Sustaining Lough Neagh
In 2023, I said Lough Neagh was dying in plain sight. One year on, it grieves me to say that Lough Neagh, as a complex living ecosystem, is not dying; Lough Neagh is dead. Friends of the Earth’s James Orr writes.
Water quality, fringe habitats, invertebrates, topography, fish, and bird populations are being degraded to levels that have never been seen before. The complex interactions between these features, with the added pressures of climate breakdown, mean that the Lough has passed many tipping points that we barely even understand.
The unprecedented global media attention, and local political attention, have come to very little. In fact, the input of phosphorous, the key trigger for the algal blooms, has actually gotten worse.
In the last year phosphorous has increased because of further defunding of creaking sewage infrastructure and the approval of even more factory farms.
In the neoliberal model of Northern Irish economics the response of government often reinforces the very problem it claims to want to fix. For decades the economic model made Lough Neagh invisible. It was a place to dump in and a place to extract from. Its natural wealth was plundered on an industrial scale. The university research station at Traad Point (near Ballyronan, County Derry) was closed down, laws were broken (such as the Strategic Environment Assessment Directive) and 50 years of unlawful extraction from the bed of the lough was ignored.
The solutions are not that difficult. Firstly, renew the 10-year water infrastructure investment programme. Secondly, give the lough a breathing space by halting damaging activity. Thirdly, design the model of farming away from feeding the income streams of the major corporates towards regenerative agriculture and family farms.
Anyone can see that the current agricultural model is so destructive that it cannot last. The model works like this: cut down South American rainforest to grow soy; ship the soy here to feed to caged animals; allow the excrement from the animals to pollute our rivers and lakes; export the protein and the profits and finally, use public funds to subsidise this unsustainable model by giving the industry huge corporate welfare payments.
The lough itself, and many communities, are demanding transformational change because they know that it is the business-as-usual mentality that has killed Lough Neagh.
We have behaved towards Lough Neagh because of how our political economy perceives it – a resource to extract from rather than the most important jewel any country could be gifted. We have not only turned our back on Lough Neagh but for many in leadership positions, over many decades, Lough Neagh was worth more dead than alive. Meanwhile, our inboxes get filled with crackpot techno-fixes and false solutions.
To revive Lough Neagh, we need a new vision for what we believe the lough could be. A flourishing ecosystem of abundance and health that supports thousands of sustainable jobs. A habitat of global significance recognised across the world.
This requires:
• A Citizen’s Assembly imbued with local wisdom to reverse the democratic deficit.
• A new food policy that recognises that we can easily feed people, invest in farms and restore nature.
• An independent environmental protection agency that has sufficient powers to protect and restore nature.
• A management body that cares for and sustains the lough across the whole of its catchment.
This is achievable. We have a minister with an environment remit. We can even now grasp the opportunity for community ownership and afford legal rights to the Lough Neagh itself to exist, to regenerate and to be allowed to flourish. If we sustain Lough Neagh, the lough will sustain us.
