The worst aspect of the RHI scandal is the sense that little has been learned from it

For several years, this newspaper led the coverage of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scandal.

Day after day we covered the latest developments in the saga, often on our front page.

Our then political editor Sam McBride wrote a book that remains a definitive account of ‘cash for ash’.

We made an editorial decision to give it such prominence because it revealed things that were wrong in Northern Ireland.

Above all, it exposed a deplorable approach to public money, as if it grows on trees. As if burning resources, literally and metaphorically, has no consequences.

In fact it has profound and deeply damaging consequences, such as depriving other precious public services of funding including health.

The lack of any notion that it is appropriate to act prudently with taxpayers’ cash seemed all the more marked because that the money was seen as coming from a distant, limitless Treasury pot.

That some unionists seem to share an indifference at best towards the need to respect UK finances, and a mercenary approach to it at worst, was in one respect appalling, in another not so surprising. There has always been an Ulster nationalist strain that can seem as keen as nationalist separatists on extracting from the Union, as on contributing towards it.

At the same time, however, we are all human. Perfect governance exists nowhere. What is perhaps the most alarming feature of RHI is not so much that it happened but the sense that little of substance has changed in Northern Ireland since it.

It has just been confirmed that only one civil servant faced sanction over the scandal. We know that no-one in the political world faced formal sanction.

And our political class continue to give loud backing to multiple and endless popular demands for public funding.

Rarely, even after the RHI shambles, do you hear calls for reform of expenditure or scrutiny of it, let alone a careful explanation of why popular demands for more funds might at times be wrong.

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