Only our rivers run pee, fixing Lough Neagh…

It is at this point in the summer cycle that all of us can watch Lough Neagh, and some of our other inland lakes and waterways, turn green as the blue-green algae blooms, and it is at this point too that the annual political pantomime begins.

Many of our politicians can be seen this summer on Facebook and Instagram, standing at the water’s edge and grandstanding to the electorate that they understand the problem. And yet the fact remains that no Stormont politician, and no party acting as a group, seems to have the courage to make the decisions required to fix our lakes and inland waterways.

Real governing is not just the ribbon-cutting and the warm words our politicians and councillors live for; it is also telling a powerful group that the thing they want, or the thing they have always had, is over, and then holding the line while they scream. That is the part of the job our politicians cannot do, because the culture they operate in is built on compromised decision-making and on bowing to lobbyists time and time again.

Watch Andy Burnham over the last month by contrast. He faced up to adult social care, the one issue every UK government for decades has called too risky and too difficult and quietly kicked down the road, as well as devolution and vocational education, the sort of issues our own politicians talk about, then sidestep before heading off on a well-deserved summer break in the hope they are forgotten about by the time they return.

You can agree or disagree with Burnham’s ideas, but the point is that he is willing to name a hard problem and spend political capital on it. That willingness to disrupt people’s comfortable arrangements in order to fix something real is exactly what has been absent from Stormont for its entire existence, and nowhere is that absence more visible, literally, than at Lough Neagh.

I should say first that I am not an expert in any of this. To improve my understanding, I read up on the subject, focusing my research on whether the issue is unique to Northern Ireland or whether the same problem exists elsewhere in the world, and, if it does, what those countries did to fix it.

The most relevant case study I came across, and the one most comparable to Northern Ireland, was the Netherlands, where the Dutch government did take the decisions required to address the problem, but at huge financial and political cost.

The big question is whether Stormont is willing to do what the Netherlands did. I am not convinced it will, and I have sadly concluded that Lough Neagh will never be fixed, that it, and the other lakes and loughs across Northern Ireland, will keep turning green every summer until they tip into full eutrophic collapse: biologically dead water that can no longer support the ecosystem it once did.

So let us start with an overview. Lough Neagh is the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland, the body of water that supplies over 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water, and a lough that has been classified at “bad” ecological status, the worst category there is, for over two decades.

The first toxic blooms were recorded back in the 1970s, so nobody can claim to have been ambushed by this news. Over 60% of the phosphorus feeding the algae comes from agriculture, most of it cattle slurry, off a catchment that is three-quarters farmland. And here is the finger-in-the-ears moment: even if every drop of new pollution stopped tomorrow, the phosphorus already banked in the sediment would keep leaching back out for up to 40 years, which means there is no quick fix, and never was.

Now let us look at what actually trying to fix the problem looks like, by examining in detail the problems the Dutch faced and the solutions they reached for.

The Netherlands is also a traditional agriculture-based economy, and the Dutch faced much the same problems as us: large herds generating excess manure, ecosystems dying, and an insatiable demand for grass to feed those herds through winter, which in turn has to be fertilised with slurry to hit the necessary yields.

Where the Northern Ireland response is a political compromise designed to appease every stakeholder, the Dutch were forced to take a far more radical approach, because their courts effectively forced the government to act. A 2019 court ruling made it legally impossible to build almost anything in the country until the nitrogen problem was sorted.

The result was that the government had to set legally binding targets with real deadlines, put up €25 billion of funding, and set out to cut the national herd by roughly a third to achieve the required results.

They pursued this through radical measures: buying entire farms out at up to 120% of their value, on the condition that the farmer would never farm in the EU again; keeping compulsory purchase in reserve for anyone who would not take the money; and stripping away the derogation that had let their farmers spread more fertiliser than everyone else. It cost the country two collapsed governments and a farmers’ revolt that spawned its own political party, but they did it anyway, because the courts had left them no way out.

That is the real price of fixing inland lakes and waterways, and it is paid in pain, in money, and in telling a powerful rural lobby something it does not want to hear.

So what has Stormont done to date, and what is it simply not willing to do?

In July 2024 the Executive approved a 37-point action plan. The Agriculture and Environment minister, Andrew Muir, launched it on the shore, promised to work “night and day,” and called the effort “unprecedented.” Yet a year on, the data I could find suggests only 14 of the 37 actions had been delivered, with most of the rest merely “progressing” — while 2025 turned out to be one of the worst years for algae on record, and 2026 is shaping up to be worse still. And when the department consulted on tightening the nutrient rules, the one measure that would actually touch the source, a motion opposing the plans — backed by the DUP, Sinn Féin, the UUP and the TUV — was carried in the Assembly by 52 votes to 23.

Lough Neagh Action Plan (DAERA, July 2024): 37 Actions

GREEN Action delivering or under way per the plan (a real intervention, not independently verified as complete).

ORANGE Process step: scope, review, consult, communicate, research or govern. No direct effect on nutrient load or blooms.

RED Enforcement action, flagged to highlight the gap between promised enforcement and delivery.

No.	Pillar	Dept	Action (summary)	Target timescale (2024 plan)	Key
1	Education	DAERA	Water quality outreach events to farm businesses (build on SNHS soil analysis)	Complete by 31 Mar 2025	Process step
2	Education	DAERA/AFBI	Develop Lough Neagh science platform / online portal	Commence Jun 2024	Process step
3	Education	DAERA	Training in compliance for slurry-spreading contractors	Commence 2025	Process step
4	Education	DAERA	Scope/implement water quality initiatives + farm sustainability training	Scoped by Oct 2024	Process step
5	Education	DAERA/NIW	Communications plan + education campaign (water use, septic tanks)	Commence Oct 2024	Process step
6	Education	DAERA	Scope Conservation Management Plan for Lough Neagh	Scope by Mar 2025; complete Mar 2028	Process step
7	Education	DAERA	Catchment-wide awareness campaign via departmental mailshot	Complete by 31 Mar 2025	Process step
8	Education	DAERA	Reinvigorate catchment stakeholder group	By 30 Nov 2024	Process step
9	Education	DAERA	Scope slurry-spreading information system (rainfall warning)	Dec 2024	Process step
10	Investment	DAERA	SBRI Phase 2 (SULS) + slurry-processing demonstrator sites	Commence 2024	Delivering / under way
11	Investment	DAERA	Livestock Dietary Emissions Challenge (Defra Dairy Demonstrator)	Award anticipated (from Nov 2023 call)	Delivering / under way
12	Investment	DfI	Deliver Lough Neagh wastewater schemes (price control determination)	Long term	Delivering / under way
13	Investment	DAERA	SBRI to investigate solutions to reduce blooms when they occur	SBRI commencing Aug 2024	Process step
14	Investment	DAERA	Research on nutrient-recovery options + intervention impacts	AFBI call issued Apr 2024	Process step
15	Investment	DAERA	Scope expansion of Sustainable Catchment Programme (SCP)	By Sep 2024	Process step
16	Investment	DAERA	Deliver Farming with Nature (FwN) Package	Roll out by 2026	Delivering / under way
17	Investment	DAERA	Scope/report on domestic wastewater treatment systems	Dec 2025	Process step
18	Investment	DAERA	Pilot tree planting to test riparian buffer zones	Nov 2024	Delivering / under way
19	Investment	DAERA	Continue Environmental Farming Scheme Group Project	Continuation	Delivering / under way
20	Investment	DAERA	Scope community challenge fund (‘Live Here Love Here’)	Mar 2025	Process step
21	Investment	DAERA	Bid for new grant programme (water quality/conservation)	Commence Jun 2024	Process step
22	Regulation	DAERA	Complete NAP review, consult, introduce revised NAP Regulations	Mar 2025	Process step
23	Regulation	DAERA	Consult on restricting chemical P fertilisers on grassland	Consultation Aug 2024	Process step
24	Regulation	DAERA	Introduce Fertiliser Database; consult within NAP Review	Could commence 2024	Process step
25	Regulation	DAERA	DAERA group on excess nutrients; consult on slurry-processing framework	Group Jul 2024; consult by Dec 2026	Process step
26	Regulation	DAERA	Review 3rd cycle River Basin Management Plan	Dec 2024	Process step
27	Enforcement	DAERA	Increased enforcement activity in highest-risk areas; taskforce	Apr 2025	Enforcement
28	Enforcement	DAERA	Provision of additional Water Quality Inspectors	Apr 2025	Enforcement
29	Enforcement	DAERA	Establish enforcement project team; consult on methods (FPNs)	By Sep 2024	Enforcement
30	Enforcement	DAERA/DoJ	Review/consult on penalties + fines for Environmental Crimes	By Sep 2024	Enforcement
31	Enforcement	DAERA	Scope dedicated team for poorest water quality catchments	Dec 2024	Enforcement
32	Enforcement	DAERA/DoJ	Introduce streamlined penalty regime + risk-based inspections	Jan 2026	Enforcement
33	Science & Gov.	DAERA/AFBI	Lough Neagh Science Platform (detail of Action 2)	Commence Jun 2024	Process step
34	Science & Gov.	DAERA	PhD studentships on nature-based solutions	Dec 2024	Process step
35	Science & Gov.	DAERA	Commission Innovation Lab (‘Forever Mournes’ model)	Jun 2024	Process step
36	Science & Gov.	DAERA	Scientific review of sand-extraction impact (Phase 1)	Report due Mar 2025	Process step
37	Science & Gov.	DAERA/AFBI	Implement InterAgency Blue-Green Algae monitoring protocol	Bathing element commenced Mar 2024	Delivering / under way

 

The farming unions called the plan “out of touch,” and Andrew Muir spent his energy fighting what he called “misinformation” rather than the pollution. He has stayed in post performing a role he cannot use to change anything, a position I find disappointing, especially when we have seen other politicians, such as Labour’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, resign over what they saw as a lack of government commitment to an issue central to their brief.

Sadly, none of the 37 actions will fix the problem, because there is not a single mention of livestock reduction. The Dutch discovered the hard way that you cannot buffer, treat, educate or monitor your way out of a structural oversupply of nutrients, that you have no choice but to cut the herd.

So this is where we find ourselves: no buyout fund and no €25 billion, no compulsory purchase scheme, and nothing that costs a farmer a single penny or reduces the herd, just a modest pot of capital funding and a great deal of tree planting and signage. It is a plan designed to be seen doing something while the lough quietly continues to die.

In healthcare, the failure of a system eventually shows up as a number nobody can spin, excess deaths, waiting lists, people dying earlier than they should. The outcome itself becomes the indicator, and no press release survives contact with it.

Lough Neagh is Stormont’s version of that number, because you cannot spin a bloom that, after fifty years of farming intensification, regulatory capture and institutional paralysis, has finally become visible from space.

This is what my research suggests fixing the lough might look like if we followed the lessons of the Dutch. Obviously the experts would need to develop a plan tailored specifically to Lough Neagh and to Northern Ireland, this is an observer’s view, not a blueprint, but it gives a sense of the scale of the solutions required, and of why tinkering round the edges simply won’t work.

• Tell the Ulster Farmers’ Union plainly that cattle density in the catchment has to fall.
• Cut the herd in the catchment areas, possibly by up to a third.
• Set legally binding targets with fixed deadlines and real penalties.
• Enforce density caps through mandatory licensing.
• Impose no-slurry buffer zones on affected waterways.
• End the nitrates derogation.
• Fund a buyout scheme for the farms nearest the lough, compensating farmers whose land will no longer be suitable for commercial farming.
• Plant and harvest reed beds around the lough to strip out pollutants.
• Use compulsory purchase to acquire non-compliant farms.
• Tell the public honestly that the lough will not recover for decades, no matter what is done.
• Accept the political cost, and then actually govern.

Sadly, all the available evidence suggests that few, if any, of the above will happen, if Stormont’s track record on difficult decisions is anything to go by. Every single item on that list requires telling a powerful rural constituency something it does not want to hear, in the very seats every party needs to hold, and inside an institution that was built to manage competing interests rather than to confront them.

I can understand why the Ulster Farmers’ Union has resisted much of the 37-point plan. The financial package required to achieve the results is wholly inadequate, and the fear that many of its members will have to exit the industry is very real. Of course they are going to defend their members.

And this is no longer a Lough Neagh problem, nor one that respects party lines. This summer the blooms arrived at Camlough Lake, in the heart of south Armagh, the home village of one of Sinn Féin’s big dogs, Conor Murphy, the party’s former Economy Minister and now its leader in the Irish Seanad, forcing the lake shut an unnecessary obstacle in the way of a £4.6 million watersports hub the area has been promised. When the blight starts closing lakes and threatening flagship investment in the home patch of a Sinn Féin royalty, just as it fouls water in unionist heartlands too, it becomes what it always was, a genuine cross-party problem that needs fixed.

So back to the known knowns. We know the lough and our other waterways will keep deteriorating, and we know Stormont will keep pretending to fix it, commissioning more reports, refreshing the same recovery plans, raising concern from time to time.

The question is do our politicians have the political courage to fix the problem once and for all.

Note 1: Claude AI was used to analyse and measure Stormont’s progress against the 37-point action plan, drawing on all available press releases and commentary; it may not be fully up to date.