Public ownership is only viable option for dying Lough Neagh

IT started with picnic baskets – plastic bags filled with Tupperware in all probability – and a long, slow walk to Lough Neagh down Castor Bay Road.

In those days – I’m talking about the 1960s – summers were long and warm. It must have rained, but I’ve edited that out of my childhood memory.

We were one family with two names, the Collinses outnumbered by my O’Connor cousins.

The hero of the hour was Uncle Brendan, who would ferry us down to Castor Bay, one by one, on the back of his motorbike – in those carefree days there were no helmets – and it was fun: racing down the road, wind in our hair, clutching on to Brendan as if our life depended on it, which it did.

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We’d spend the day playing games, splashing in the shallows, and hunting sticklebacks.

We knew the lough’s foundation story – the battle between Fionn Mac Cumhaill and a Scottish giant, and the lough emerging from the hole left by the clod of earth Fionn threw at him.

But we knew nothing of the earls of Shaftesbury who owned the sand we paddled on, or the bloodthirsty Arthur Chichester, who seized the lough in the 17th century by means of a genocidal campaign against the native Irish.

The lough’s history since then has been one of despoilation as the Chichesters and then the Shaftesburys, who inherited it through marriage, used it as a money-making machine.

Throughout its history their rights have been contested, but the British look after their own, and the Shaftesburys have prevailed.

It is now in the hands of Nick Ashley-Cooper, twelfth earl of Shaftesbury.

As the interview with him in Saturday’s Irish News revealed, the earl may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he has had his fair share of misfortune.

His father was murdered and his brother, who had inherited the title, died tragically young.

It would be all too easy to say that the lough – dying before our eyes – is his problem now. And there is no doubt that Shaftesbury has become a convenient scapegoat for the ecological disaster that has befallen the lough.

But this crisis does not easily fit the pat storyline of another Irish disaster at the hands of yet another English absentee landlord – though that does not absolve the Shaftesburys of their responsibilities.

We are all responsible for the fate that has befallen this rich natural resource gifted to us by Mac Cumhaill’s lucky accident (yes, I believe the myth). And we can rant about the earl and the Shaftesbury Estate all we like.

But that will not bring the lough back to life, nor will it restore the livelihoods of those who depend on it, or make its waters fit for a new generation of children who just want to splash about and chase the sticklebacks.

Our houses, roads, and public buildings have been built using sand dredged from the lough floor; and the water itself (not owned by the Shaftesburys) has been poisoned by fertilisers and slurry produced by farmers putting food for our tables.

Throw in man-made global warming, and you have all the ingredients needed for the toxic blue-green algae which is killing the lough.

If anything shows an abject failure of political leadership, it is the response to this crisis.

For all the hand-wringing about the state of Lough Neagh, our politicians and the civil servants who advise them have failed to take the necessary action to turn things around, refusing to confront special interest groups – not least the farming lobby – and failing to stop breaches of environmental regulations.

Talk about new models of governance – community ownership and trusts – is yet another way of dodging the issue, giving the impression of doing something while doing nothing.

The earl has said he would be happy to transfer ownership of the lough without compensation.

The Executive needs to take him at his word. The only viable long-term solution for Lough Neagh is to take it into public ownership – not a trust or a community venture.

This has been proposed before. The reason it hasn’t happened is that the ‘powers that be’ do not want to take responsibility for the lough and its future.

But the devolved administration is the only body best placed to deliver an integrated cross-departmental solution to the lough’s problems.

More important still, the Executive would be accountable to the electorate for how it discharged its duties.

At the moment, the lough is being run as a business.

It’s not a business. It is one of the north’s few natural resources.

If ever there were an issue all parties could rally around, this is it.

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© The Irish News

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