Renewable heating initiative

The RHI Inquiry was established to investigate the catastrophic failure of a green energy scheme launched in 2012 by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI). The scheme intended to encourage businesses to switch from fossil fuels to biomass boilers (wood pellets). However, unlike the equivalent scheme in Great Britain, the Northern Ireland version lacked a "tiering" system or a cap on payments. This meant that the more heat a participant generated, the more profit they made—creating a "perverse incentive" to heat empty sheds or keep boilers running 24/7 just to collect the subsidy.

The resulting political firestorm, led by a BBC Spotlight investigation and whistleblower claims, eventually caused the late Martin McGuinness to resign as Deputy First Minister, collapsing the power-sharing government for three years. The Inquiry, chaired by Sir Patrick Coghlin alongside Dame Una O'Brien and Dr Keith MacLean, scrutinized nearly 2 million documents and held 111 days of oral evidence.

The final three-volume report, spanning over 600 pages, was a blistering indictment of the "siloed" and "incompetent" culture at Stormont. While it famously ruled out "corruption or malicious activity" as the primary cause, it identified a devastating "accumulation of errors." It found that Arlene Foster (the Minister who launched the scheme) and her successor Jonathan Bell failed to provide adequate oversight, while civil servants were described as being "consistently under-resourced" and lacking the technical expertise to manage such a complex project.

The report also exposed a "breakdown in record-keeping," where many ministerial decisions were unrecorded to avoid Freedom of Information requests, and criticized the "inappropriate influence" of Special Advisers (Spads). The Coghlin Report concluded that RHI was a "project too far" for a small administration that tried to build a bespoke scheme it simply did not have the capacity to govern.