It was a full five months into the RHI Inquiry's public hearings that we finally heard from Arlene Foster and her former adviser Dr Andrew Crawford.

Some of the evidence from them over the past two weeks has been significant and has shone a bright light on the inner workings of government.

Image source, AFP

Click here to read analysis from BBC News NI politics reporter Jayne McCormack on what we've heard.

That's all from Stormont for a couple of weeks - we'll be back when the inquiry returns on 8 May.

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DUP leader Arlene Foster defended the continued employment of her former ministerial adviser in a part-time role with her party.

Dr Andrew Crawford (below) twice sent confidential government documents relating to RHI to a cousin before they had been made public.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

But he is working for the DUP again, carrying out Brexit research for the party's MEP Diane Dodds.

Mrs Foster said Dr Crawford's conduct had been "inappropriate and disappointing" but she felt he had "learnt his lesson".

Last week, in response to one of the first question put to her at the inquiry, Mrs Foster said she didn't bear any personal responsibility for the RHI catastrophe.

But she told the Northern Ireland Assembly in December 2016 that she accepted "responsibility for the work" of DETI when she was the department's minister.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Asked about that now, she says it's "very difficult to see how one could be held responsible for things that weren't being communicated" to her.

She says that the assembly was the place where she should've been held accountable about the department's activity but given that it collapsed in January last year it's now for the inquiry to do that.

in her final remark, she also suggests that people outside the inquiry chamber have made "judgements on limited information on what went on".

Civil servants who set up and ran the RHI scheme "worked long hours" and that gave Mrs Foster cause for concern, she says.

The inquiry has heard time and time again from civil servants - both mid-ranking and senior - that DETI's energy division was stretched in terms of staffing.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

In her written statement, she identified the "lack of capacity" in the department's energy division as a flaw and she says that wasn't just in terms of numbers of staff but also energy specialism and expertise.

Asked if she did enough to address that, she says she raised it with DETI's permanent secretary and the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and she's not sure what else she could've done.

In October 2014, Mrs Foster visited businessman Dr John Gilliland's (below) farm at Brook Hall in Londonderry.

At a presentation at one of the agriculture department's stakeholder events a couple of months after Mrs Foster's visit he discussed a biomass boiler and wood chip dryer installed through the RHI scheme at a cost of £36,000 and explained that it had collected £35,000 in subsidies in its firsts year of operation.

Mr Scoffield says it appears that Dr Gilliland was aware how the scheme could be operated "to best financial advantage" and how the rewards were potentially "extremely beneficial".

"There was no discussion about any of this, certainly not," says Mrs Foster and if there had been "I would have taken action".

One of the first companies to notice how lucrative the RHI scheme could be was Sheridan and Hood, which was owned by Brian Hood (below), who gave evidence to the inquiry in February.

He even suggested to Stormont's justice department that if it used the RHI scheme as part of a major emergency service college it was planning it could pocket just under £900,000 over 20 years.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

His company was the first to be accredited on the scheme and he even received a certificate for that from Mrs Foster, external in March 2013.

The DUP leader can't remember meeting him.

Beneficiaries of the RHI scheme are wide and varied and across all communities" and are "certainly not just restricted" to DUP supporters, says Mrs Foster.

She makes the comment in response to Mr Scoffield's suggests that "cynical" people would say that if the scheme had been benefitting DUP voters that would be a reason for her "not to blow the whistle".

Image source, PA

The DUP leader says she doesn't accept that assertion.

She also says she isn't aware of any senor figures in the DUP who knew the scheme was being abused.

Many people may find it "impossible to believe" that if Mrs Foster had her "ear to the ground" she "wouldn't have picked up" that the RHI scheme was "more or less too good to be true", suggests Mr Scoffield.

"I can assure you, Mr Scoffield, that I most certainly didn't pick up something of that nature," she responds.

Image source, Getty Images

"Why in heaven's name would want to be associated with a scheme that was overcompensating?

She says the scheme is a "huge regret for me in my political life".

Mrs Foster tells the inquiry that she didn't have any inkling about how financially attractive the RHI scheme was.

Mr Scoffield puts it to her that the DUP has a "large support base within the farming community" and she agrees.

Image source, Reuters

He also suggests her party has "close connections" with the Ulster Farmers' Union and she says it works with the organisation and tries to "advocate on their behalf".

She also agrees that her ministerial adviser would have had close contact with the major poultry producer Moy Park - the inquiry's heard that many of its farmers are beneficiaries on the scheme.

In her witness statement, Mrs Foster says that the agricultural sector was "attracted to" the RHI scheme.

Pressed on how she knew that, the DUP leader says she became aware that Stormont's agriculture department was holding events at which the scheme was being promoted but she can't remember how or when that was drawn to her attention.

At those events, some biomass boilers firms were using the now now infamous "cash-for-ash" and "burn-to-earn" leaflets about the scheme to promote their products.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Mrs Foster can say "hand-on-heart that no-one came" into her constituency office in the rural Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency about the scheme.

Sir Patrick says he finds it "difficult almost to the extent of being impossible to understand" why there was no co-operation between DETI and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Surely, he says, that would have been useful for DETI to have been kept informed about how the scheme was operating on the ground in the agriculture industry.

DECC's correspondence to DETI showed that it was "continually reassessing and amending its budget management policy and procedures" for the Great Britain RHI scheme, says Mr Scoffield.

Image source, Getty Images

Letters in November 2013, March, June and October 2014 all made mention of updates to its cost control plans - the inquiry barrister says its clear that DECC was "sharing their knowledge" with DETI.

Mrs Foster says she regrets that the importance of the messages weren't flagged up to her by officials because "the level of detail in these letters I think would've struck me if I'd read them in any detail".

The UK government department running the Great Britain RHI scheme was the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

Its then minister Greg Barker - now Lord Barker (below) - sent regular updates to DETI about developments but he didn't always get a reply.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

When letters were received by Mrs Foster's private office they would be passed down to DETI's energy division to assess the need for a reply.

Mr Scoffield refers to a letter of of May 2013 in which Mr Barker refers to a review of the subsidies on offer in the GB scheme and actions being taken to deploy cost controls.

DETI's energy division decided that no reply was required and Mr Scoffield says there's no indication that the letter was returned to Mrs Foster - she says she doesn't remember seeing it.

The system by which the RHI scheme was funded was unusual and pretty much all of the civil servants who have appeared before the inquiry have said they had never encountered it before.

In simplest terms, the money would come from the Treasury but it would not cover any overspends.

Image source, Getty Images

If the scheme went over-budget, DETI would have to cover that cost and there would effectively be a penalty imposed of about 5% in the case of an overspend.

Asked if she ever considered where money to cover overspendings would come from, Mrs Foster says she didn't because she hadn't been alerted to any concerns that the budget would be breached when she was DETI minister.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Mrs Foster's final evidence session is under way - it'll last until 15:45 and we'll keep you across the details.

First topic on the agenda is the funding arrangements for the RHI scheme.

That was another busy evidence session with Mrs Foster and we'll be back after the lunch break for more - join us from 14:00.

Linked to Ms O'Hagan's concerns, Green Party MLA Steven Agnew put a written assembly question to the then enterprise minister asking whether subsidies for biomass disincentivised energy efficiency

Mrs Foster says that didn't raise any concerns with her.

She says she's had some strange questions during her time as a Stormont minister and that was by no means "the maddest question that I've been asked".

Image source, Getty Images

Turns out that her DUP colleague Jim Shannon can lay claim to that title, as Mrs Foster explains that she was environment minister he asked how many foxes there were in Northern Ireland, external in 2007.

The answer? Well, the DoE didn't keep figures, unfortunately.

It was "not acceptable" for the DUP to release the RHI scheme whistleblower's emails when the scandal erupted in December 2016, says Mrs Foster.

"As party leader I am sorry that Ms O'Hagan got caught up in all of this."

Image source, RHI Inquiry

She says that the party had been told by Stormont's economy department that Ms O'Hagan was "content for the email to go out" into the public domain.

"Clearly that's not what the case was."

Mrs O'Hagan was "caught in the political crossfire" at the time of the RHI scandal publicly erupting in December 2016, accepts Mrs Foster.

The DUP's deputy leader Nigel Dodds published one of Ms O'Hagan's emails (below) that month, saying that it "nails the myth" that Mrs Foster "failed to follow up" on concerns that were raised to her.

He said the email "raised no concerns" about the scheme and he claimed it was the "only contact with the minister" - that was, of course, incorrect and Mrs Foster accepts that now.

Sir Patrick suggests that one possibility for releasing Ms O'Hagan's email is that "she was fed to the wolves".

Ms O'Hagan told the inquiry in February that how her correspondence was handled at the time was a "complete disgrace".

The DUP leader says there was a "storm" about the scandal going on at the time and there was "a lot of firefighting" to "deal with the allegations that were being made".

Mrs Foster accepts that her actions might have been different if she'd noticed the importance of what was being said in Ms O'Hagan's email.

"If you put the two emails beside each other, as I have done on many occasions since, there's very little difference between the two emails," she says.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Mr Scoffield asks her if this is another occasion when she thinks "there is something more that I could and should have done". and she says that is with the benefit of hindsight.

"We can always look for the pursuit of perfection but I was dealing with quite a busy time and I thought that the matter was being dealt with," she adds.

None of us are perfect and I never claimed to be so."

Mrs Foster says she doesn't believe that the RHI scheme whistleblower (below) was believed when she took her concerns to DETI officials.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

"As a result of that her meeting was not taken as seriously as it should have been," she adds.

She says civil servants "should have investigated whether the claims made by Ms O'Hagan could in fact be the truth" and the minister and her adviser should've been "alerted to that".