At Least Ozymandias Built Something

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The famous line from Shelley’s poem Ozymandias invites us to consider the legacy of an ancient King, the eponymous Ozymandias. A great King and a great builder Ozymandias may have been, but time had literally reduced his legacy to dust. It’s a meditation on how no matter who you are or what you do, time eventually sweeps it all away.

On the other hand, at least Ozymandias built something worth commemorating and while it all eventually fell to pieces you get the sense it didn’t do so on his watch. We here can only look at the efforts of our leaders to build something and shake our heads as doing anything or fixing anything seems beyond them. As 2025 ended though the annual release of formerly classified files got underway and allowed us to see glimpses of just how much of today’s mess lies in decisions that were made decades ago.

The biggest story has to be Lough Neagh of course. I think nothing, save the effective collapse of our health system, is as totemic of the dysfunction of our government as the mismanagement of this incredibly important natural resource. We are all familiar with what is happening in the Lough by now, how it has been poisoned (mostly) by unrestricted agricultural activity and how the Executive seems too fearful of the farming lobby to take the steps required to restore it to good health. Now I have to add I am no expert on agriculture, and I have to accept there are probably trade-offs that have to be made between the needs of the environment and the need to be able to feed ourselves, but when the Lough is literally turning green I think it is fair comment, even as a layman, to say the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. And I’d like to know how we ended up in this mess.

This Belfast Telegraph report by Sam McBride paints a damning picture.

A decade before Stormont used public money to encourage an explosion of factory farms, the then Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD) knew that Northern Ireland already had too many farm animals, one of the documents uncovered by the Belfast Telegraph shows.

Yet in 2014, then Agriculture Minister Michelle O’Neill – with the backing of the entire Executive – would launch the ‘Going For Growth’ strategy to drastically increase agricultural production, leading to an increase in factory farms and an explosion of manure…these files prove officials knew not only how bad the problem was – but what was causing it, yet only acted in a limited way when under threat of massive EU fines.

The report even reveals that the massive increase in pollution that damaged the Lough was caused by decisions made in previous decades, even as far back as the 1940s, that incentivised farmers engage in practices that increased production but at a horrendous environmental cost we are now paying (showing you can only disregard the environmental consequences for so long before the bill comes due).

And in 2014, they supercharged the problem with the Going for Growth strategy. Andrew Muir recently said

“Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister has apologised to farmers for decisions made by predecessors that incentivised agricultural growth but contributed to pollution in Lough Neagh.

Andrew Muir said “we got things wrong in the past and I apologise for that” but vowed to “fix the situation”…

The strategy, jointly sponsored by the then agriculture minister Michelle O’Neill and her economy counterpart Arlene Foster, incentivised an expansion of Northern Ireland’s agricultural output, including the beef and dairy sector.

However, the expansion has meant more slurry being spread on farms, the run-off of which often finds its way into waterways like Lough Neagh.

Phosphorous, a mineral found in slurry and fertilisers, has been shown to be a leading cause of algal blooms.”

But McBride’s report hammers home the same fact again and again. They knew. Even as they promoted the Going for Growth strategy, they were in possession of the research showing that the very practices they were encouraging more of had contributed to the Lough’s ruination. It makes the current state of the waters even harder to abide. It wasn’t simple neglect in giving the farmers maximum leeway and it most certainly wasn’t incompetence informed by ignorance as they encouraged them on. They made a conscious choice to prioritise the short-term economic gains of encouraging the poor practices employed by our farmers rather than the ecological well-being of one of our major water resources. Now a few months ago the Department of Agriculture launched a public consultation on reducing pollution in our waterways, but whether this turns out to be genuine turning or a sticking plaster solution remains to be seen, though my money is on it being a sticking plaster solution. Cynicism and scepticism sadly tends to be rewarded when casting an eye over the Executive.

But it’s not just agricultural activity causing the problems happening in Lough Neagh. Our decrepit water infrastructure also plays a role, albeit a smaller one. It is simply incapable of treating our waste to remove the pollutants that have choked the Lough and other waterways. Worse, the decaying system is affecting our building sector and preventing the construction of much needed housing. As this article in ‘The Impartial Reporter’ from a few days ago reminds us

“The ongoing political failure to properly fund NI Water is directly contributing to a spiralling housing crisis, as a chronic lack of supply is pushing up sale prices and rents, according to Build Homes NI.

The lobby group that represents some of the biggest residential construction companies in Northern Ireland was set up this year to campaign for action to address the deepening wastewater problem.

The body claims it is becoming almost impossible to gain planning permission for new-build projects in many areas, because of an inability to secure the green light from NI Water to connect the homes to its overcapacity sewerage network…

Build Homes NI has highlighted that house completion rates are at a 60-year low in the region – around 6,000 a year – at a time when nearly 50,000 households are on a waiting list for social homes.”

The issue with our water system is that it is underfunded and needs more investment but the Executive cannot afford it on its current budget and most of the governing parties are loathe to use revenue-raising measures to raise the money needed to modernise the system i.e. water charges. The BBC reported in the summer on the options the parties were considering to help fund NI Water, but water charges on the general public weren’t even mentioned. It is not hard to imagine that the northern public, squeezed by the cost of living crisis, revolting against any Executive plan to charge them for water, even if such plans were argued to be a necessity (which they are) required to help alleviate both the housing crisis, alleviate pollution and remove an unnecessary fetter on our economic development. And I am not even arguing that they SHOULD implement water charges, merely pointing out that is a possible solution to this pressing need they have rejected without coming up with a viable alternative. Yet pressing need does not lead to institutional reaction from the Executive, if drift or deferral is ever an option it is invariably the option selected. It’s easier.

Nor are our problems restricted solely to our dying loughs and creaking water systems, nor are they wholly the fault of decisions made by the Executive. Short-sightedness and deferral to existing vested interests appears to be a feature, not a flaw of our system. Another declassified paper reported on by Sam McBride shows how the civil service resisted investing in a single airport in Belfast to compete with Dublin, instead preferring to maintain the two airport model we have to this day…

“Civil servants were told a quarter of a century ago that Dublin Airport would pull more and more passengers from Northern Ireland unless there was a single Belfast Airport – but they fought against that suggestion.

Files declassified at the Public Record Office in Belfast show Stormont unease at a study commissioned by Whitehall’s Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) which examined the future of air travel in Northern Ireland.

Since then, Dublin Airport has grown to dominate the island’s air travel market, now handling almost 35 million passengers a year in comparison to just 6.7 million passengers for Belfast International Airport and 2.3m passengers at Belfast City Airport.”

The report goes on to highlight resistance from local civil servants against the idea of having a single airport in the Belfast region that could compete with Dublin

“In March 1999, Robin McMinnis, director of the Department of the Environment’s (DoE) Air and Sea Ports Division, said DETR “do not appear to have appreciated that a centralist approach is not appropriate to our local situation where the market is dominated by two privately owned competing companies”.

He said that “the problem was compounded by a certain naivety on the part of DETR and, without wishing to be unkind, I sense that they have not fully thought through the implications of the exercise or considered how any findings might be implemented”…Examining the possibility of creating a ‘Northern Ireland Hub’ airport, it looked at either limiting Belfast City Airport to domestic business traffic or shutting it entirely…However, even examining the possibility of shutting one of Belfast’s airports enraged Belfast City Airport.”

The end result of course is that rather than having one competitive airport, Belfast is served by two in competition with each other and who have managed to become less than the sum of their parts as a result.

And yes, that means we have two entities in the north which ultimately stymied each other allowing their southern equivalent to roar ahead…as metaphors go, that one is particularly on the nose. I’ve never really understood why Belfast, a fairly small city, has two airports serving it when bigger cities elsewhere make do with one. It’s just one of those absurdities that emerged that we have normalised and which is too entrenched to rectify but it is worth it from time to time to just stop and wonder at the sheer folly of it all and remind yourself that outcomes like these aren’t typical.

And you don’t just need to look at Lough Neagh, or our creaking water infrastructure, or how we managed to build two airports for a small city that dragged each other down whilst Dublin powered on. You can look all around and see the same kind of short-termist thinking everywhere. It is what led us from planning for a single world-class sporting stadium at the Maze site to upgrades to three existing stadiums in Belfast, one of which hasn’t even been built yet. The common thread between the air, the water and even the land if we factor in the ongoing farce over the A5 is the same. They are the product of exceptionally poor decision making, whether that was by ministers in a one party state back in the 1940s, disinterested direct rulers at the end of the 20^th century, or the gridlock of the fiefdoms we label departments at Stormont which Alex Kane rightfully lambasts.

Today I look upon the Executive’s works. The failures. The aborted projects. The absence of progress on so many fronts. And trust me, I do despair.