DUP and Sinn Fein to hold ‘clear the air’ meeting over ‘cash for ash’

Sinn Féin finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir and DUP economy minister Simon Hamilton are to hold a "clear the air" meeting on Thursday afternoon to try to address the "cash for ash" renewable heat system fiasco.

Mr Ó Muilleoir confirmed that the meeting was taking place after Mr Hamilton said he plans to introduce emergency legislation that he claims would reduce the projected overspend of more than £400 million (€460m) in the renewable energy scheme to “effectively zero”.

Mr Hamilton is planning to bring his proposals to the Northern Executive shortly . He was also hoping to have the Assembly returned early from its Christmas recess next week to discuss his plans.

Mr Ó Muilleoir’s initial response was to express annoyance that as finance minister he had not first contacted him before announcing his plan for emergency legislation through the media on Wednesday evening. In a tweet on Thursday however Mr Ó Muilleoir said he and Mr Hamilton would have a “clear the air” meeting on the issue .

Foster ‘seriously misjudged the public anger’, says former Assembly colleague

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Despite the attempts to resolve the renewable heat scheme (RHI) problems Sinn Féin has not let up on its demands that DUP leader Arlene Foster stand aside pending an investigation into the scheme.

The Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams again called on her to step aside. "Neither the public nor Sinn Féin can continue to countenance the manner in which the DUP conduct business within the Executive and the Assembly," he wrote in his weekly column in the Andersonstown News.

"Can this be sorted out? Of course it can. That would require Arlene Foster to do what Peter Robinson did. She should step aside to facilitate an independent process which gets to the facts of the RHI scandal effectively and quickly. This is a straight forward case. The First Minister has been in office for a relatively short time. If she wants to continue in that office she needs to do the right thing," he said.

Amid continuing political recrimination over the scheme, a former DUP Assembly member David McIlveen has broken ranks to criticise Ms Foster. He described the crisis over the scheme as an “omnishambles” and said Ms Foster had “seriously misjudged the public anger” over RHI.

Most seriously he queried whether Ms Foster had become an “electoral liability” for the DUP and expressed doubt she would remain as party leader in the long term.

“Whilst the view in public is that ‘Arlene’s team’ are as loyal and happy as ever, the reality in private is something very different,’ ” he wrote in Thursday’s News Letter.

“Does a party obsessed with winning elections want to move forward with a leader who appears incapable of facing up to their mistakes, and attacks on a personal level their critics even if they are members of their own party?” he said.

“Humility in unionism sadly seems to be in short supply at the moment and it is largely for this reason that the drama of the RHI scheme has been allowed to become a crisis,” said Mr McIlveen.

The DUP East Antrim MP rejected the criticism and characterised Mr McIlveen's comments as resentment at losing his North Antrim seat in last year's Assembly elections.

“I think you have got to remember David probably has some motivation here because he is still feeling sore after having lost the election,” he said.

Both Mr Wilson and former DUP Minister Edwin Poots MLA repeated that Ms Foster would not be standing down at the insistence of Sinn Fein.

Ms Foster oversaw the inception of the RHI scheme during her time as economy minister.The state-funded RHI was supposed to offer a proportion of the cost businesses had to pay to run eco-friendly boilers, but the subsidy tariffs were set too high, and without a cap, so it ended up paying out significantly more than the price of fuel.

This enabled applicants to “burn to earn” — getting free heat and making a profit as they did it. Claims of widespread abuse include a farmer allegedly set to pocket around £1 million in the next two decades for heating an empty shed.