Take back the lake – a report on the Ireland climate camp

The 2024 Ireland Climate Camp took place close to Lough Neagh, Ireland’s biggest lake which is suffering serious pollution from agribusiness. Daire Ní Chnáimh reports from the camp.

Lough Neagh, Ireland’s biggest lake: an otter is found dead, covered in toxic algal bloom. A dog drinks the lakewater and dies. A kid playing half an hour away gets a nosebleed when chemicals from the breakdown of the algae spread on the wind. Local bird populations have declined by 75%. The water quality – which supplies 40% of water to Northern Ireland – is ‘at breaking point.’

These are just some effects of the pollution by colonial profiteers on the biodiverse ecosystem of Lough Neagh, in the North of Ireland – the site of this year’s Ireland climate camp.

Sixty percent of the pollution in the lake is caused by agricultural runoff, largely from Moy Park, agribusiness giant and target of the camp’s action. Moy Park boasts the top revenue of any corporation in the North of Ireland, and is cavalier about environmental destruction. Local campaigners unearthed the fact that Moy Park has been committing bare-faced fraud, lying through its teeth about its fulfilment of environmental regulations.

At the camp, historian Conor McCabe gave context for the power held by the agribusiness lobby. From the 1700s, Irish people were forced to depend on the export of live cattle to Britain, in order to pay their rent. After the Famine, with its deaths, emigration, and mass evictions by British landlords, the use of Irish land to graze cattle sharply rose.

British colonisers fantasised about converting Ireland to a whole island of cattle to feed Britain. In the 1920s, these ideas wound their way into the policies of the Irish Free State. The new government continued to act like Ireland was a regional economy within the ‘UK’, and across the island, power accrued to the middlemen who administered Irish land for the profits of Britain.

In 1933, communist journalist Brian O’Neill wrote in The War for the Land in Ireland:

’For decades now, the bullock and the Irish peasant have faced each other in enmity, and the victory of the one has meant that there was no room in Ireland for the other. […] The squeezing out of the small farms—a process that to-day far outbalances the operations of the Land Commission —combined with an onslaught on the wages and living conditions of their labourers (or workers) is their only way to maintain their system and their prosperity.’ 

Almost a century later, this process is still at work across both the South and North of Ireland. The agribusiness-driven pollution of Lough Neagh has caused a modern public health crisis, and reveals the extreme edge of this conflict. Intervening in the lasting economic dependence on cattle is crucial to preserving both the ecosystems and human life surrounding the lake.

Locals who attended the climate camp were very clear that British rule of the North is at the core of today’s problem. The lake is officially owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury, an Eton-educated ex-DJ based in his family’s ancestral mansion in East Dorset. 

For decades, without environmental oversight, planning permission or regulation, the Earl authorised the extraction of sand from the lake in order to resource construction projects in Britain, in what Friends of the Earth called the biggest ‘unlawful mine anywhere in Europe in a Special Protection Area.’ Regulations were brought in 2021, but extraction continues apace, with licenses granted to extract 1.5 million tons every year. 

In the face of the slow death of species in the lake, which threatens the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and fisher-people, residents of the surrounding counties are mounting resistance. A landback campaign for community ownership of the lake, and an effort to institute the ‘Rights of Nature’ into law as seen in Ecuador and Colombia, are key parts of the response organised by Save Lough Neagh. The Rights of Nature approach would mean the lake has legal rights to exist and to regenerate – which can be defended in court. As one of the organisers put it, ‘instead of land as inanimate objects or “natural resources,” the Rights of Nature promotes ways of thinking and being that attest to the land as lived and living memory, and as part of our community.’

The Earl of Shaftesbury has indicated an openness to selling back the lake – but that he would ‘not give it away for free’ (despite receiving it for free along with his silver spoon). The Earl recently visited Belfast and got a glass of the toxic lakewater thrown in his face. 

Each success in this landback campaign will weaken the hold of the British state on Ireland, in its long passage toward justice.

Climate struggle, antifascism and lessons for activists

The Ireland climate camp took place in a moment of flared up street fascism and the pre-emptive arrests of comrades setting up a climate camp in the North of England. This set us reflecting on the need for our movements to tackle the deeper problems of the state, police, and fascist ideologies. An activist culture based on high-paced reactivity – which is what some antifascist work can feel like – is not enough to build power to overthrow the capitalist system.

Rooting ourselves in comradely relationships and long-term local struggles is part of the answer, and an inspiration here was the community resistance to mining nearby in the Sperrins. On a site proposed for goldmining by ecocidal multinational Dalready, the Sperrins community installed the Greencastle People’s Office (GPO). The occupation is now in its sixth year and has so far prevented Dalready getting permission to mine. It has also been the occasion for thousands of conversations and political educations, about how the corporation will trample on the lives and the land in order to extract profits. The organisers remarked that there is enough gold in the banks of the world to meet all our technical requirements for the next 500 years. We do not need to mine new gold – unless we remain shackled to the capitalist death-chariot which drives our planet to ruin. 

The camp brought home how crucial local resistance is to achieving land justice and decolonisation. To build a revolutionary culture now, we need to connect with the histories of local collective struggle in our areas, and share that knowledge so we can axe the roots of the current expressions of fascism which afflict our movements globally.