Time was, people would stop Feargal Sharkey in the street to talk about the song Teenage Kicks. These days, he says, “it’s always about shite in rivers”.
The former Undertones singer, now the vocal frontman for the campaign to highlight the scandal of sewage in Britain’s inland and coastal waters, does not particularly welcome the change. “I’m really happy to get back to talking about gigs and records again as soon as anybody else is ready,” he says. But neither is he about to give up his cause. Particularly now he is winning.
He has known for a couple of years that he has discovered that rare beast in our divided times: an issue that can unite the whole country. “It’s not a national poll, clearly,” he says, “but there is literally no street anywhere these days I can walk down without someone stopping me and saying: ‘Bloody hell, Feargal, keep going with what you are doing on the rivers.’ People go ballistic with rage when they start talking, all kinds of people, and why shouldn’t they? We put our trust in the system and the system has taken that trust and trashed it. Why should we not be angry about that?”
In the past week, that anger found a new focus in the latest toothless “action plan” delivered by environment minister Thérèse Coffey. After a couple of days spent eviscerating that muddled speech to all-comers, Sharkey, when I meet him in central London on Thursday evening, is at peak flow. “This is the third water plan in six months! Coffey announced on Tuesday a £1.6bn investment. Does that overturn the £3.1bn her predecessor announced last August? Or the billions Michael Gove announced in 2018? It is,” he says, “just kids in a panic realising too late they are going get a hammering on this at the local elections, and again grasping at any straw.”
Listening to Sharkey, it is tempting to think that, at 64, he still channels his punk edge. In fact, he says, it goes back a bit further than that.
He grew up in a Catholic family in Derry, the second youngest of eight kids. His father was chairman of the local Labour party and branch secretary of the electricians’ union. “The lesson that my parents instilled in us was if we saw social injustice, we had a bloody obligation to confront it,” he says, “and what bigger injustice is there than that every single river in this country is polluted? And all to drive the shareholder dividends of the water companies?”
Sharkey’s first experience of protest came in April 1969 when his mother bundled the kids into the car to take part in an Easter civil rights march, walking between Belfast and Dublin. He would have been 10.
“There is a temptation to romanticise some of that stuff,” he says, “but it is true that frequently in my parents’ kitchen the locals all sat around discussing how they were going to bring down the national government of Northern Ireland. And in the years that followed, I watched them do exactly that. I grew up knowing that things change when you get enough decent people saying we have had enough.”
Sharkey’s awakening to the injustice of river pollution came seven years ago when he became chairman of the Amwell Magna fishery on the River Lea in London. He imagined it might be a retirement hobby, indulging a passion for fly-fishing at the oldest club in the country, on a stretch of river that Izaak Walton fished for trout 400 years ago. That’s not how it turned out.
“As part of the handover, my predecessor explained to me issues with the Environment Agency (EA) and Thames Water going back to the late 1990s,” he says. “Water was disappearing from the river from over-extraction to such an extent that it was turning into two-and-a-half miles of stagnant pond.”
Though the cause of the problem had been identified in 2003, the EA had commissioned further studies and reports without taking decisive action against Thames Water. “Meanwhile, the river was dying.”
After he gave up performing in 1991, Sharkey had worked in executive roles in the music industry. “In that world you don’t have 15 years to sit around debating something,” he says. “You better get your sorry ass together, come up with a plan, and deliver it on time and under budget.”
Working with a group called Fish Legal, he compelled the EA to fulfil its obligation to protect water quality. “My plan was not to stand on the steps of the high court,” he says, “but to bang furiously on the door. As a result, we got our problem fixed really quickly. And I’m pleased to report that there’s now more water going through the Amwell Magna fishery than there has been for decades.”
The experience made him investigate how many other little community groups there were out there also trying to defend the quality of water in their own fishing patches, or where they swam. He found dozens. “These are ordinary people who can remember when their river was so clear they could count the number of pebbles at the bottom, they could see fish, weeds, bugs, insects. And now it was a horrible grey and smelled occasionally. What the hell was going on?”
He runs through some of the causes of that change, no less shocking because of their familiarity. The chronic shortfall of investment in water infrastructure, the £56bn debts of the water companies, the £66bn paid out in dividends since privatisation, the slashing of EA budgets by Liz Truss, the procession of hapless, ineffectual Defra ministers, the built-in 25-year statutory notice period to remove a water company licence ...
“When you create something that is a naturalised, geographical monopoly,” he says, “you need really effective regulation, because by definition, the companies are set up to take advantage. Instead you’ve got 30 years of political indifference and regulatory failure. And guess what? In that vacuum, the water companies, financed by venture capital, completely game the system.”
He believes that the outrage at those facts is finally reaching a French-style, Derry-style out-on-the-streets flood. “I say this with enormous respect to my English friends,” he says. “I’ve lived here for 40 years. I’ve always kind of thought God bless the Anglo-Saxons because you really do have to force them into a corner before they push back with a real fury. But we are getting there.”
He was invited to address the Labour conference last year on the issue – “Have I had a conversations with Keir Starmer about sewage? Yes I have” – and knows there is an easy message to send to voters.
Clean up Britain?
“Yes. Sewage, corruption. It’s true on just about every level.”
The message is gaining traction in unlikely quarters. “Polluted rivers were not only on the front page of the Guardian and the Times last week,” he says. “But I got a call from the Sunday Express: ‘Feargal can you give us 400 words by the end of the day?’ My Dad would have had a laugh about that.”
Has he come to terms with the idea that the cause may dominate years that he might have spent more peacefully on a river bank?
He laughs. “Occasionally I remind my children that the male side of the Sharkey family – tall, skinny, head full of hair – we all live until we’re 100. My Dad died three months off his 100th birthday. But this doesn’t have to be a long battle. Sewage is going to cost the government the next election. To put a musical spin on it, we are at a classic Spinal Tap moment [in this campaign].” He smiles. “It is time to turn the volume up to number 12.”
• This article was amended on 9 April 2023. Izaak Walton would have fished the river about 400 years ago, not 500 as an earlier version said. The author of The Compleat Angler lived from 1593 to 1683.
