That's all for day 114 at the RHI Inquiry - it's fair to say that the hearings finished with a whimper rather than a bang but they certainly had their moments along the way.

And Sir Patrick Coghlin's final comments hint at more drama to come when the report is published, whenever that might be.

We hope you've enjoyed our live coverage of the inquiry - a big thanks to everyone who chose to follow it, especially all of the "anoraks" who joined us day in, day out.

From the BBC News NI team at Stormont, have a great Christmas and a happy new year!

Conor Macauley
BBC News NI agriculture correspondent

It is "very likely that some individuals" may receive "quite significant criticism" in Sir Patrick Coghlin's RHI Inquiry report, he says.

He underlines his "complete determination to ensure that no-one is treated unfairly".

The writing of his report and his recommendations is the inquiry's next step and that will "obviously be a significant undertaking and a painstaking process in the light of the amount and complexity of the evidence we have received", says the chair.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

It's "simply not possible to give a date by which the inquiry report will be published" but it will be done "as soon as reasonable possible".

"I can say that will not be before Christmas," he jokes!

Sir Patrick rounds off by paying tribute to those who have worked on the inquiry and he says it's been "both a privilege and a pleasure" to chair the proceedings in the "beautiful" Parliament Buildings at Stormont.

"We'll rise now 'til later!"

We now reach the point that some thought would never happen...

"Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the oral hearings of the inquiry," says chair Sir Patrick Coghlin.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

He was "slightly amused" to hear the chair of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry announce that it is unlikely to resume until late-2019, having received 200,000 documents.

That's "less than a fifth" of what the RHI Inquiry has had to cope with - it's had more than 1.2 million papers to sift through.

The final closing remarks are offered on behalf of David Sterling (below), the boss of the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

His barrister David Reid tells the inquiry the RHI scheme "really was a project too far" for the civil service.

Officials' "failure" to "appreciate suspicions which the scheme aroused have clearly come as a surprise to many".

The inquiry has given the civil service the "opportunity to look at itself in the mirror and to ask itself hard questions about the kind of civil service it wants to be".

Image source, PA

It "must learn lessons" from the RHI debacle "in order to command the confidence of the community it serves", adds Mr Reid.

And there can be "no margin for complacency" in the change and improvement required within the civil service to make sure that another disaster like the RHI does not happen again, he says.

Inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin says the remarks give a "degree of reassurance" to the panel.

The inquiry has received a written closing submission from Mr Sterling - you can find it on the inquiry's website, external.

Summing up, Jeremy Johnson maintains that criticism of the civil servants he represents should be limited by a recognition "of the truly impossible position into which they were placed" in handling the RHI scheme.

He says the cash-for-ash failure was ultimately caused by "a blinkered and misconceived decision to commit to a deeply-flawed scheme without appropriate planning and resourcing".

Image source, RHI Inquiry

That was followed by "an almost unbelievable series of compound errors" by officials, politicians and political advisers "at every conceivable level".

Mr Johnson says his clients and their families did not seek to profit from the scheme: "They are not corrupt and they are not dishonest."

There was a "failure properly to consider whether there were adequate resources to deliver" the RHI scheme "safely", says Jeremy Johnson.

The limited staffing level dedicated to the setting-up and running of the RHI has been one of the key and recurring themes at the inquiry.

The barrister says the workload was "too much" for the three officials who were most directly involved in the scheme from spring and summer 2014.

Image source, Getty Images

The Whitehall department that was running the similar RHI scheme for Great Britain had 77 staff, Mr Johnson reminds the inquiry.

He says that had consideration been given to the appropriate level of staffing required to run the scheme in Northern Ireland, DETI "should never have pursued the scheme, at least not without a massively greater level of resource".

"The public has been left to pay the price, both financially and fiduciary."

There was a "conspiracy" in December 2016 between the then economy minister Simon Hamilton (below) and DUP advisers to discredit DETI civil servants "in order to protect" Arlene Foster's ex-aide, says Jeremy Johnson.

That was in the anonymous forwarding of emails to Mr Hamilton's own permanent secretary Dr Andrew McCormick and to journalists.

The email in question highlighted communications between the officials and individuals working in the renewable energy and agricultural sectors.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Mr Hamilton admitted to the inquiry that it was "not my proudest moment".

The civil servants' barrister says the minister was a public servant and was required to comply with the principles of public service.

The leaking of the document to the media and to the permanent secretary "in order to damage two public officials in order to take the heat off another" was a fundamental breach of the principles.

Civil servants working on the RHI scheme were "not burning to earn, nor were their families", says Jeremy Johnson.

"The only thing they were burning was midnight oil, not biomass."

Many unusual analogies have been used during the inquiry hearings - everything from yetis to trains - and here's another... ice skaters!

Jeremy Johnson says he's been reading into some of the latest psychological research into skaters and it apparently shows that "the best of the best" - those who win Olympic medals - fall more often in training and learn from their mistakes.

With all the elegance of a perfectly executed axel jump, he deploys that detail into a cash-for-ash context.

Image source, Getty Images

He accepts that the RHI scheme has been a "professional disaster" for each of the DETI officials he represents but says they are "all better public officials because of their willingness to learn the lessons".

"Chastened by this ordeal and having learned some extremely hard lessons, they are the very people one would want to remain within public service so that others can benefit from their experience of this otherwise disastrous affair."

And he emphasises that his clients came to post when the RHI had already taken root and "none of them are responsible for the mistakes that were made in the critical period between 2012 and 2014".

Conor Macauley
BBC News NI agriculture correspondent

Jeremy Johnson QC addresses the inquiry on behalf of DETI civil servants who took on the running of the RHI scheme from spring and summer 2014.

Those officials are Seamus Hughes, Davina McCay, Chris Stewart and Stuart Wightman.

Their barrister describes them as "intelligent people who worked extremely hard on behalf of the public".

Image source, RHI Inquiry

There was no "nine-to-five clock-watching culture" evident in their work and there is "overwhelming evidence to testify to the non-stop, frenetic working environment", including emails sometimes being sent in the early hours of the morning.

He makes a comparison between the officials' approach to the RHI inquiry and some of the evidence of ex-minister Arlene Foster, who said she was "accountable but not responsible" for the actions of her adviser.

Mr Johnson says: "They're not dancing about on the distinction between responsibility and accountability - they accept both."

Inquiry chair Sir Patrick Coghlin has a number of questions to ask about the DETI internal scrutiny panel - known as the casework committee - to which the officials who were working on the RHI scheme presented their case for funding it.

Unfortunately, Mr Coll doesn't seem to have the facts at his fingertips.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

In particular, Sir Patrick wants to know why the question of cost controls not raised and discussed at the committee meeting.

The officials' representative says the panel has the evidence about and adds: "Not wishing to be at all difficult about it I can't really take you any further on that."

The small group of DETI officials who were involved in the set-up and initial running of the RHI scheme "undoubtedly" have to "carry a heavy burden for the rest of their days", says Peter Coll.

He says they are sorry that the "public was not best served".

But they should not be alone to "shoulder this burden" because "errors were made at every turn" by those who provided advice about and scrutinised the RHI.

Image source, Getty

The officials that Mr Coll represents should be considered by the inquiry to be "professional, decent, dedicated, hardworking, honest, thoughtful and intelligent public servants".

Their barrister says that the failings during their time working on the scheme "occurred within the construct of the system that they worked in".

That system is "plainly unfit for purpose" and that "begs many questions about the system of public administration in Northern Ireland and how it should operate in the future".

It was Arlene Foster - not civil servants - who made a decision to proceed with the creation of the RHI scheme without including cost controls, insists Peter Coll.

It's been well documented at the inquiry, of course, that no minutes exist of a key meeting in June 2012 at which the then DETI minister was briefed about the scheme before she gave it her approval.

But barrister Peter Coll reiterates the evidence of Fiona Hepper, the department's then energy boss, who told the inquiry that she informed Mrs Foster in person about the risks of pressing ahead without budget protection measures.

Mrs Foster denied that she was alerted to the dangers.

The barrister says Ms Hepper and the other civil servants had no reason to mislead the minister, adding: "What possible motivation would they have had to do so? Absolutely none."

A decision had to be made on whether to opt for a scheme offering claimants continuing subsidy payments over a period of 20 years or a one-off up-front grant, which analysis at the time showed was better value for money.

Mr Coll says a suggestion by Mrs Foster's DUP adviser Dr Andrew Crawford that officials had withheld information from the minister because they had worked hard on the continuing subsidy scheme and favoured it over the grant option "made no sense".

As far as the politicians were concerned, the RHI scheme was the "only show in town".

Essential planned reviews of the RHI scheme were not carried out by the civil servants who succeeded the officials who had set up the initiative, says Peter Coll.

In his handover note to his successors, DETI official Peter Hutchinson (below) pointed out the need for aspects of the RHI to be examined as a matter of urgency.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Had that happened it could have led to the detection of some of the scheme's critical flaws but instead those opportunities were missed.

Mr Coll says that monitoring and review of projects such as the RHI scheme are "sine qua non" - essential.

"Civil servants should not and do not need to be told by their predecessors to conduct reviews of programmes of this nature."

Turning to the vexed question of the lack of formal note-taking by officials, Peter Coll speaks of an "unfortunate informality and casualisation" that crept into interactions between DETI officials and the then enterprise minister Arlene Foster.

She was not only comfortable with informal access by her officials but "in essence she actively encouraged it", he claims.

Image source, RHI Inquiry

Mr Coll says the "time-honoured structures" of communication are there for a reason and if they are not observed problems will arise "almost inevitably".

He offers the example of Mrs Foster's ministerial adviser Dr Andrew Crawford communicating with her by Post-It note.

Setting appropriate subsidy rates on offer in the RHI scheme was a problem from the beginning, says Peter Coll.

DETI had used the expert consultancy Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA) to effectively design the scheme.

But CEPA's initial report, which laid the foundation for the scheme, contained key errors that went undetected, creating big problems further down the line.

Mr Coll says DETI and its civil servants were "heavily reliant" on CEPA.

"It seemed the reasonable and appropriate course to rely upon CEPA as the appointed experts" he says.

Opening the proceedings this morning is Peter Coll QC, who is representing some of the DETI civil servants who set up and ran the RHI scheme from 2011 until about spring 2014.

Among those he is speaking for is Peter Hutchinson, who the inquiry heard was more or less left to run the scheme by himself, and Fiona Hepper, who was the department's energy boss.

Mr Coll says it is not his "intention to attack others" who have been involved in the cash-for-ash debacle, nor will he be indulging in the "time-honoured Northern Ireland tradition of whataboutery and them'uns".

Image source, RHI Inquiry

His clients "do not have any selfish personal interest" in the RHI, "were most certainly not in it for the money" and did not try to "craft or structure or indeed manipulate" it for any personal benefit to them or their families.

The inquiry process has taken a "heavy personal toll" on the civil servants involved, says Mr Coll, and he adds: "This is their life's work at stake."

He also outlines the potential professional repercussions that some of the officials could be facing - the content of Sir Patrick Coghlin's inquiry report "will be central" in any subsequent internal disciplinary action against the civil servants, he says.

"There are others who are involved in the RHI scenario who will not be subject... to disciplinary action - chiefly, of course, amongst those will be the politicians."