RHI inquiry: '˜Basic' public administration failures exposed

The inquiry’s work has been stymied by multiple occasions where minutes were not taken, with the suggestion by the head of the civil service that some of that was deliberate due to a desire by the DUP and Sinn Fein to avoid potentially embarrassing records being released under freedom of information.

On Tuesday the inquiry heard from Emer Morelli, one of the most senior figures in the Department of Finance, who was pressed about delays in decisions in the period where RHI was running out of control in 2015.

At one point Dame Una O’Brien, a former head of Whitehall’s Department of Health, said the evidence again pointed to issues of “very basic public administration – that’s my point. Failure to copy a letter, failure of private office to pick up that you’d made a commitment to write. These are really basic things, aren’t they?”

Later, Dame Una again expressed concern at the lack of basic record-keeping within the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

“You had this meeting and people get up and walk away from it with separate understandings and those misunderstandings then get compounded into other misunderstandings because nobody has taken the responsibility to say ‘this is the agreed way forward between us’.

“Is there any single note of that meeting, Mr Aiken?”.

Barrister Joseph Aiken said: “No, there isn’t”.