Stormont minister Andrew Muir believes Lough Neagh should be returned to community ownership “without charge” and before the end of the current assembly mandate in 2027.
The agriculture and environment minister outlined his hopes to the Earl of Shaftesbury less than a fortnight ago in their second meeting since February’s restoration of the institutions. He has yet to receive a formal response.
Nick Ashley-Cooper, the Dorset-based aristocrat whose family’s claim to the bed and banks of Ireland’s largest freshwater lake dates from 17th century, has said that he wants to transfer ownership of the lough to a “charity or community trust model” but has yet to state his asking price.
He’s called for ‘rights of nature’, legal recognition and protection for Lough Neagh’s ecosystem, to be included in any final deal.
The earl has pledged to use the financial profits gained by sand extraction from the lough’s bed to “invest in the future wellbeing of the lough”.
However, he has been critical of inaction and a lack of collaboration around efforts to bring Lough Neagh into community ownership.
As revealed by The Irish News in February, Lough Neagh Partnership is spending up to £250,000 of lottery money looking at future management of the lough, including potential public ownership.
Mr Muir is the first government representative for more than a decade to speculate about the cost of transferring ownership of the lough.
In 2014 working group’s report commissioned by the then agriculture minister Michelle O’Neill, representatives of the Shaftesbury Estate said a valuation of £6m was made a generation previous.
The working group concluded that there were no “tangible benefits to the effective management of the lough, should it be brought into public ownership”.
Mr Muir told The Irish News that although ownership of Lough Neagh isn’t covered in the recently published ‘action plan’, he recognised the “wider public discourse on the matter”.
He said he backed community ownership and welcomed the Earl of Shaftesbury support.
“Whilst my ideal goal is to achieve transfer to the community without cost, many other, and potentially much more significant, hurdles possibly exist around a change in ownership for Lough Neagh,” he said.
“The Lough Neagh Partnership initiative will hopefully help extrapolate the issues but fundamentally, the real test may be the capacity to establish a durable model to take over ownership which will include an answer to the question as to what constitutes the community.”
The minister said he discussed the earl’s rights of nature proposal but raised concerns about how to realise this aim “in the context of both reduced assembly mandate left and constrained resources”.
The minister said he would like to see ownership of the lough transferred “within this mandate”.
“I think we can dot that but what I would say to all the interests and parties around Lough Neagh is that we need to work together,” he said.
SDLP MLA Patsy McGlone said the lough’s long-term interests were “best served with the accountability that public ownership and oversight will bring”.
“The Earl of Shaftesbury should do the right thing and hand the lough over to be taken into independent accountable public ownership,” he said.
“There is no time to lose given the current state of the lough and we cannot afford to waste months or even years squabbling over money at a time when public finances are under such extreme pressure.”