AT LAST the long-awaited 656 page report from Sir Patrick Coghlin on the Cash-for-Ash inquiry has arrived. 

It delivers a damning indictment of Stormont incompetence and a multiplicity of errors and omissions behind a bungled green-energy scheme.

However, rather as expected, Coghlin absolved participants of actual corruption, saying: “Corrupt or malicious activity on the part of officials, ministers or special advisers was not the cause of what went wrong with the scheme.”

This result will come as a great relief to Arlene Foster, the First Minister and DUP leader who presided over the scheme, both in its early stages as head of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment and then as first minister. 

He criticised her, among other things, for not even reading her own department’s legislation.

“To do so is a core part of a minister’s job,” he said, and he went on to criticise the behaviour of some ministers and special advisers as “wholly inappropriate.”

He also warned: “There is no guarantee that the weaknesses shown in governance, staffing and leadership revealed by the inquiry’s investigation of the Northern Ireland Renewable Heat Incentive (NI RHI) scheme could not combine again to undermine some future initiative.”

In 2017, five years into the RHI scheme, Foster was busy with even more profitable issues. 

She was haggling with prime minister Theresa May, who had lost her overall majority in a panic general election.

Foster’s DUP, with 10 Westminster MPs, was effectively able to name its price for Foster to tip the balance of power and offer the Tories a life-saver by way of a small majority. 

The price we the taxpayers had to pay to keep the Tories in power was a cool £1 billion.

Why would Foster doubt that, when push came to shove, the British taxpayers and their Tory government would not pay up just half that figure to pay for her wood-pellet fiasco?

The RHI scheme started in 2012 as a well-intentioned UK-wide effort to reduce carbon emissions by switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources such as wind, solar and waste-wood pellets.

Foster and her DUP colleagues lifted cost controls, turning wood-pellet boilers into machines to print money — hundreds of millions of pounds over 20 years. They thought British taxpayers would pick up the tab.

The scheme was set to cost the taxpayer £490 million and there were always allegations of corruption surrounding it. 

Sinn Fein’s Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, asked Foster to step aside as First minister while her involvement in the scheme was investigated, but Foster refused.

McGuinness resigned and, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the first and deputy first ministers are equal and, therefore with no deputy, Foster could not remain in her post as first minister. 

McGuinness’s resignation caused a snap election in which the DUP lost 10 seats.

The scandal’s origins lie in a 2012 decision by Foster as head of the Northern Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment — now renamed as the Department for the Economy — to make the subsidy more valuable than the cost of wood pellets used to heat boilers. Nor did she cap the total subsidy.

Word spread that boilers meant profits, and the more boilers and the more pellets you burned, the richer you became. 

The result was a scramble to instal boilers and run them 24/7. People were even building empty uninsulated sheds in order to heat them with a wood-chip boiler and thus qualify for the madcap scheme. 

Let’s take a proper look at this wood-pellet fuel business that Foster was so keen on. 

On the face of it, when it was introduced it did seem an excellent green-fuel idea. 

Waste wood could be used and timber forest trimmings would have a sustainable use.

So good was the idea that two of the coal-fired generators at the huge Drax power station in Yorkshire were converted from liquidised coal to the new wood fuel pellets. 

Because the US uses far more timber in house and other building they started to chip, first their waste wood, then their huge forests produced lots of waste too. 

In due course the US wood-chippers decided it would be profitable to ship their fuel pellets to Britain and Ireland.

As demand grew, those US pellet producers started to cut and slash virgin hardwood forests in places like Virginia, leaving bare wasteland where once there had been ancient green forest lungs cleaning our atmosphere.

Huge amounts of wildlife simply had nowhere to go. So now we have huge areas of virgin forest being destroyed and fuel chips being moved thousands of miles by dirty oil-fired ship. Doesn’t look so green now, does it? 

Foster’s debacle prompted Sinn Fein to pull the plug on its power-sharing administration with the DUP, creating a three-year political vacuum that only ended in January when both parties agreed to restore the assembly and executive.

Foster faced strong criticism after she personally campaigned to keep the scheme open, even when senior civil servants warned of the overspend. 

Even her own minister, Jonathan Bell, who ran the scheme, planned on closing it. Foster kept it going.

Coghlin’s inquiry uncovered an email in which Andrew Crawford, a long-serving special adviser to Foster, shrugged off the spiralling cost. 

“I am a little confused over what the problem is,” he told a fellow adviser. “If we go over our 4 per cent target all that will happen is that we will get more than our fair share of the UK pot … I would have thought that this is to Northern Ireland’s advantage.”

The Northern Ireland budget will lose £400m over the next 20 years as a result of the failure of the scheme. 

An independent audit investigated 300 sites and found there were issues at half of them, including 14 cases where there were suspicions of serious fraud.

Now Coghlin takes more than 650 pages and more than a quarter of a million words to clear everybody, including Foster, of fraud.   

Foster keeps her position despite heavy criticism of mistakes. Political advisers, who, like Foster, seemed equally cavalier about cash from across the sea, have even been promoted to more highly paid positions in Stormont. 

Various groups in the North of Ireland used to paint their local kerb stones red, white and blue, or green, white and gold depending on political loyalties. 

Sir Patrick Coghlin has taken up the paintbrush himself, but his brush seems to be loaded with just one colour — political whitewash.