It’s not very often that this blog plagiarises a column from an Irish daily newspaper. But a truly shocking column by that fine Belfast Telegraph journalist Sam McBride¹ is worth reprinting (almost) in full because it outlines in graphic detail the terrible current state of key parts of agriculture, the environment, electricity, health, education and infrastructure in Northern Ireland these days. And because many readers of this blog are in the Republic, and the Southern media rarely cover these vital areas of life in the North. And because McBride is a journalist with a broadly unionist outlook, what he writes is strikingly honest and truth-telling.

He writes: “There’s an end of days feel to Northern Ireland. It’s not that Irish unity is necessarily looming, but that dramatic elements of what society has taken for granted are breaking down, with limited reason to believe that they’ll be coming back soon. A sort of half-hearted anarchy pervades. There are still laws, police and regulatory bodies. The streets aren’t filled with looters. But so much of what an advanced democratic society takes for granted is crumbling.

A veteran unionist politician recently said to me: ‘The whole place is an absolute mess’….One senior business figure phoned a week ago to lament how so much of Northern Ireland is falling apart. He likened the situation to Libya – there, two warring leaders had fought while their infrastructure collapsed, killing thousands of people when two dams burst. Here, he said that the two sides were expending their energy on tribal disputes while critical infrastructure degrades around them.

The consequences might not come while these politicians and civil servants are in power, but come they surely will. He said that spending on roads had been almost £1 billion short over the last nine years – a false economy because the more roads regress, the more expensive they become to maintain.

The Civil Service isn’t trusted by the Treasury, the Irish Government or business to spend their money, he said, because the scandalous behaviour of ‘cash for ash’ had not been addressed – despite what the head of the Civil Service claims [McBride was the journalist who exposed the full horror of the NI Civil Service’s catastrophic dysfunctionality during the Renewable Heat Incentive fiasco in his superb 2019 book Burned].

“Having sown the wind, we’re now reaping the whirlwind. This day next week [30th September], Northern Ireland enters a critical period of electricity insecurity. Kilroot power station’s coal-fired units shut next Saturday evening, but the gas-fired generators which were meant to replace them are nowhere near ready.

Even when those generators come online some time early next year, they will not replace the lost capacity due to a gaffe by those overseeing the electricity system. There will be a critical gap in generating capacity which means that on calm, cold days when problems develop at other plants there could be blackouts. Yet no one seems terribly exercised by this. There’s scant evidence of it being treated as a crisis.

Twenty miles west, Lough Neagh’s poisoning is clearly visible from space.² It will remain dangerously polluted until 2043 even if the sources of those pollution are slashed – but they’re still growing.

Stormont didn’t just let this happen; it actively facilitated it. The ‘Going for Growth’ strategy overseen by Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, but backed by all five major parties, used public money to subsidise a move from traditional farming methods to industrial factory farms.

That means a dismal life for hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of birds cooped up in soulless buildings. But it also means vast quantities of excrement coming from what might just be a few acres, with nowhere near enough land on which to spread it without polluting watercourses.

Poultry farms increased production by 35% in the six years after 2012 before falling back. The number of pigs has increased by 72% in the last decade. Farms now produce nine million cubic metres of slurry a year – enough to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza almost four times, or to fill more than 800,000 concrete mixer lorries.

Stormont has turned parts of Northern Ireland into a vast toilet so that multinational companies like the Brazilian-owned Moy Park can export mass-produced food. Rather than cracking down on polluters, last year DUP minister Edwin Poots slashed the fines on farmers who repeatedly pollute waterways.

Dr Les Gornall, an expert in slurry, yesterday told the BBC Nolan Show that without intervention Lough Neagh will become “a stinking septic tank that’s 400 square kilometres with no lid on it” from which we can no longer draw drinking water. Before that point, he said it could attract foreign pests like fever-bearing mosquitos.

Lough Neagh is at a tipping point, he warned, and “when you hit these tipping points, nature is unforgiving”. Dr Gornall said “there’s no doubt” that Stormont’s policies have created this crisis. Yet civil servants this week told journalists there’s no evidence that ‘Going for Growth’ had harmed the lough.

40 miles north-west of the lough lies another environmental catastrophe. Mobuoy illegal dump on the outskirts of Londonderry is on such a scale that it can only be compared to dumps run by the Italian mafia.

Stormont’s Department of the Environment was repeatedly warned about an enterprise so vast that many local councils and the PSNI were (they say unwittingly) having their waste dumped there. By the time it was shut a decade ago, 1.6 million tons of waste was in the ground. It’s still there and is polluting the River Faughan which supplies much of Derry’s drinking water.

Ten years later, civil servants are still discussing what to do. A public inquiry into the scandal was blocked by a minister – Edwin Poots.

The DUP also blocked an independent environmental protection agency which would have been outside ministerial control. A very senior civil servant who sat in Executive meetings told me that even within the Civil Service the Department of Agriculture was regarded as a lobby group for farmers, having been ‘captured’ by the industry. The fact that chief vet Robert Huey hounded a conscientious vet out of her job when she found uncomfortable evidence of rules being broken does nothing to dispel that concern.

In 2015, agriculture and environment were bundled into one department in which agriculture would be overwhelmingly dominant. A former minister said that the original name for the department was simply ‘the Department of Agriculture’ and this only changed when Alliance ministers David Ford and Stephen Farry objected. The DUP and Sinn Fein went into a room for a while and returned with a new name – the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).

“That just shows you what the thinking was,” the former minister said. But while the name changed, the substance didn’t. What had been created was farcical: a department of pollution which was also a department to prevent pollution. The conflict of interest was obvious, and not accidental.

It wasn’t the only conflict of interest. NI Water now tells us that the tap water which 40% of Northern Ireland drinks after being taken from Lough Neagh’s polluted waters and treated is safe to drink. But NI Water has a vested interest in us believing that it can ‘safely’ keep flushing 200,000 tons of sewage a year into the lough.

All of this could get dramatically worse. The Secretary of State has set a deliberately sparse Stormont budget, presumably in the belief that the collapse of public services would force the DUP back into Stormont.

NI Water says that this budget means that in a few months’ time it will be releasing even more raw sewage…and sewage will back up into homes and businesses, closing schools and hospitals.

Meanwhile, the police are leaderless and overseen by an inept Policing Board. Even before its dangerous data breach, the PSNI’s budget was plundered to an extent which meant basic policing would be impossible. A toxic culture means staff are trying to get out as soon as they can afford to do so, leaving inexperienced officers who will inevitably make more and more mistakes, thus exacerbating the crisis.

As winter looms, people are needlessly dying in hospitals which are unreformed because of calamitous cowardice by politicians who thought that doing do would cost them votes. Staff are burnt out, strikes have become routine, and medics are leaving for other jurisdictions. Patients able to pay can escape their agony at a price; those who can’t are left to suffer…Now health faces a £470 million shortfall. [On 25th September the Irish Times reported on an Irish Department of Health study which showed that proportionately more than twice as many people in the North were on a waiting list for appointments (inpatient and outpatient) than in the Republic].

“The Department of Education is £382 million short and admits that disabled children will experience ‘major negative impacts.’ The infrastructure budget is £167 million short. Officials there say all streetlights will have to be switched off and salting of the roads will end.

Department by department, there are scores of other unthinkable outcomes. Some cuts in one area will create more spending elsewhere: no longer gritting roads and footpaths will see more people ending up in already overwhelmed hospitals.

For many of us, this is not the Northern Ireland we recognise. The schools our children attend still excel, the roads seem much as they were a decade ago and environmental collapse is not visible where we live. Northern Ireland is still for many of us an amazing place to live and to work. Our cost of living is lower than anywhere else in the UK or Ireland, and so much of life has improved dramatically from our childhood. But the reality of these problems is no less tangible just because we don’t experience them ourselves…

Above all this sits the need to reform Stormont’s bureaucracy. Civil servants could do this themselves relatively easily. A few high-profile sackings or demotions for scandalous behaviour would do more to put the wind up the organisation than any number of reviews, reports or new rules. But the current crop of senior civil servants shows little inclination to do anything beyond talking. We also obviously need a government – and one which is radically better than what we’ve had.

This is not to say that returning to Stormont is easy for the DUP. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. The party – in full knowledge of the consequences – chose to collapse government and promise voters that it would not allow its restoration until the Irish Sea border was demolished…

But for a party which says it cherishes Northern Ireland’s place in the Union, the DUP’s fingers are on a staggering number of the problems which might persuade people to back Irish unity. Northern Ireland’s public services are breaking, and in so doing they’re breaking people. Only those insulated from this reality could believe that this can continue indefinitely without significant political consequences.”

¹ ‘NI’s frightening decay is breaking public services – and breaking people’, Belfast Telegraph, 23 September

² Sam McBride, ‘Lough Neagh has become a scene of Biblical disaster, and Stormont was central to its destruction’, Belfast Telegraph, 9 September