Northern Ireland’s poultry industry must be forced to clean up its act

Working in Moy Park’s poultry processing plant in Portadown was a summer job option when I was at school. People who did so would return to class in September with the chicken-sized equivalent of a thousand-yard stare, having witnessed industrial slaughter. It concentrated minds on better grades: nobody wanted to go back.

Once migrant workers arrived in Northern Ireland from the late 1990s they quickly filled most of the production jobs at Moy Park and other meat-processing plants, facilitating the industry’s further expansion. They also filled up terraced housing in the town centre, while former occupants spent the proceeds from sale or rent moving to suburban developments. The same happened in Dungannon and Ballymena, other centres of the poultry industry. There were initial tensions but relatively few problems, given the scale of the population change involved, as migrants were taking jobs and occupying housing local people no longer wanted. The poultry industry created its own semidetached economy. Questions should have been asked about what this was contributing to the rest of Northern Ireland even before its environmental impact was realised.

Moy Park, the North’s largest private-sector employer, has been Brazilian and US-owned since 2008. It is bringing workers in and taking profits out. There are still good technical and white-collar jobs in the meat processing industry. However, there is no shortage of such work – manufacturers in the same towns struggle to recruit staff.

Employment in related agriculture is surprisingly low. There are only 630 poultry farms in Northern Ireland, with just 130 classed as large. Most will be family businesses and all will receive subsidies.

Larne gas cavern project a victim of green nimbyism and North’s administrative deadlock

---

Can Sinn Féin pull off its left-right, North-South balancing act?

---

Northern Ireland’s poultry industry must be forced to clean up its act

---

Some claims about the cost of a united Ireland don’t stack up

---

[ Contamination of Lough Neagh with blue green algae ‘inevitable’, says Friends of the Earth ]

Poultry produces much of the slurry that is polluting Northern Ireland’s waterways, with Lough Neagh becoming the totemic example. Associated ammonia pollution of soil and air, by far the worst in the UK, is at least as serious.

Obviously, Northern Ireland’s overall £5 billion agri-food sector has significant economic value, with four-fifths of revenue from sales outside the region. But this depends on a reputation for quality that pollution will destroy. Lough Neagh eels had been a small, exclusive export market; the collapse of the fishery has been reported around the world. It would not take many more tales of disaster to affect food exports in general.

Government is also being contaminated. On Tuesday, a BBC Spotlight investigation found Moy Park had breached legal limits on effluent discharge hundreds of times since 2017 at its three main sites, all within the catchment of Lough Neagh.

There have been no prosecutions by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, the enforcement body of Stormont’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs. Moy Park says it pays the state-owned Northern Ireland Water for extra treatment when limits are exceeded.

Andrew Muir of Alliance, the department’s minister, told the BBC he would be asking his officials for an explanation. “This can’t continue,” he said. Precedent is not encouraging.

[ ‘Like the flip of a switch, it’s gone’: has the ecosystem of Lough Neagh collapsed? ]

Moy Park lobbied for the 2013 “Going for Growth” Stormont strategy to develop intensive agriculture. Farms supplying it were encouraged to install anaerobic digesters to dispose of slurry, although this did not remove the critical pollutants. Moy Park and its suppliers were key beneficiaries of the Renewable Heat Incentive, the boiler scheme that brought down Stormont in 2017. A subsequent inquiry found there had been no corruption. Officials and ministers, from the DUP and Sinn Féin, had simply tripped over themselves to give the industry whatever it wanted. Clearly, that craven culture has not changed.

The combination of agriculture and the environment in one department, plus the lack of a fully independent environment agency, creates an unusual mix of poacher and gamekeeper at Stormont. Most slurry reaches watercourses after being spread on fields, contrary to restrictions. Three months after Stormont collapsed in 2017, the Environment Agency signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ulster Farmers’ Union agreeing an educational approach to breaches of those restrictions, with a presumption against prosecution. Somehow, it managed to do this without a minister in place. Regular reviews of the policy were promised but either have not occurred or have ignored declining water quality.

In 2022, Muir’s DUP predecessor cut the maximum penalty the department levies against farmers who repeatedly breach the restrictions from 100 per cent of their annual subsidy to 15 per cent. The DUP also blocked an independent environment agency. Muir promised a new approach when he became minister in February, with an “urgent” focus on Lough Neagh. Last month, his department said he was considering the penalty level and the memorandum but this will be part of a wider review to be completed two years from now.

This is the old approach of never confronting the problem. Northern Ireland’s poultry industry must be forced to clean up its act. If that is not a viable business model, we would be better off without it.