Troubled Waters: How Lough Neagh Is Being Destroyed by Corporate Greed and Political Neglect

Praise for Troubled Waters

‘Tommy Greene’s relentless pursuit of the story of Ireland’s Great Lake stands in stark contrast to the political neglect and colonial dispossession that brought Lough Neagh to the point of destruction. This is seminal and truly significant work.’

Trevor Birney, investigative journalist and producer

‘Everyone in Ulster should read this book. It expertly lays out the destruction of our greatest natural asset due to decades of negligence, mismanagement, greed, corruption, stupidity and cowardice. It is shocking and enraging.’

Nick Laird, poet, novelist and broadcaster

‘This is a story of our time – an environmental disaster, hopelessly failing institutions and political structures, people ignored, profit winning out over protection of the largest freshwater lake both across the UK and on the island of Ireland. This book is beautifully written and painstakingly researched. It should act as a … rallying cry to demand action to protect our planet.’

Norman Lamb, former MP and British Minister of State for Health

‘A powerful, illuminating and quietly searing account of Lough Neagh and what ails her … No one and no institution are spared in this timely telling of the consequences of the wilful neglect of the lough and the communities that depend on it. I read the book with an ever-increasing sense of frustration – as each new revelation underlined how poor governance, plain ignorance and corporate selfinterest undermined all best intentions.’

Darragh McIntyre, senior investigative journalist and broadcaster

‘Lough Neagh is not “dying”, it is being killed, and Troubled Waters tells us why. Greene’s book is a forensic overview of the likely suspects, their motives and opportunities. We are introduced to an array of heroes and villains, from local citizens and diligent scientists who are demanding government action to dithering and in-fighting politicians and those simply interested in abusing the Lough’s resources for their own gain. Essential reading for all those who want to know more about the “ecocide” of Ireland’s “great lake”.’

John Barry, professor of political economy, Queen’s University Belfast

Tommy Greene is an award-winning journalist and writer, regularly contributing to The Guardian, The Irish Times and Al Jazeera. He has received awards from UCD Smurfit School and the Law Society Ireland for his investigative work on environmental issues. His work on Lough Neagh has been widely recognised, and he has been asked to collaborate with the Field Day Theatre on a short film on the subject. Tommy lives and works in Belfast.

Troubled Waters

HOW LOUGH NEAGH IS BEING DESTROYED BY CORPORATE GREED AND POLITICAL NEGLECT

First published in 2026 by Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Tommy Greene, 2026

978 1 78537 563 7 (Paper)

978 1 78537 565 1 (eBook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Text typeset in Minion Pro 11/16 pt

Cover design by riverdesignbooks.com

Front cover image: © RooM the Agency/Alamy

Back cover image: © European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 L2A imagery

Extract from ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’ by Seamus Heaney from Door into the Dark (1972) reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

A Lough Neagh Sequence

(For the Fishermen)

1. Up the Shore

I

The lough will claim a victim every year. It has virtue that hardens wood to stone. There is a town sunk beneath its water. It is the scar left by the Isle of Man.

II

At Toomebridge where it sluices towards the sea

They’ve set new gates and tanks against the flow. From time to time they break the eels’ journey And lift five hundred stone in one go.

III

But up the shore in Antrim and Tyrone

There is a sense of fair play in the game

The fishermen confront them one by one And sail miles out and never learn to swim.

IV

‘We’ll be quicker going down,’ they say—

And when you argue there are no storms here, That one hour floating’s sure to land them safely—

‘The lough will claim a victim every year.’

Seamus Heaney

FOREWORD

Bernadette McAliskey

ONE OF THE MOST BREATHTAKING views of Lough Neagh is from where the graveyard behind the Old Cross rises towards the shoreline only to fall steeply to meet the water. This is Devlin country, from whence came my maternal grandfather, John Bán Devlin. I grew up ‘in the town’ (Cookstown) and ‘married back into the Lough Shore’ in 1973, moving into the moss, the bog, the wetlands of Derrylaughan or the ‘School Lands’, depending on who is talking about them and to whom.

In 1981, as a result of a murderous British loyalist attack on our home, our small family became ‘internally displaced refugees’, exiled and accommodated in Coalisland town until 1996, when we returned to the lough shore at the earliest safe opportunity presenting itself. A lot of dirty water had flowed under a lot of bridges during the intervening fifteen years, and not just in terms of what we now know was a very dirty war.

On our return, we were stunned by the loss of wildlife, especially birdlife. The lark had all but gone, as had the curlew, the snipe and the redshank. The cuckoo remained and, though reduced in number, still returns each April to make my heart sing. The moss itself was dug out almost ‘as far as Van Diemen’s land’, leaving the bog cotton and blaeberry as scarce as hen’s teeth. No progress had been made, from 1973, in connecting the area to the regional sewage system, and the myriad of new dwellings, many of which

should never have been given planning permission, still required the installation of their own private septic tank system.

The lough and the shore were visibly in serious trouble and decline thirty years ago. But those fixated on ‘economic opportunities arising from the peace’ chose not to listen to the voices of those who cared about meadow pipits, tree sparrows and tree creepers, or the frogspawn, moorhens and mallards making their way to the lough along small rivers and moss drains. Curiosity and concern about the loss of habitat were poor coinage when the policy was growing private-sector wealth, and the EU was paying the bill. Those raising the alarm were ignored or dismissed as scaremongers, difficult people and axe-grinders.

The appearance on the surface of the lough of luminous green, slimy and foul-smelling algae, visible from space, awakened both the imagination and fear of people across the entire jurisdiction, who might previously have never seen Lough Neagh from above the planet on which they stood and lived in blissful ignorance of where their tap water came from. Demands for an immediate return to safe water and for ‘heads to roll’ filled the air, with the lough’s terminal illness being diagnosed, often with self-assuredness, by the uninformed, while the last voices to be listened to remained those who had long been sounding the alarm. The discordant noise of the blame game is almost as depressing as the silence of the wildlife and stillness of stagnation on the lough shore.

It is against this backdrop that Tommy Greene has ventured to explore how we have all arrived at the position where the cradle of our human existence on this land has been so abused, neglected and contaminated that it is dying before our eyes.

The book is seminal, beautifully written and powerful in the rigour of its discipline and analysis. Greene does not mince his words. The story is how Lough Neagh has been, and continues to be, destroyed by corporate greed and political neglect. It’s based on rigorous discipline in research and forensic clarity in analysing evidence collected from all sides of the debate. While the content is painful reading, the style of writing is plain speaking,

measured and without aggression or sensationalism. Of critical importance, the story starts with the lough herself and the humans closest to her.

It will become essential, if uncomfortable, reading for those concerned specifically with Lough Neagh, but also for a generation struggling to restore the balance of the relationship between human beings and the ecology and environment of which we are an integral part.

INTRODUCTION

A Lament for Lough Neagh

‘WHERE WAS I WHEN LOUGH Neagh died?’ My interlocutor pauses for a moment. There is a sharp intake of breath. ‘I remember it very well because it was in and around the Twelfth [of July] … When everything in Northern Ireland was turning orange, Lough Neagh turned green.’

This comment is patently tongue-in-cheek and typical of the speaker’s wry humour. Yet it cites a widely used framing that has driven a renewed public debate around the lough’s current condition and its future survival. It is one branch of a discussion, still very much live, that began to develop during the summer of 2023, stemming from concerns scientists had raised for a number of years: that Ireland’s largest inland waterbody – at around 400 km sq, greater in surface area than any other in the UK and much of northwestern Europe – was not only languishing in the state of marked decline such experts had long talked about but was now ‘dying’. And it was doing so in ‘plain sight’.

One scientist, who had for years worked at Lough Neagh and its surrounding wetlands, was unequivocal when asked for his analysis towards the end of 2023: ‘This year, in terms of commercial fishing and sports activities in the water, the lough died.’1 Other experts have been more reserved in their assessments, but nearly all have conceded it remains in a ‘critical’ state.

For centuries, this shimmering body of water lying in the middle of

Ulster – Ireland’s tideless ‘inland sea’ – had been a cornerstone of the island’s storytelling traditions and the lifeblood of the many communities it supported. In Celtic mythology and local folklore, it was considered a place of blessing and miraculous transformation, of cleansing and renewal, a portal to other worlds inhabited by deities and the divine. Now, having approached what may be a series of imperceptible tipping points, the lough finds itself on the verge of ecological collapse.

This prospect of environmental breakdown and mass extinction at the largest contiguous ecosystem on these islands, as a number of researchers are now warning openly, was not one raised overnight – indicators of the looming catastrophe had been turning up for years. For those closest to this legendary lough, one sudden and portentous change to its complex, delicately balanced ecosystem came just a few months before its waters were transformed into a thick, green and brilliant silvery-blue broth, and prompted widespread alarm. ‘The disappearance of the “April fly” was something that really got a lot of people seriously worried around the lough shore,’ said one elderly walker I spoke to at the remote fishing village of Ardboe in County Tyrone.

Locals understood very well the significance of the ‘April’ or ‘Lough Neagh’ fly – so-called because of the time of year during which it typically emerges in swarms – and its apparent disappearance. Acting as a lynchpin for the lough’s overall ecology, the April fly is a keystone species that supports a wide range of organisms, including fish and wildfowl endemic to the lough system, along with frogs and predatory insects. Although not unique to Lough Neagh, these flies (non-biting midges belonging to the chironomid family) are a crucial element of the complex web of life centred around this immense body of water. More than just natural feature and periodic nuisance for those living nearby, the flies, with ‘their million collisions’ against car windscreens and ‘Their just audible siren’, as Seamus Heaney described it in ‘At Ardboe Point’, are also part of a common culture along the lough shore – an atmospheric mainstay that has suddenly been replaced by silence. Their visible absence since the spring of 2023 was unprecedented in recent times and viewed as ominous.

In addition to this grim portent were the multiple effects of a fastchanging, more unstable climate. July 2023 was Northern Ireland’s wettest month on record, with the year as a whole seeing Ireland’s highest levels of rainfall since records began. The lough encompasses a vast catchment area –draining around 43 per cent of all land in Northern Ireland, as well as parts of counties Monaghan and Cavan in the Irish Republic – which had for many years been awash with all kinds of industrial and synthetic contaminants. That summer’s weather triggers – intense downpours followed by sustained periods of relatively warm spells – were, to some scientists, the tipping factor for an ecosystem whose physical and chemical boundaries had long been strained.

Long-term pressures on the lough system – primarily, the result of a rapidly-expanding industrial agriculture model and creaking regional wastewater infrastructure – meant that for years prior to 2023 the waterbody had been classed as hypereutrophic, overloaded with nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen. These macronutrients can, in excess, drive the destruction of entire aquatic ecosystems. And Lough Neagh is now considered one of the most nutrient-rich lakes across the continent, if not the world. Other factors believed to contribute, such as industrial-scale sand extraction from the lough bed and the presence of a particular invasive species, the Eastern European zebra mussel, are thought to have, in the former case, remobilised phosphorous contaminants already in the lough bed and, in the latter, facilitated a 1°C heating of the lough since 1995 due to the now-ubiquitous molluscs filtering the water and allowing more light to penetrate through the water column.

On top of this, a number of current and former military sites along with the many industrial facilities near the waterbody may be leaking toxic ‘forever chemicals’, which do not break down naturally in the environment, into this critical source of nearly half the region’s drinking water. Another external pressure is a series of (both authorised and unauthorised, active and inactive) landfill sites across the catchment area of the lough – estimated to run into the hundreds, potentially even thousands – which Northern

Ireland’s authorities are still not monitoring to this day, as a devolution loophole means there is no active legislation compelling them to do so. In many cases, they are not even aware of the existence of these sites, having ‘long turned a blind eye’, in the view of locals and campaigners, to these seeping toxic grounds within ‘throwing distance’ of the lough.

Along the lough’s southern shores, for instance, is the locally named ‘Kinnego dump’, a gaping cavity where large quantities of medical and industrial waste are buried. It now lies covered with a shallow layer of earth and, more recently, with a scattering of strategically planted trees. To the unsuspecting eye it is simply a cattle farmer’s land a few hundred metres from the Oxford Island Nature Reserve and a popular recreational marina. However, to those aware of what is contained there, it is a ticking time bomb and a problem with which nobody wants to grapple. Such sites are strewn across the 4,500 km sq catchment area like running sores and are thought to be leaching all manner of hazardous materials into the body of freshwater where many of Ulster’s major arterial waterways converge.

All of these environmental pressures on the lough led to an unprecedented cyanobacteria, or ‘algal’, bloom appearing across its surface in July 2023.2 Dozens of calls were made to emergency services when the scale of the bloom became apparent, with some alarmed residents believing there had been a gas leak nearby. There was also a significant spike in the number of panicked queries being fielded by public authorities. Internal NI Water data shows that calls received from households within the main settlements across lough shore areas trebled between 2022 and 2023, with an additional rise of 13 per cent the following year. For 2023 and 2024, around 90 per cent of these calls coincided with successive blooms during the summer and autumn months.3

The local effect has been devastating. While some of the fallout was more immediate, summer 2024 would confirm the recurrent nature of this pollution crisis to the various communities relying on Lough Neagh for their health, well-being and livelihoods. The first to face what would become a shared pain was the waterbody’s famed community of fishers. Eel fishing

is an ancient practice on the lough that dates back to the Bronze Age, and it is still home to Europe’s largest commercial wild eel fishery. The Lough Neagh fishers have long struggled to protect their way of life – one that is an important part of the area’s social fabric. Those who fish for eels navigate a season that usually runs from May until late October, but in 2023 they only managed three weeks.

Freshwater swimming circles, which had become increasingly popular since the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, were another group to feel the noxious effects of this remarkable pollution event. Full-body rashes, lesions and successive days or weeks bedbound with illness were reported by swimmers throughout May and June 2023. It was no longer safe to enter the water recreationally. Further casualties were a string of businesses around the lough, including a water sports centre and a number of café-restaurants, which were forced to shut their doors temporarily or, in some cases, permanently. These were largely family-run enterprises; some had been operating for decades.

The health and well-being implications for those living in and around the lough shore did not end there. Residents right around the shoreline began purchasing bottled water, having lost faith in NI Water’s reassurances that the murky brown liquid coming out of household faucets – often with an unusual odour and a ‘musty’ taste – was safe to drink. A considerable number say they still do not feel confident enough to return to drinking water from their taps, with many resorting to either boiling it or installing domestic filtration systems at a cost of hundreds of pounds.

Attention soon turned to Belfast. While just over 40 per cent of Northern Ireland’s drinking water as a whole is sourced from Lough Neagh, it provides half of the capital city’s supply. The prospect of standpipes and other emergency measures to ensure safe potable water became increasingly conceivable as the summer went on and the pollution worsened visibly. In the end such measures were not needed, but they are a realistic future necessity for a number of the region’s biggest urban centres if the situation does not improve.

As well as the on-the-ground impact, future forecasts about the mushrooming pollution crisis were turning dire. An increasingly unsettled public was warned of the far-reaching effects the toxic bacterial growths could have for them, especially if they were to become a repeat occurrence, or more pronounced or aggravated. Les Gornall, a scientist who had worked for decades researching the environmental impacts of slurry at the lough shore, was one of the first researchers to sound the alarm. Speaking on BBC Radio’s The Nolan Show, Northern Ireland’s most popular broadcast, he explained how this blue-green algae was rendering Lough Neagh both unusable and potentially unrecoverable if drastic action were not taken to limit phosphorous and other pollution inputs.4

Just a few days later, appearing on the Nolan Live TV broadcast, Gornall explained what the lough’s ailing health signified not only locally, but internationally – where Northern Ireland was beginning to develop a reputation as ‘the dirty corner’ or ‘dirty man of Europe’. ‘If [the lough] was a human being, it would be in the ambulance,’ he told viewers. ‘It would be on its way to the hospital with cardiac arrest. It’s a really bad situation on a world basis. It’s as bad as it gets – almost as bad as it can possibly be.’5

Although the public’s understanding of the green sludge washing up on the lough’s shores was still somewhat unclear at this stage, concerns about it were well-founded. Over the following year scientists at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) would discover that more than 80 per cent of the bacterial DNA recovered from algal mats in Lough Neagh belonged to hazardous microbes, including E. coli, Salmonella and eleven other substances that can cause human illness. One specific toxin was identified in the lough’s waters for the first time ever on the island of Ireland: microcystin-LR. This toxin, which exceeded the World Health Organization’s recreational exposure limit at every sample site tested, attacks the liver, nerves and brain, impacting our cells’ ability to function. In higher doses, it can lead to illness and even death in humans.

The prognosis was grave indeed. Spelling out what Lough Neagh’s evolving pollution crisis could ultimately mean for the area and region as a whole, Gornall listed:

No fishing, no angling, the loss of the Lough Neagh eel, no paddleboarding, no wild-swimming, no canoeing, a ban on children playing on beaches, the loss of walkers and loss of tourism, the death of dogs, closure of their favourite coffee shops, depression, mental health problems, the opening of ecological niches for mosquitoes, biting midges. And, when we talk about mosquitoes, you don’t know which variety you’re going to get – whether [it’s] the ones that are just going to give you a welt, or Zika, Nile fever, Dengue fever coming into Northern Ireland. 6

Around this time, the owner of the lough’s bed, banks and soil, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, the twelfth earl of Shaftesbury, gave an interview to BBC NI. It aired on 4 October 2023 as part of what an insider described as a somewhat ‘choreographed’ ‘Lough Neagh Day’, partially intended to take some of the heat out of what was becoming an increasingly intractable crisis. Even though there was and has been no expert suggestion of the aristocrat or his estate causing the algal blooms, the earl’s choice of words concerning thorny questions of ownership and incomes drawn at the waterbody had the opposite effect to what he and his team had hoped. When asked whether he would ‘gift’ the inherited asset – ‘the spoils of war’ or ‘stolen goods’ in the eyes of many7 – to the public, he responded by saying he wanted to be ‘treated as any other business owner’, suggesting he be paid a fee for its sale. His ill-judged comment was incendiary, triggering a furious reaction from a number of quarters. It helped ensure that questions over the lough’s future remained firmly in the public eye until the end of the calendar year. ***

Having just concluded a year-long investigation into the abiding mismanagement and some of the neglect of the lough that had set the stage for this crisis, I, like many others, was struck by the public response this newly visible manifestation of Lough Neagh’s decline had elicited. Having been peripheral

to large sections of Northern Irish society and its power politics for so long, this extraordinary pollution event appeared to send shockwaves through swathes of the region’s population.

The body of work on Lough Neagh that I had produced for the Belfastbased investigative website The Detail was now finding new audiences. But, while impressed by some of the reporting of the immediate developments in 2023, my sense was that there was still a larger story to be uncovered. This was not just because of the lough’s visibly distressed condition at that moment in time but because of everything it had been in previous eras, what it represents in its current state and what it still could be in the not-toodistant future.

Something that strengthened my resolve to undertake this deep dive was the degree of confusion that has been in evidence regarding Lough Neagh since it became a national, and sometimes international, news item in 2023. An enduring inability to reach a shared understanding of the nature and drivers of the crisis at the lough seemed a good reason to attempt to disentangle some of its knotted threads. It was no longer the ‘least sexy topic in the world’, as former Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) politician Jim Wells had told me rather acidly in 2022, standing in front of Northern Ireland’s inoperational devolved parliament.

When setting out to write this book, the story struck me, at its core, as being one of public versus private interests. That still seems to be the case, yet this consideration appears to have been lost amid the deflections and misdirection of the last thirty-six months or so. I wanted to document how this had happened, exploring the extent to which Lough Neagh’s chronically polluted waters mirrored Northern Ireland’s wider body politic at this particular time in the state’s history. Beyond this corner of Ireland, I believe the lough is a powerful symbol for the cronyism choking our politics and natural life support systems in many parts of the world where the respect and connection to land has been lost. This is reflected in the fact that through a mixture of the state’s sclerotic, dysfunctional politics and the muddying of the water by vested interests, a viable path towards the

lough’s rehabilitation seems, in some respects, even further away now than it did three years ago.

Some have suggested that the unexpected surge of interest in the story of Lough Neagh mid-2023 pointed to fundamental changes within Northern Ireland itself. A sense of the environment, public health and welfare having been a ‘hidden victim’ of the territory’s protracted conflict – relegated to the margins of a peacetime political settlement increasingly being figured as a clientelist ‘carve-up’, ripe for exploitation by big business – was beginning to crystallise, with the lough acting as both symbol and setting for this pathology.8 Speaking to the author in 2025, Stormont’s current minister for agriculture and the environment, Andrew Muir, described the waterbody’s condition as representing a ‘tipping point in environmental consciousness for many’.9

A natural starting point for this book was: what did it mean to say the lough was ‘dying’, a phrase that had been used frequently in relation to the growing crisis? And, if it was, had it been ‘killed’ in the way some campaigners were suggesting? Fingers were beginning to point in various directions at alleged culprits and inevitable questions of justice were being raised: was it going to be served and, if so, in what ways and to what extent? I also wanted to discover who could be considered the winners and losers of this crisis, more broadly, as well as which voices were not being heard.

Finding out what was going on would, however, prove harder than expected. Among the more public-facing authorities responsible for the lough’s management and condition, the initial silence was deafening. As James Orr from Friends of the Earth NI recalled of late summer and early autumn 2023, ‘Nobody responded. Not just the politicians and civil servants – the earl [of Shaftesbury] wasn’t responding, the local councils weren’t responding, the NGOs weren’t responding. They all had their heads in the sand. It was like a total lockdown. There was certainly no coherent response for months after [the algae] was first sighted.’10

The pollution crisis not only stunned these actors, but also brought into sharp focus the mess that was and still is Lough Neagh’s fragmented management structure, shared between some two dozen organisations. This was

a confused quagmire of, in some cases, self-written stakeholders and vested interests, which claimed responsibility for the lough but at the same time sought to wash their hands of any immediate responsibility for its current condition. This problem was exacerbated by the absence of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and there appeared to be significant confusion over who the first responders should be. The most obvious candidate at Stormont, the Department of Agriculture, the Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), only gave its first press briefing on the crisis in the final days of September 2023, several months after the bloom began. It was, Orr says, ‘a very depressing time’ and for ‘anyone who cares about the Lough, it was incredibly sad to witness this play out so visibly and for the official response to be so lacking, to effectively be non-existent’.11

The scale and gravity of the pollution crisis was brought home to many of Northern Ireland’s key political movers and shakers when, at least for a couple of days, it was also visible in the saltwater aquatic environment along County Antrim’s northern coastline. While cyanobacteria growths can appear in saltwater settings, the tidal flush effect of marine bodies often disperses them. This partly explains why blue-green algae has not swept the region’s various sea loughs, such as Belfast Lough, Carlingford Lough and Lough Foyle. However, the fact that it had surfaced at the prized coastal resorts where many of Northern Ireland’s power-brokers – including permanent secretaries and other civil servants running the jurisdiction at the time – were likely holidaying was ‘another horrifying element’, according to Orr. This was no longer a storm brewing in seemingly forgotten stretches of mid-Ulster, but one that had begun to encroach on and threaten one of the region’s most valued tourism spots.

That the authorities and various lough stakeholders had lost control of this snowballing crisis was now strikingly obvious. Less clear was how growing pressure from a wider public – who had long felt poorly served by these actors and who were now beginning to feel abandoned by them – would develop or where it would lead.

By the summer’s conclusion – one drawn out by an unusually warm September – the growing public outcry had reached fever pitch. A number of small-scale rallies around the lough shore in the early summer months led to the birth of a series of energetic, galvanised grassroots organisations. Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media groups sprang up to coordinate these efforts swiftly thereafter. Buoyed by previous efforts to bring the lough into a community-run co-operative, their aims were clear: they wanted accountability from authorities and management bodies that almost appeared to be in hiding, as well as to form a bridge between the local people most directly impacted by the crisis and the decision-makers, who were at a remove from what was unfolding.

At a series of heated public meetings held around the lough shore, fingers were increasingly being pointed in the direction of flailing public authorities and the lough’s management bodies. Some fierce exchanges at the Cultural Centre in the County Tyrone village of Kinturk signalled the beginning of a series of hostilities between de facto management group the Lough Neagh Partnership and grassroots campaigners in the area, a significant number of whom had not heard of the organisation prior to the 2023 crisis.

When campaigners held a dramatic ‘wake’ to mark the lough’s slow death by the shores of Ballyronan in mid-September, the world’s media had already been stalking the crime scene for weeks. Chinese and Russian state media, Sky News, Al Jazeera, Le Monde – the international news outlets continued to accumulate. Their camera crews and journalists descended on the lough to gain a front-row view of the devastation and to report the catastrophe now playing out, not just in front of the region’s eyes but also on TV screens and smart devices across the planet.

‘This is loss, this is death, this is destruction,’ was the message bellowed into microphones at rallies along the lough shore and at the gates of Belfast City Hall. The latter demonstration saw hundreds of protesters march on Ulster unionism’s former citadel, a bastion of its erstwhile political control. Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin), the veteran rights campaigner and lough-shore resident, described this response as a kind of ‘awakening’ just

a few weeks later at a rain-soaked rally by the Toome Canal on the lough’s northern end.

The perfect storm of pollution and political agitation was captured by and reflected in extensive media coverage of the lough’s crisis. Gornall’s interview was not an isolated item. Lough Neagh would go on to lead The Nolan Show for several weeks – an unprecedented degree of leading-slot coverage for an environmental story in Northern Ireland. Something was beginning to shift. The crisis touched on many pressure points under the surface of the region’s creaking political settlement. A number of simmering frustrations and elevated tensions began to emerge at various levels. The lough became a kind of mirror, reflecting back multiple – and multiplying – concerns that shifted according to the perspective or priorities of the viewer. For some, it was a physical manifestation of Northern Ireland’s ‘poisoned politics’, as leader of the opposition Matthew O’Toole argued in a widely quoted Irish Times op-ed.12 For others, it was yet another demonstration of Stormont’s technocratic failures, its inability to address long-term pollution and respond to a public health crisis of ‘biblical’ proportions, as Northern Ireland editor Sam McBride wrote in the Belfast Telegraph. 13 Memories of Stormont’s failings when dealing with another generational public health crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, were still fresh in the public’s mind.

In the figure of the lough’s owner, a seemingly aloof ‘absentee landlord’, for whom the inherited asset continued to be a significant income source, some Irish nationalists and republicans saw ugly colonial hangovers, reaffirming their views that even a reformed Northern Ireland was a non-viable political entity. In all of the missed opportunities for greater public control and participation in Lough Neagh’s running, many across civil society saw not just a prevailing attitude towards the environment reflected in the lough’s lamentable condition – but also fundamental democratic deficits still ingrained in the northern state.

International press coverage continued into the early winter months. Closer to home, it was a leading item for days on the BBC News at Ten and became an unlikely talking point on the broadcaster’s flagship topical debate

programme Question Time. ‘In the world of agriculture and environment in Northern Ireland, one story dominated,’ wrote BBC NI’s correspondent Louise Cullen, in an article published on the BBC website on 2 January 2024 and looking back on 2023. The headline for her piece – ‘Lough Neagh: The year the UK’s largest lake turned green’ – suggested it may have been some kind of singular aberration or one-off phenomenon. This, of course, did not turn out to be the case.

The feverish months bookending late 2023 and early 2024 saw heated debate, not only about the lough’s future, but also about the nature and administrative structures of the northern state at a crucial juncture in its hundred-yearlong history. A storm that had erupted seemingly out of nowhere during yet another hiatus of devolved government seemed to highlight multiple apparent failings regarding how the region was and largely still is being run. Northern Ireland’s so-called ‘forgotten county’, a black hole at the centre of its politics, became the focal point for all of these concerns.

At the time the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, the people of Northern Ireland were promised peace and prosperity – and this objective continues to be the criterion on which much of the society’s development, political or otherwise, is judged. The region went on to record the thirdhighest per capita number of millionaires across the UK over the following two decades, but from 2023 the lough began to tell its own story about the kind of prosperity that had flourished during this time. Not only did its condition emphasise the hidden price of post-conflict Northern Ireland’s model of growth-led economic development, but the physical scars along the lough bed itself also told a story about how the environmental damage had been unknowingly funded by the UK taxpayer. Decades of neglect were beginning to incur serious, accumulating costs for the north-east and north-west of the island bisected by Lough Neagh.

It surprised few but dismayed many that 2024’s first algal bloom arrived

more than a fortnight earlier than it had the previous year. There was now even more pollution entering the lough system than before, scientists highlighted, as political agreement over a long-awaited clean-up plan for the waterbody was repeatedly frustrated by industrial farming interests and their advocates at the restored power-sharing Executive.

Whether the lough has passed a ‘point of no return’ or not, the evidence increasingly suggests that no autopsy would claim Lough Neagh reached its current state due to natural causes. What brought Ireland’s crowning waterbody to this point – prompting declarations that it is ‘dying’, ‘dead’ and ‘unrecoverable’ – has much deeper roots. It is a complicated and intricate process that has largely played out through a series of backroom decisions, the stripping of rights and the tightening grip of secretive private interests. That, along with reflections on the importance of the lough for Ireland, culturally and economically, the effects of this crisis on local communities and what its future might be, is all explored in the pages which follow.

ONE

‘Dying

in Plain Sight’

FOR RICKY HOLMES IN ANTRIM town, it was not so much a sight as a smell that he says alerted many residents to what was an unwelcome presence.1 Some of the town’s inhabitants could smell it half a mile from the shoreline.

Alarm bells had already been ringing for some time. In May 2023, a couple of months earlier, Ricky had noticed collections of small green globules glistening throughout the water of the lough. He would regularly dunk his head under the lough’s surface either alone or as part of weekly communityled swimming sessions on the opposite side of the northern shoreline, by the Ballyronan townland’s redeveloped marina. To begin with, he was passingly intrigued, yet relatively unperturbed, by the luminous green particles that were floating around him as he swam by. However, their rapid rate of accumulation soon had him unnerved and kept him out of the water for months.

‘It started off as a kind of green glitter in the water,’ he said. ‘And then, as the weather warmed up a bit more, it started to congeal. As the weeks – or even days – passed, it just spread more and more and more. We soon ended up with this green sludge that people saw collecting on the surface of the water, on rocks, everywhere.’

Towards the end of June, Holmes drove along the lough’s northern shoreline with a friend to the nearby parish of Cranfield. By the ruins of a thirteenthcentury church, a well-known pilgrimage site, he and his companion began to

capture photographic evidence of this viscous, blue-green slime. ‘Within five minutes of being there, my head was splitting,’ he says.

Other members of the Ballyronan Bluetits, a community-led open-water swimming group, noted the appearance of rashes and lesions across their skin. They were symptoms brought on by contact with something described by nearly all eyewitnesses as ‘otherworldly’. Mary O’Hagan, the group’s co-lead, remembered how, around this time, fluorescent purple pools also started developing alongside the multiplying blue-green material. Whatever the substance was, this was more than just a scattering of bright fragments now. It was growing, increasing exponentially by the day.

‘I suspected it was something unusual, not good,’ she said of the sparkling green specks that Holmes and other swimmers had noticed. ‘But I didn’t know it was blue-green algae at that point. And then, I would say, within a few days of that, there was a patch of red algae that showed up on the beach at Ballyronan. Really nasty-looking stuff. I thought it was a chemical spillage, that somebody had maybe spilled red diesel.’2 Its visual appearance was arresting, she said. ‘It was so vibrant – almost like fluorescein – that I thought someone had put something into drains to trace it and that it was coming up there on the beach. At the same time as it was there, the blue-green algae had started to gather on the slipway at the marina in Ballyronan, where the boats are all docked.’

O’Hagan was straight on the phone to a council pollution hotline as soon as she got back to her home in the nearby town of Magherafelt. Within a few days, the presence of blue-green algae was confirmed and the ‘red patches’ – by now, slightly dispersed by dogs running through the discoloured shoreline waters – were also confirmed, to her surprise, as another kind of ‘algae’.

The term algae is something of a misnomer here. Rather than a naturally occurring plant species, it was actually a kind of photosynthesising bacteria covering the great expanse of water larger in surface area than Malta. It began making headlines within a matter of weeks.

Mary recalled, ‘It just got worse and worse from there. It just got thicker and soupier. There wasn’t any let-up from it at all from there on in.’

to succumb to something like that. The rapidity, the swiftness of the sickness and deaths we saw is certainly consistent with [the effects of] these neurotoxins that are there.

Reid’s research confirmed many of the worst suspicions about the dangers posed by this commixture of contaminants. His findings made dismal reading for the lough’s beleaguered shoreline businesses, already fatigued by the negative publicity swirling around these public health concerns.

For one local business owner, there had been more to contend with than simply adverse PR. The Edge Watersports, a shop for outdoor water pursuits at the Cranagh Activity Centre along the Lower Bann, was one of the first businesses to announce permanent closure in 2023 as a direct consequence of the algal blooms. Rob Skelly, the man who had run the outfit for nearly thirty years, appeared utterly despondent around twelve months on from the first arrival of the blooms. Speaking in summer 2024 to the News Letter, as cyanobacteria growths began to sweep the lough once again, he was scathing about what he considered an almost non-existent government response to the crisis.

‘We were just wiped out last summer and it’s not coming back,’ he said. ‘Absolutely nothing has changed since last year in the lough. The only reason that it isn’t worse now is because the weather has been quite poor, but as soon as we get a blink of sunshine it will be the same again.’5

He told the author that he had gone into 2023 ‘relatively optimistic’ after a bumper year in 2021 and healthy returns the following season. But by August the ‘green flecks’ he had initially seen in the water had spread quickly, accumulating in ‘thick clumps’ at the river’s edge and permeating the flowing water. The river had become ‘like Chicago on St Patrick’s Day’, he recalled, with the algae in ‘full suspension right the way down for two or three metres’. Despite some short-lived attempts to resurrect the business, Skelly soon began to realise this would have long-term implications.6