Northern Ireland’s environment is unlikely to benefit from higher EU standards because the country already flouts the existing rules, leaving it in a “grossly degraded” state, experts have said.
The region may escape a post-Brexit erosion of UK environmental law but still suffer grave environmental damage because of governance failures, they warned.
Northern Ireland has no functioning executive or environmental protection agency and the civil service has not published an environmental strategy or statement of principles.
Under the Windsor framework the region remains subject to EU laws that in many cases are more stringent than those in England, Wales and Scotland.
But Northern Ireland will struggle to exploit that opportunity, said Ciara Brennan, director of the advocacy group Environmental Justice Network Ireland. “It cannot be absorbed given the already grossly degraded state of the environment here. The crisis at Lough Neagh is symptomatic of how bad things are across the north.”
A vast algal bloom is choking the largest lake in the British Isles and the source of 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water. It has been contaminated by slurry and other agricultural runoff as well as human sewage discharges.
Campaigners say the plight of Lough Neagh and a huge illegal waste dump outside Derry reflect a lack of scrutiny, enforcement and accountability that have made Northern Ireland the “dirty corner of Europe”, with the department of agriculture, environment and rural affairs, or Daera, accused of favouring farming interests over the environment. The department did not respond to a request for comment.
Poor governance subverted ambitious EU rules, said James Orr, director of Friends of the Earth in Northern Ireland. “The only way that environmental standards are maintained is if there are effective watchdogs and enforcement bodies. The difficulty is that those agencies don’t exist or have been defunded or deprioritised.”
Great Britain’s divergence from EU rules might leave Northern Ireland with higher standards, but that was of limited value when the region was an environmental “basket case”, said Orr. “There is no effective rule of law when it comes to environmental standards.”
Retaining EU rules was no reason to “dance in the aisles” given that Northern Ireland has ignored EU rules for decades, said Jim Wells, a former Stormont assembly member of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP). “We’re decades behind the rest of the UK and Europe,” he said.
Any divergence from rules in Great Britain had gone unnoticed because of the parlous state of the region’s waterways, bogs and other areas, said Wells. He accused nationalist and unionist parties of kowtowing to the Ulster Farmers Union. “The UFU only have to blink twice and various environmental protections are dropped,” he said.
Viviane Gravey, a politics lecturer and expert on EU environmental policy at Queen’s University Belfast, said the collapse of the Stormont executive and assembly had left the civil service struggling to fill the vacuum.
“There is all this potential for Northern Ireland to be more ambitious than Great Britain but for that you need to have civil servants capable of doing the work and an environmental agency that has teeth. The civil service is under so much stress and there are so many gaps. Deadlines are being missed.”
The DUP collapsed power-sharing in January 2022 in protest over the post-Brexit trading arrangements, which the party said weakened Northern Ireland’s place in the UK and left it under EU sway.
The party cites divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK as justification for a continued boycott that has left the secretary of state, Chris Heaton-Harris, overseeing a civil service that runs the region on a type of auto-pilot, unable or unwilling to take major decisions.
Analysts say this has aggravated environmental neglect that dates back to the Troubles and which continued after the Good Friday agreement when the major parties backed the rapid expansion of industrial factory farms, especially of pigs and poultry, that now contribute to 9m cubic metres of slurry a year.
Northern Ireland was in the “surreal” situation of not adopting an EU ban on single-use plastics, while England, Wales and Scotland, which were not bound by EU rules, enacted their own ban, said Gravey. However, Northern Ireland’s new Office for Environmental Protection – which can scrutinise but not enforce – was prodding the civil service into decisions and greater transparency, she said. “That’s where I see some hope.”
The scale of divergence in standards between Northern Ireland and Great Britain remained unclear, said Brennan. “But you could say the divergence question is academic because if you don’t have the governance structures in place to implement environmental law then it doesn’t really matter what the law is.”
