Minister seeks meeting with Earl over Lough Neagh ownership
- Author, Louise Cullen
- Role, BBC News NI agriculture and setting correspondent
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The Environment Minister Andrew Muir has mentioned he’s searching for a meeting with Earl Shaftesbury following his current feedback concerning the ownership of Lough Neagh.
Nicholas Ashley-Cooper mentioned he want to switch his property’s ownership of Lough Neagh “into a charity or community trust model, with rights of nature included”.
However, he mentioned the proposal “may take time”.
Andrew Muir mentioned on X, previously Twitter, that “community ownership remains my own preference”.
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‘No entity who can enhance well being of lough’
But in his article, the earl asks “to whom?”.
He added there’s “currently no entity that is offering to take it or who can guarantee to improve the environmental health of the lough.”
While the Shaftesbury Estate holds the rights to the mattress of the lough, 5 corporations have been granted licences to extract sand for which they pay a royalty to the property.
The earl acknowledged that “unauthorised and therefore completely unregulated and illegal sand extraction” had been going down for various years.
He mentioned the property had made “repeated attempts” to attempt to cease it.
Nicholas Ashley-Cooper mentioned the Estate’s Lough Neagh Ltd. firm “has no control” over the water within the lough and the vitamins that go into it.
He added that “collective action” was wanted to search out options to the problems going through the lough.
The earl describes the present scenario of Lough Neagh as “deeply upsetting” and added {that a} charity or neighborhood belief mannequin with rights of nature included as presumably “the best way” to assist the Lough’s long-term future.
Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) lecturer Peter Doran of the All-Island Rights of Nature Caucus welcomed the earl’s assertion.
“As an advocate of a rights of nature approach and community-ownership, I’m hopeful that other stakeholders, including the executive, will now collaborate on a challenging transition, a just transition,” he mentioned.
“The challenge is to re-imagine a novel community-led restoration in which the lough itself and its multitude of life systems are meaningfully included as part of that rights-bearing community.”
He added: “The lough will not be a mere object for extraction and exploitation however a topic of our shared historical past.
“The new chapter have to be one in every of collaboration, recognising that our destiny as a neighborhood is deeply entangled with the destiny of nature. We as soon as knew this. It is time to embrace that perception as soon as once more.”
A QUB tutorial who specialises in land regulation and has studied ownership of Lough Neagh in recent times welcomed the announcement by the earl.
Dr Bróna McNeill mentioned it might be a “novel project” for Northern Ireland that will require funding, time and widespread engagement.
She added that it was prone to be the “most appropriate” end result for Lough Neagh.
What are Rights of Nature?
Rights of Nature is a authorized concept that seeks to grant rights to parts of nature to guard them from hurt and permit them to flourish.
It is known that the Lough Neagh Report commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs doesn’t study ownership of the lough as a part of the instant options required.