PoliticalOD 17: Groundhog Days

 

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 the Union with ambivalence.

That ambivalence is playing out in the ongoing shambles surrounding an Irish Sea border. While nationalists and the Alliance Party continue to demand that the Northern Ireland protocol is enforced with 'rigour', some of the business groups that favoured special status for this region are starting to face up to the consequences of separating our economy from the rest of the UK.

We still frequently hear these campaigners articulating the idea that Theresa May's 'backstop' offered the best of boths worlds, while Johnson's 'frontstop' created the difficulties. This notion completely misunderstands the backstop, which was intended to keep the whole UK aligned with the EU, but included provisions for an even deeper divide, had the government subsequently decided to move away from the customs union and single market. I wrote in detail about the two deals and their respective merits, at TheArticle.

Meanwhile, the executive is attempting to commit economic harakiri by introducing the most stringent anti-Covid regulations on these islands, without a coherent plan for what happens next or a proper interrogation of the figures. Plus ca change?

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