People must be held to account over RHI

NEXT week sees the publication of the report into the debacle that was RHI, probably the worst scandal in Northern Ireland’s devolved political history.

(For those who are not familiar with the saga, I would recommend journalist Sam McBride’s brilliant expose of the affair, Burned. It should be on the curriculum of every school in the land).

If anything proves the complete inability of those at Stormont — especially the DUP and Sinn Fein — to provide anything resembling good governance, it is, surely, this episode: a catalogue of incompetence, greed, nepotism, secrecy and an arrogant disregard for parliamentary rules and, indeed, the rule of law.

The response to the report from those MLAs who made up the Assembly, and who were responsible, will be so predictable as to be laughable.

The script could write itself: “Important that the newly reformed Assembly continues to deliver... blah, blah” (have to protect the jobs, you see); “commissioner to be appointed to scrutinise report... blah, blah”; “committee formed to make recommendations... blah, blah”; “findings taken on board... blah, blah”; “lessons learned... blah, blah”; “stakeholders and key partners moving forward... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

The sad thing is that the pathetic electorate here will probably ignore the outcome, as they meekly whinge that those in power are “all like that anyway, sure what do you do?”

One can only hope that, as a result of the report’s findings, some of those responsible will, at some stage, face the full rigour of the law.

D HALLIGAN Whitehead, Co Antrim