Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

  Stormont's maladministration of the Northern Ireland Renewables Obligation, or NIRO, shares many features with the RHI scandal. Intended to encourage green energy production, the scheme created a perverse incentive for companies to game the system, which undermined its original purpose. There is one key difference, though, which has prevented NIRO from dominating column inches. While officials were mistaken in their belief that London would foot the bill for RHI, and the Northern Ireland budget took the hit, for NIRO, it was electricity customers in Great Britain who picked up most of the cost. The audit office has issued another damning report, but media interest has been low. Partly, this can be explained by coronavirus and Brexit dominating the political agenda. More worryingly, it reflects an attitude that we should view streams of income from the mainland as 'free money.' Then, unionists here wonder why many of our fellow Britons view Northern Ireland's place in