Sam McBride: Who can restore the broken authority of the Northern Ireland Civil Service?

In a circular process, mandarins were then chosen by the Senior Appointments Selection Committee, a body itself made up of the most senior civil servants, each of whom was selected for the committee by the Head of the Civil Service, who was in turn advised by the committee.

Jobs were neither applied for nor CVs reviewed, with the acerbic observation that “few senior officials have ever drawn up their own CVs or would know how to do so”.

Despite criticism that such a situation was untenable in a modern democracy, Plowden, an academic who was himself a former civil servant, said in his 1994 book Ministers and Mandarins that it represented “a powerful symbol of the traditional civil service” which “reflects the confidence of the civil service as a profession in its own judgements about its own future and about the national interest, and about the congruence between the two”.

As with much of life in Northern Ireland, things here have always been slightly different.

But until recently two broad elements of Plowden’s analysis of the Whitehall machine would have been largely analogous – civil servants had enormous power in choosing each other for the top posts, and that practice was a manifestation of a government bureaucracy which was firmly self-confident.

Where the confidence of Whitehall mandarins could be traced back to their predecessors who had run an empire, the confidence of Stormont’s officials had been forged in their knowledge that it was the fledgling Northern Ireland Civil Service which – as much as the politicians of the Ulster Unionist Party – had built Northern Ireland and had been critical to sustaining it throughout the Troubles.

For decades as Northern Ireland burned, as blood ran in the streets and as politicians proved incapable of finding workable governmental arrangements, it was the quiet bureaucrats of the Civil Service – as much as the military might of the Army, the resolve of the police or the restraining influence of churches – which held society together when it could have imploded into outright and uncontainable chaos.

But now, on the eve of Northern Ireland’s centenary, the institution which in the years after 1921 was central to making the new creation work when so many expected it to fail is now battered and a byword for irreformable ineptitude.

The RHI scandal brought to view long-buried incompetence, along with new problems – officials’ limp subservience to their political masters’, a culture of deliberately not taking minutes or even recording who took major decisions if they believed it might embarrass their ministers, and incompetence so extreme as to be scarcely believable.

But as the chairman of the public inquiry into that scandal, Sir Patrick Coghlin, repeatedly noted during its hearings, many of the indefensible activities revealed by cash for ash had been raised time and time again by the Audit Office and the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee, and assurances had been given by senior civil servants that “lessons will be learned”.

They weren’t, and by failing to weed out incompetence in their ranks and speak truth to power, now Stormont’s mandarins are greatly diminished – a collective punishment in which honourable and competent officials are now paying for the sins of their colleagues.

The fact that in monetary terms not a single civil servant of any rank has yet lost a penny, much less their jobs, as a result of RHI does little to convince the public that this is an institution capable of holding itself to account (a long-running process with the potential for disciplinary action continues to trundle on but will be unable to discipline any civil servant who has retired by the point at which it concludes).

All of this is relevant because on Wednesday the first interviews of those who have applied to succeed David Sterling – who was implicated in the practices revealed by the RHI scandal – as Head of the Civil Service were conducted. According to a source, five internal candidates were interviewed – Sue Gray, Peter May, Richard Pengelly, Denis McMahon, and Hugh Widdis – along with at least one external candidate.

The identity of the external candidate or candidates remains unclear. Another source said that at least one senior DUP figure had wanted Francis Campbell, an Ulster-born former British diplomat who served as Ambassador to the Vatican, to apply for the post.

The fact that Mr Campbell is a devout Catholic may make that seem surprising to those whose view of the DUP is as inflexibly sectarian party but it would in many ways be entirely logical – not only is the 50-year-old Rathfriland man a highly regarded bureaucrat and spoken of as a person of integrity, but the DUP has enthusiastically endorsed other senior appointments of Catholics, most notably that of John Larkin as Attorney General.

It is unclear whether Mr Campbell – who earlier this year went to Australia to be vice chancellor of Notre Dame University – is even interested in the post, but the appointment of a Northern Ireland Catholic as head of the Civil Service would powerfully symbolise how this society has changed since 1921.

Until now, the Head of the Civil Service has – as in Whitehall – almost invariably been an internal promotion. But it is indicative of the shrunken authority of the civil service that internal candidates now probably begin with a handicap in a situation where the central requirement for the post will be to reform the institution.

Multiple Stormont sources point to Department of Justice permanent secretary Peter May as the pre-eminent internal candidate and the closest to a continuity candidate of those most likely to get the job.

Department of Health permanent secretary Richard Pengelly is another strong and experienced candidate but the fact that he is married to not only a senior DUP figure but one who is the special adviser to the First Minister in the department he would then lead is at least a complicating factor in a post requiring not just actual neutrality but the perception of neutrality.

However, experienced Stormont figures largely agree that the clear favourite is Department of Finance permanent secretary Sue Gray.

Despite that title, she is very much an outsider, having suddenly and unexpectedly arrived months after the RHI Inquiry had begun to reveal Stormont’s entrails and to some shrewd observers it appeared that Whitehall was putting one of its most senior figures in the Stormont department which controls the budget at a time when the culture of ‘free money’ was being laid bare.

In person, she is warm and unstuffily personable, a sort of bureaucratic Mo Mowlam unwilling to accept convention if it cannot be cogently defended.

To some, she is therefore a crusading reformer belatedly bringing reluctant officials into the 21st century and they see the fact that she has unsettled some of her new colleagues as evidence of that.

But to others, her words too often don’t match her actions – especially around the secrecy which has long surrounded how she operates, a major problem if she is the person to reform a civil service whose aversion to openness was revealed by RHI to have been such a liability.

Mrs Gray has a remarkable and atypical background. During the Troubles – in what The Sunday Times later described as “an unusual ‘career break’ in the 1980s” – she came from London take over the Cove Bar on the Hilltown Road between Newry and Mayobridge, less than ten miles from the border, with her husband, Portaferry-born country and western singer Bill Conlon.

If Mrs Gray did get the job, it would represent the shattering of another glass ceiling for women and would for the first time see a triumvirate of women in Stormont Castle’s most senior roles.

However, all this speculation may be academic. Several years ago the rules on choosing the Head of the Civil Service were changed to give the First Minister and deputy First Minister full final say on who is appointed.

Therefore, with this huge choice ultimately in the hands of Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill, they will get who they want – unless, as is not infrequent, they cannot agree.

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Alistair Bushe