Are the Rights of Nature the Only Way to Save Lough Neagh?

‘Lough Neagh is dying and it's dying in plain sight’. This was the assessment of James Orr, director of Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland, when vast blooms of blue-green algae emerged in the UK and Ireland's largest freshwater lake in summer 2023, drawing global attention. For decades, pollutants including phosphorus have entered the lough, causing a process of eutrophication, whereby cyanobacteria proliferates at a destructive rate. The cumulative pollution had resulted in widespread toxic blooms, prompting serious public health concern.

With devolved government absent in 2023, fingers were pointed at the lack of a sitting Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive. But this is not just a story of government inaction. In large part, the crisis has been facilitated by the past actions of government. The Executive’s ‘Going for Growth’ strategy, which sought to re-orient Northern Ireland’s agricultural sector in a larger-scale, export-oriented direction, has come in for particular criticism for exacerbating the problems at Lough Neagh.

Within ten days of the Assembly returning in February 2024, MLAs debated a Sinn Féin private members’ motion about the lough, with all parties agreeing that actions to address the crisis needed to be prioritised. However, party differences quickly emerged, particularly over the extent to which blame should be placed on agriculture. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was subsequently blamed for holding up the adoption of an action plan proposed by the Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, the cross-community Alliance Party's Andrew Muir.

Some activists and politicians have argued that what is needed to protect Lough Neagh and aid the reversal of the damage to its ecology is the adoption of a ‘rights of nature’ (RoN) approach. What is an RoN approach and what would it look like in Northern Ireland?

Granting nature rights

In Western legal philosophy, the idea that nature should have rights is particularly associated with the work of Christopher Stone, who made the case for rights that could be defended in courts in his 1972 essay ‘Should trees have standing?’. However, such thinking has a longer history in Indigenous cultural and knowledge systems, which in recent years has started to inform policy and activism in Europe.

Arguably the boldest approach to recognising the RoN to date is Ecuador’s, where the 2008 constitution recognises nature as a legal subject that can be spoken for in courts. In New Zealand, meanwhile, the Te Awa Tupua Act has given the Whanganui River legal personhood and established a guardian body for it.

For advocates of an RoN approach in Northern Ireland such as James Orr and activist-academic Peter Doran, viewing nature as having rights is primarily about a shift away from viewing it as property that can be exploited by humans and towards a fundamentally less extractive political economy. Some calling for an RoN response to the Lough Neagh crisis stress the colonial origins of the lough's current ownership. The lough's bed and soil are owned by the twelfth Earl of Shaftesbury.

However, some see the framing of RoN in the language of indigeneity and colonialism as problematic. Research conducted by legal scholars Killean et al. reveals that such a framing can potentially be narrowly associated with Irish republicanism and risks excluding Protestants as outside of an imagined, ‘native’ community and as colonisers.

Doran was keen to stress in our interview with him that adoption of RoN and public ownership of the lough should be seen as a ‘decolonial gesture, not decolonisation’. The latter, he explained, can often (sometimes strategically) be portrayed as hostile to Protestants whereas the former should be understood as addressing the psychological and cultural overhang of colonisation.

Others also see the lough as potentially unifying. Gerry Darby of the Lough Neagh Partnership, a stakeholder organisation overseeing management of the lough, pointed out that the environment was neglected as part of the peace process, but was hopeful that co-operation in relation to the crisis could be a way for local communities to ‘meet in the middle’.

However, we are doubtful whether the DUP can be persuaded to support RoN legislation – support that would be required under the rules of power-sharing. Not only are some unionists suspicious of an RoN approach due to its perceived association – rightly or wrongly – with republicanism, but inasmuch as it would challenge more extractivist visions of agriculture, this approach is likely to be resisted by larger-scale agricultural interests, which have well-developed links with political unionism.

Rights of future generations

While there might not be cross-community political support for an RoN approach, invocation of future generations in discussions about the environment is something that appears to span the communal divide.

Addressing the crisis at the lough, Cara Hunter of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), has spoken of the ‘moral and professional duty to protect the environment for not only ourselves and our generation but for our children and their children’, while Sinn Féin's Linda Dillon quoted Oscar Wilde: ‘The things of nature do not really belong to us; we should leave them to our children as we have received them’.

On the unionist side, during his time as Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, the DUP's Edwin Poots made multiple references to safeguarding the environment for future generations when launching a draft of Northern Ireland's first environmental strategy, arguing that it was important to ‘safeguard and restore our nature and biodiversity for the health and prosperity of current and future generations’.

Politicians share a common concern for future generations in part out of interest for the transgenerational survival of the ethnonational communities they represent. This is evident, for example, in Arlene Foster's backing of a package of language and other cultural measures that she argued would ‘advance identities and protect them for future generations’ as part of her final speech to the Assembly as First Minister.

Emphasis on the economic or resource value of the lough also cuts across party lines and perhaps the strongest shared basis for thinking about the importance of the lough to future generations lies in the fact that it supplies 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water. There has been significant public concern about the implications of the crisis for this supply. Even if we cannot know the precise interests of future generations, we can be confident that those interests are likely to include access to clean drinking water.

Representing future generations

Appeals to the interests of future generations might serve as a useful rhetorical call to action, but arguably there is also a need to ensure their formal representation. In the article, we don’t set out to prescribe a single approach. However, we do point to one potentially promising precedent: the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. Established in 2016, this commissioner has the power to ensure future generations are considered in policy making by ordering reports on policy, reviews of public bodies and offering an advisory role to government.

Inspired by this example, crossbench peer Lord Bird introduced a private members’ bill in the House of Lords in in January 2020, proposing the creation of a UK-wide future generations commission. The bill was supported by the SDLP MP (and now party leader) Claire Hanna, who has argued for similar legislation specific to Northern Ireland.

While we think that it would be normatively preferable for nature to be valued more intrinsically, rather than for instrumental reasons such as the supply of drinking water, our analysis suggests that there may be better immediate prospects of political buy-in to a rights of future generations approach than an RoN one. There are also connections between rights of future generations and of nature, for example through the substantive right to a healthy environment. The argument for the representation of future generations as a response to the Lough Neagh crisis is therefore one that we advance out of pragmatism – not as an alternative to advocacy for the rights of nature, but as part of a two-pronged strategy to start to reverse the policy mistakes that have left the lough in such a catastrophic state.

This work was supported by the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action and the Department of Political Science and International Studies Competitive Research Fund at the University of Birmingham.