A question put to Sinn Féin Minister for the Economy at Stormont, Caoimhe Archibald, at the MacGill Summer School in Co Donegal last month will have caught the attention of few onlookers. Yet her response – arguing, between pre-scripted soundbites, that “what we have seen is a real collective approach from the Executive” on the clean-up of Lough Neagh – may have raised some eyebrows.
Archibald’s comment does not just say something about what has passed for official responses to the lough’s acute and worsening condition over the past 18 months. It also drives to the heart of the gap between this new-old Executive’s rhetoric and its delivery more widely.
When Northern Ireland’s powersharing institutions were restored at the beginning of 2024, some commentators and industry leaders were buoyed by a sense that, despite the limitations of these devolved governing arrangements, this historic Sinn Féin-led Executive might do things differently. Now, less than two years from the next round of Assembly elections, it looks just as inert and divided as any of Stormont’s previous iterations – and arguably more superficial.
For Sinn Féin, failure to see through clear advances on the cross-Border A5 road upgrade, Casement Park’s redevelopment or a minister’s bid to install Irish-language signage at Belfast’s new Grand Central transport hub is more likely to do the party political damage than continued neglect of the largest – and perhaps our most special – contiguous ecosystem on this island. Yet, having made the lough’s plight a central pillar of its programme for government, it is worth considering just how united and integrated an approach the Executive has applied to this stated “priority” issue.
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The short answer, if a recent battle over the innocuously named Nutrients Action Programme (NAP) is anything to go by, would be very little. In the past number of months, Stormont’s agriculture and environment minister, Andrew Muir, has been straining to gain approval for what is essentially a second attempt at introducing measures to stem the largest source (contributing more than 60 per cent) of Lough Neagh’s most pressing contamination woes: its phosphorous and nitrogen inputs. Muir is finding himself even more isolated now than he was last year when the Executive held up and heavily diluted his “action plan” to tackle this bacterial pollution, while his colleagues would not initially provide a public endorsement for a strategy that remains under-resourced and largely unimplemented.
In the same breath as pledging to protect and even “save” Lough Neagh, every Executive formation other than Muir’s Alliance Party – Sinn Féin, the Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party – voted down this year’s NAP, which comprises essentially moderate agricultural reforms. The culture war whipped up by some MLAs over these plans underscores one of the few settings – symbolic standoffs – this version of Stormont, like a number before it, appears comfortable with. If politicians cannot offer more than gesture politics and get to grips with this area of policy, every indication is that cyanobacterial (or “blue-green algae”) blooms will become a recurrent event for many summers to come.
The disconnects concerning Lough Neagh are profound and a lack of joined-up thinking is not only evident at Stormont Castle. The governance vacuum the current and previous devolved governments – stretching back decades – have left behind are at the heart of a slow-moving disaster at Lough Neagh, which is no longer simply impacting its biodiversity but also the human communities who rely on this waterbody for their livelihoods and for sourcing half the North’s drinking water.
Most of the lough’s problems boil down to it being fundamentally a public asset and simultaneously not being treated as such. Yet few of the lough’s self-written stakeholder actors and even fewer politicians seem interested in altering this status quo, even as a third summer of cyanobacterial blooms begins, one pathology of both a “spiritual and moral crisis”.
And, meanwhile, the fallout from this recurrent pollution crisis is deepening. Just last month, the lough’s co-operative fishery – thought to be the largest of its kind in Europe – was forced to extend its ban on eel fishing to cover the entire 2025 season. Despite this being effectively the third consecutive season in which those fishing for the lough’s most lucrative catch have been unable to work its waters, with incomes having fallen by an estimated 60 per cent, there has still been no compensation or financial aid package for the fishers.
This governance vacuum, effectively amounting to a free-for-all at Lough Neagh, has long allowed all manner of opportunistic actors to grab resources and run.
While promised interventions stall on tackling pollution drivers, another key strand of any supposed recovery or rehabilitation has been outsourced to a series of private consultants and third-sector groups. This process concerning the lough’s future ownership and management has to date been largely disconnected from the mosaic of communities surrounding itss 90-mile perimeter. It also appears increasingly to be being driven by three of Northern Ireland’s biggest landowners – Stormont’s Department of Agriculture, the Environment and Rural Affairs, the National Trust and the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury – in what has so far been a congested, confused and opaque process.
Arguably, the only serious co-ordinated achievement by these government and private actors over the past 18 months has been the development of a defensive – and, in some cases, sweeping – PR strategy that has largely deflected responsibility and accountability elsewhere for the cross-cutting response dilemma.
There are, however, still avenues and means through which to reimagine Lough Neagh, which has been bound up with questions of democracy since times predating partition. Yet a fundamental change of mentality is required, given concerns that tentative efforts to bring the public into shaping the waterbody’s future may be instrumentalised by various interested parties – backed by a mixture of public funds, private finance and philanthropic sources – for their own predetermined agendas.
Reflecting on what is at stake, citing “water we can’t really drink” and “fish [that] can’t live”, the lough shore resident and veteran campaigner Bernadette McAliskey summarised the state of affairs as follows: “We have exploited it and ignored it. And now, nature is – quite rightly – taking her revenge.”
Tommy Greene is a journalist and the author of Troubled Waters, which is due to be published by Merrion Press later this year
