A 44-year-old British aristocrat is fending off complaints of gross mismanagement from environmentalists in Northern Ireland this week wanting him to dispense with his hereditary control of the bed of Lough Neagh, Co. Antrim in the face of a worsening environmental crisis on what is Ireland’s largest freshwater lake.
Nicholas Ashley-Cooper also known as the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury has been castigated for his management of Lough Neagh which has been undergoing a severe algae outbreak throughout the summer. It is understood that this is caused by excessive temperatures and nutrient runover into the water.
The lake, which is the primary source of drinking water for Belfast city, has been the property of the Earl’s family since the 1800s after originally being seized by the English adventurer Sir Arthur Chichester during the Elizabethan conquests in 1608 to the detriment of local Gaelic landowners.
Huge swathes of the lake are currently caked in thick, blue-green algae especially toxic to both humans and livestock with the environmental group “Friends of the Earth” warning that the scale of the damage done to the lake is being consciously downplayed by both the Earl and local authorities.
Witness reports describe the surroundings of the lake as smelling of thick sulphur with the Lough’s beaches closed to swimmers throughout the summer. This closure is likely to continue until winter due to the health risks aggravating many local businesses reliant on the summer trading.
One environmental officer who works at the Lough described the algae outbreak as the result of a variety of factors ranging from nutrients in agricultural fertilisers, poor wastewater treatment, hotter and wetter summers as well as the recent eradication of the invasive Zebra mussel which had previously helped filter the water in the Lough.
“More sunlight penetrates the water [so] there’s more photosynthesis and more algal growth, so we reckon that could be the tipping point that’s brought the bloom we see today,” outlined environmental officer Peter Harper as local farming groups pushed for a partnership to deal with the pollution.
The BBC has carried reports of Northern Ireland residents buying bottled water on account of the algae crisis on Lough Neagh with the estimated cost of cleaning up the Lough placed at €500m by one scientist.
The crisis on Lough Neagh has underlined Northern Ireland’s ongoing political impasse since the suspension of the Stormont executive nearly two years ago, caused by unionist refusal to acquiesce with post-Brexit arrangements around the Irish Sea Border.
A previous government assessment put the price of purchasing the Lough at £6 million in 2013 with Belfast City Council lending its support to a motion in September by Green Party councillor Brian Smyth to take Lough Neagh into public ownership despite the abstention of the DUP.
The Earl of Shaftesbury, who exerts his control over his holdings through the Lough Neagh Development Trust, has expressed his willingness to sell the Lough to the state but is reluctant to give away his claim for free.
“The situation with the sale is one that’s borne out of an understanding that my ownership has always been very divisive and quite political and I always get blamed for things that are completely outside of my control,” said the Earl who added that his ownership was being scapegoated by politicians willing to negate their responsibility.
An Eton-educated aristocrat, turned musician and tech entrepreneur, the Earl is primarily resident in Dorset and inherited the title after the murder of his father the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury in November 2004 by his then wife and ex-Playboy bunny Jamila M’Barek, followed by the sudden death of his older brother from a heart attack six months later.
Many environmentalists and political pundits believe that the lack of a functioning executive in the region has paralysed any coordinated official response to the Lough Neagh crisis with Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill in her role as Agriculture Minister previously lobbying the Earl to gift the lake to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2014.
Attempts at bringing about a resolution to the water crisis through multi-party talks with the Northern Irish Department of Agriculture have been largely fruitless hampered by the absence of political stability in Northern Ireland with the office of minister of Agriculture being vacant since the collapse of Stormont in October 2022.
South of the border an EU-wide clampdown on the use of fertilisers, due to similar water quality concerns such as that which occurred at the Lough, looks set to create conditions for potential agrarian unrest in Ireland following the passing of the Nature Restoration.