It’s been said many times that the state of Lough Neagh is a metaphor for Northern Ireland. Short-sighted Stormont policies coupled with a lack of oversight have resulted in an environmental catastrophe.
Pollution caused by the unfettered spreading of thousands of tonnes of animal manure from intensive farms, sewage from an underfunded waste water system, and leaching from unchecked septic tanks have produced a toxic sludge covering swathes of the lough that provides at least 40% of our drinking water.
While questions around the lough’s ownership are important for its future governance, the Earl of Shaftesbury is not to blame for the environmental crisis.
Last October, veteran civil rights campaigner Bernadette McAliskey told The Irish News that the Devon-based aristocrat was a “handy scapegoat” for the plight of Lough Neagh and that “collective failure” was to blame for its current state.
The lough’s decline has been happening cumulatively over decades, accelerating more recently thanks to Stormont’s rarely mentioned Going for Growth strategy. The region now produces enough food for 10 million people, exporting the vast bulk.
Yet the waste created by industrial scale agriculture isn’t exported and is instead spread on fields, ostensibly as fertiliser, with most of the nutrients running off and ending up choking our waterways.
An Audit Office report published in March found that despite initiatives to improve water quality, less than one third of the north’s rivers had good ecological status, representing no improvement since 2015. In the case of lakes, only 14 per cent of were classified as having good ecological status.
The situation in Lough Neagh has been exacerbated by the presence of zebra mussels, an invasive species whose filtration feeding method makes the water clearer and therefore enables light to penetrate deeper, encouraging more vigorous algal growth.
Like environmental governance and enforcement, responsibility for controlling invasive species lies with the same Stormont department that’s been encouraging agricultural intensification and boosting output.
Officials and ministers have been aware of a looming catastrophe for at least 20 years, yet paid merely lip service to addressing it.
Somewhat belatedly, the Stormont executive this week signed-off an ‘action plan’ that has been described as a “significant step” in the long term rehabilitation of Lough Neagh and other water bodies.
Previously DUP ministers had reportedly failed to endorse some 17 (of 37) additional actions proposed by Alliance agriculture and environment minister Andrew Muir that were deemed ‘cross-cutting’ and therefore required approval from executive colleagues.
Mr Muir described the plan as a “detailed, science-led, proportionate and ambitious set of actions that will make a tangible difference to our waterways”.
The minister stressed that there are “no quick fixes” and that successful delivery of the plan will require “significant investment”.
So at the outset, the action plan’s effectiveness is dependent on adequate funding, at a time when the public finances are under severe pressure.
In terms of the measures proposed, immediate and direct action is scarce. There are countless uses of the terms ‘scope’, ‘consult’ and ‘review’, whereas urgent, substantive action should be implemented, targeted and enforced.
Similarly, the plan proposes ‘outreach’ and ‘education’, suggesting a softly-softly approach to changing farming practices that makes compliance optional rather mandatory.
Other action points, such as community challenge fund in association with government-sponsored ‘Live Here Love Here’ and examining how small grants can be delivered to improve water quality have seemingly been included to merely pad things out.
Encouragingly, there’s a commitment to begin a scientific review of the environmental impact of sand extraction on Lough Neagh, though it will require a minister with mettle to face down dredgers who worked entirely unregulated until 2021.
Andrew Muir’s intentions appear genuine but he’s up against a supertanker agrifood sector that is accustomed to getting its own way. His action plan is a start but it merely tweaks where a paradigm shift is required.
