The sad saga of Lough Neagh exposed. The Executive’s easy way out doesn’t work

If you’re looking for a way to while away the time waiting for the next round of shadow boxing over Garvaghy Road, look no further than  Sam McBride’s latest  patiently laid out account of Executive dysfunction. Not evasion alone but a mix of evasion and rare activism that has elements of cash for ash about it. Namely,  larger grants to maximise production but do environmental harm  The story is about Lough Neagh, the great freshwater lake which supplies most of Northern Ireland’s drinking water  but has  the great  disadvantage of serving as Northern Ireland’s main drain rather than the  seas and ocean that surround it.

“A decade before Stormont used public money to encourage an explosion of factory farms, the then Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD) knew that Northern Ireland already had too many farm animals, one of the documents uncovered by the Belfast Telegraph shows.

Yet in 2014, then Agriculture Minister Michelle O’Neill – with the backing of the entire Executive – would launch the ‘Going For Growth’ strategy to drastically increase agricultural production, leading to an increase in factory farms and an explosion of manure.

The Executive promised that restoring this vast water body would be a key priority. It hasn’t delivered. But the minister who has done more than most is Andrew Muir.

As minister in the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), Muir is responsible both for the main industry polluting the lough, and for environmental laws.

The North Down Alliance MLA is unlike any agriculture minister in the history of Northern Ireland. He has lost the confidence of the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU), a powerful lobby group which Stormont insiders have long said has more influence than any other outfit. I sat down with Muir in his Stormont office on the basis that I wanted to talk to him about policy. Some Stormont ministers would run a mile from such scrutiny, but he immediately agreed to a long interview.

 I sat down with Muir in his Stormont office on the basis that I wanted to talk to him about policy. Some Stormont ministers would run a mile from such scrutiny, but he immediately agreed to a long interview.

 He says that about 62pc of the lough’s pollution comes from agriculture, 24pc from sewage works and 12pc from septic tanks. That doesn’t answer the question.

He highlights that last year, Sinn Féin, the DUP, UUP and TUV all opposed his Nutrients Action Programme (NAP) which sought to stem the agricultural pollution entering the lough, something Muir said involved “an abject failure of leadership

He says this can’t just be about agriculture, pointing to vast sewage pollution where “we are an outlier in the UK and Ireland for the lax regime we have” – and which is under Sinn Féin minister Liz Kimmins’ control.

I ask again: Has pollution reduced? He finally admits he doesn’t know, saying that “time will tell”. It’s fair to assume that if pollution was falling, he’d be trumpeting that as success. He is seeking to hike derisory pollution fines and end NI Water’s preferential treatment.

Yet the UK body which examines environmental policy, the Office for Environmental Protection, says Muir’s NAP is too weak and “will not be able to deliver important environmental outcomes, such as the legally binding target of good ecological status for lakes, rivers and coastal waters”.

Doesn’t it signal a poverty of ambition that this plan which might not even happen won’t fix the problem anyway, I ask.

Muir hints that he will be toughening the NAP, saying they need to “take heed of their recommendations…we’ve got to heed the advice of scientists”.

Six months ago, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who owns Lough Neagh’s bed but cannot control the pollution pouring into it, offered to give it away for free if convinced that Stormont could improve things.

Stormont can’t decide to take up the offer. Muir wanted to meet Kimmins – who has responsibility for NI Water, which is pouring sewage into the lough and taking drinking water from it.

He says she’s agreed to meet. But weeks later, they still haven’t met – despite working in the same building.

 .Most of this involves a small percentage of farms getting ever bigger. Muir says that about 7pc of farmers produce about 70pc of the phosphorous (mostly in manure) going onto fields.

There’s now 9.2 million cubic metres of slurry produced annually from livestock kept indoors – enough to fill The Great Pyramid of Giza almost four times.

In June, the Irish Farmers Journal noted a drastic change at the top of the list of farm subsidies, “with big landowners mainly in hill areas replaced by large beef-finishing operations”.

The outfits being encouraged are less like traditional farming and closer to US-style ‘feedlots’ where calves are bought and fed a high energy diet, often imported from South America, but are cooped up all day, never getting into a field – and producing far more slurry.

These large companies can outcompete traditional farmers to buy calves and have the economies of scale to buy feed and other commodities more cheaply.

 There’s an aspect of this scheme which is unnervingly like RHI: A supposedly environmental subsidy actually incentivises something damaging to the environment and in this case incentives the destruction of the traditional family farm.

  Muir is the unwilling accessory to avoiding the one measure that might reduce pollution – to change the subsidy rules to favour family farms over growing industrialisation –  and  reduce  production. No one dares.

Lough Neagh pollution  is being contained for now. Will it ever be reduced to genuinely sustainable levels?