Sir Patrick Coghlin was paid £648k to chair RHI Inquiry

Figures released to this newspaper by Stormont’s Department of Finance show that the retired Court of Appeal judge, led the inquiry during its three-year duration, was paid £1,005 a day, coming to a total of £648,626 for 645 days of work.

Sir Patrick’s daily rate is above the upper per diem rate for a Court of Appeal judge, which is £827 a day.

However, the Department of Finance – which released the figures without attempting to hide them, as is often the case with government departments – said that his pay “was based upon the rate for a Lord Justice of Appeal uplifted to cover Employers National Insurance”.

Sir Patrick’s panel member, retired senior Whitehall civil servant Dame Una O’Brien, was paid a total of £327,823 at a rate of £850 a day.

The inquiry’s technical assessor, energy expert Dr Keith MacLean, was paid £397,531 at a rate of £1,000 a day, a rate which the department said was set by the RHI Inquiry to reflect his expertise and experience.

However, every one of the inquiry’s three barristers – who conducted most of the public questioning of witnesses – were paid at a higher daily rate than the inquiry chairman.

Senior counsel David Scoffield QC, one of Northern Ireland’s top barristers, was paid a total of £656,315 at a rate of £220 an hour.

Junior counsel Danal Lunny was paid £626,830 at a rate of £150 an hour.

However, fellow junior counsel Joseph Aiken surpassed everyone else at the inquiry with his total earnings, being paid £780,600.

That figure was billed at the same hourly rate as Mr Lunny, meaning that Mr Aiken claimed for 5,204 hours of work – the equivalent of 650 eight-hour days.

Both Mr Lunny and Mr Aiken were promoted to become QCs earlier this year.

The total cost of the inquiry to the public purse was at least £14 million, but the full cost will never be calculable because no record was kept by Stormont departments of the vast amount of time taken by civil servants to search for, collate and explain evidence to the inquiry.

A significant percentage of the total expenditure on the inquiry went to lawyers representing witnesses who were linked to departments – from high profile former ministers such as Arlene Foster and Jonathan Bell to junior civil servants.

Details of how much each of those lawyers were paid has not yet been released by Stormont.

The inquiry report concluded that there had been no corruption in how RHI was handled, but the inquiry’s investigative process unearthed a slew of extraordinary revelations about how the DUP, Sinn Féin and civil servants really operated behind the scenes.

Sir Patrick stressed at the outset of the inquiry that although its terms were open-ended and there was no budget set for the task which he had been given by Sinn Féin Finance Minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir that he was mindful that the inquiry was being paid for by taxpayers.

Speaking at a preliminary hearing in June 2017, some six months after his appointment, the retired judge said: “While it is vital that the inquiry is comprehensive, and leaves no stone unturned, nonetheless is also very important that the Inquiry remains within reasonable and proportionate bounds, particularly in terms of time and cost.”

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Sir Patrick Coghlin was paid £648k to chair RHI Inquiry – but junior barrister got far more