. The scandal was everywhere – even places Northern Irish politics seldom featured. If Foster had ventured into Belfast’s stylish Cathedral Quarter, she ran the risk of stumbling across a huge – and vicious – piece of art on the wall of a car park which had appeared in reference to RHI, depicting her as a hideous green reptilian creature.

  Foster’s tactics became increasingly out of touch with the public mood. On 12 January, she suggested that there was some sort of misogynistic undertone to the media coverage because she was, in her words, a ‘strong female leader’ while DUP MLA Tom Buchanan said of the scandal: ‘Of course this has all been hyped up by the media for their own advantage’.

  But by 17 January, as the prospect of facing the electorate in a snap election loomed, there was a markedly different tone from former DUP minister Edwin Poots. The party veteran said: ‘We owe the public an apology for devising a scheme that was not fit for purpose’.

  Twelve days earlier, David McIlveen – who until recently had been a DUP MLA – came out to accuse Foster of being personally responsible for RHI turning into an ‘omnishambles’. In an unusual public assault on the leadership from a DUP member, McIlveen said that Foster had ‘seriously misjudged the public anger’ and her lack of humility had turned the RHI problem into a political crisis, leaving her ‘deeply damaged’. As Stormont lurched towards collapse, DUP big beast Sammy Wilson dismissed the criticism, claiming that Foster had handled the RHI crisis ‘magnificently’.

  CHAPTER 20

  A BROWN ENVELOPE