Ben Lowry: The RHI scandal has been a reflection of the struggle to keep good people in politics

The report that was produced yesterday will take a time to absorb and this newspaper will continue to examine its findings in coming weeks.

In the meantime I would recommend that anyone who wants to understand the scandal read my colleague Sam McBride’s best selling book on it, Burned.

A charitable thing that can be said about the ‘Cash for Ash’ episode is that running a highly organised society is extraordinarily complex.

It is all the more so when key decisions are nominally taken by politicians, a category of people whom much of society mistrust, and when that same public does not want to get involved in politics itself, leaving us with a small pool of people who do.

Is anyone surprised that the lawyers and experts and adjudicators in the RHI inquiry seemed more impressive than some of the political witnesses? In the legal world it is a struggle to get leading lawyers to accept high court judge positions paying almost £200,000 a year with gold plated pensions (never listen to the hyped complaints about reform of public sector pensions — they are still lavishly generous).

What chance have we got of getting people of such calibre to accept an MLA salary of £49,000 a year, a role in which they will at times be the target of public contempt. They will also be worried about permanent job insecurity, made worse by the double jobbing ban, which means that if they lose their seat as an MP or MLA they will not even have a foot in politics as a councillor, because they will already have had to give up such a post.

This might all sound peripheral to RHI but it isn’t. It is central to it. It is the way that we have let societies be organised around the western world.

The brightest and best go into professions where they expect (and will tolerate) nothing less than complete job security and massive salaries.

There are of course exceptions — talented people who are not motivated by money and go into the churches, academia, etc. And politics has always had gifted people such as David Trimble, Stephen Farry or Jim Allister but there is an overall dearth of talent that impacts on the quality of people who control rich societies.

Think of the United States, the wealthiest nation in human history. It has 300 million people, so that even if only 1% of the population wanted to go into politics and then you narrowed that group down to its most talented 1% (ie 1% of 1%), that would still be a pool of 30,000 outstanding candidates for high political office.

Yet in 2016 there were few impressive figures among more than dozen contenders for the Republican Party nomination for president (which Donald Trump won). In the UK, Boris Johnson’s cabinet has fewer top notch people than Margaret Thatcher’s did in the 1970s and 80s.

If Washington and London struggle to get excellent political governors, what hope has Northern Ireland, a society of only 1.8 million people, which is politically divided into multiple parties and where the tribal divide lends added stigma to divulging your views?

Yet when people such as me have suggested that perhaps we need to edge up salaries for politicians, the very notion is typically dismissed.

Consequently some politicians who become ministers lack confidence (and how could they otherwise when at Stormont they can be ministers in their 20s, far earlier than people reach the top of professions?). If they do lack confidence, or ability, they will be heavily steered by their officials, advisors or civil servants.

But RHI showed that they too can be unimpressive.

Some advisors are brilliant but most are not, and sometimes they are slavish and ambitious operatives of their political party, who think in terms of its (and their) advance.

As for the civil servants, the report acknowledges an understandable reluctance to challenge the DUP and Sinn Fein method of governance when devolution was still in its relative infancy, and fragile.

Yet many bureaucracies include people who are bad at their job but who get promoted just because they have been there a long time, or because they have personalities that their superiors find agreeable.

This is not restricted to the public sector, where job performance management seems to have limited impact (apparent in the low numbers of people who are made redundant on those grounds) but evident in large and badly run businesses too.

In RHI some civil servants implicated in the mismanagement were given promotions and bonuses.

But the political context of the scandal is a culture of dysfunctionality at Stormont that the report has laid bare.

Mandatory coalition forces opposites to share power, as was starkly apparent yesterday when Michelle O’Neill simply abandoned collective responsibility and did a solo u-turn on the previous day’s cross party agreement on keeping schools open amid the coronavirus.

Even at Westminster there is a culture of cowardice among elected representatives to take hard decisions, such as reforming the aforementioned public sector pensions (if the average private wage worker knew the extent to which their taxes prop up public sector pensions to a level they will never enjoy, there would be riots).

Stormont is even more timid. It is almost 20 years since the late Maurice Hayes was the first in a series of experts to recommend reform of NHS provision in Northern Ireland, to make it more efficient, yet still nothing has been done.

Such political cowardice, while common in other countries, is worsened in Northern Ireland by the vast funding we get from London.

RHI illustrated a take-take-take approach to the Treasury, shared by unionists (who should fear Great Britain thinking Northern Ireland is only in the Union for the money).

It is almost forgotten that RHI was intended to be a scheme to help protect the environment, yet ended up being one in which such considerations were treated with contempt.

People who had no interest in the ‘green’ issues, in some cases might even have been contemptuous of it, pushed the lucrative scheme (in much the same way that some people who have shown little interest in carbon emissions have then pushed the lucrative proliferation of windmills across Northern Ireland).

I remember the lack of sympathy within sections of the DUP for Jim Wells MLA when in 2007 he quit in frustration as their spokesperson for environmental matters.

A letter writer opposite talks about the way Northern Ireland’s slack planning has allowed bungalows to be built everywhere for financial gain, damaging our beautiful countryside. When politicians such as Mr Wells wanted limits on such homes, they faced cross-party opposition.

Now there is little point in, for example, making the Mournes a national park because there is no political will for such a move and the area has already been so widely developed.

RHI did not happen in a vacuum but reflected some truths about our political and administrative culture.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor