Poultry produces much of the slurry that is polluting Northern Ireland’s waterways, with Lough Neagh becoming the totemic example. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty
Moy Park, the North’s largest private-sector employer, has been Brazilian and US-owned since 2008. It is bringing workers in and taking profits out. There are still good technical and white-collar jobs in the meat processing industry. However, there is no shortage of such work – manufacturers in the same towns struggle to recruit staff.
Obviously, Northern Ireland’s overall £5 billion agri-food sector has significant economic value, with four-fifths of revenue from sales outside the region. But this depends on a reputation for quality that pollution will destroy. Lough Neagh eels had been a small, exclusive export market; the collapse of the fishery has been reported around the world. It would not take many more tales of disaster to affect food exports in general.
Moy Park lobbied for the 2013 “Going for Growth” Stormont strategy to develop intensive agriculture. Farms supplying it were encouraged to install anaerobic digesters to dispose of slurry, although this did not remove the critical pollutants., the boiler scheme that brought down Stormont in 2017. A subsequent inquiry found there had been no corruption. Officials and ministers, from the DUP and Sinn Féin, had simply tripped over themselves to give the industry whatever it wanted.