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Toxic algae has been a problem on Lough Neagh since June - yet the department tasked with protecting our environment didn’t hold their first operational taskforce meeting on the issue until August 18.

If that doesn’t highlight the complacency of our supposed environmental guardians, I don’t know what does.

I think it’s well past time the Audit Office looked into how the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs is managing its obligations when it comes to protecting nature, driving down pollution and regulating toxins entering our environment.

Read more: Everything we know about the blue-green algae 'killing' Lough Neagh

They did a pretty good job in their planning system report - which highlighted major shortcomings on just about everything.

And now the state of Lough Neagh has laid bare just how ineffective DAERA is in doing the job they are there to do.

Let me remind you, Northern Ireland still has no independent environment agency. We have Northern Ireland Environment Agency, which sings to the tune of DAERA.

And DAERA has done a great job of slashing funding that could be used to monitor and assess the impacts of pollution across the land from agriculture - which remains NI’s biggest issue even when it comes to carbon emissions.

Major conflict of interest klaxon.

I know we have the Office for Environmental Protection now, which is investigating the advice DAERA has been giving councils up and down the country on ammonia emissions - which believe it or not also largely comes from farming.

But that’s all they have been able to probe - because as we reported earlier this year, DAERA, unbelievably cut funding to the supposedly independent agency hobbling any efforts to investigate any other failings like the Stormont department’s environmental assessment regime.

The OEP’s CEO, Natalie Prosser, said: “The OEP is aware of the multiple chronic pressures affecting the condition of Lough Neagh, and the current acute symptom of these in the form of blooms of blue-green algae.

“We are currently reviewing how our ongoing and future programmes of work can help tackle these issues to protect and improve the condition of Lough Neagh and the wider Northern Ireland environment.”

But the UK-body, which recently identified possible failures to comply with environmental law by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Environment Agency and Ofwat over regulation of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) has its work cut out.

That’s largely because it is funded by the very departments it is designed to probe - which seems like a major oversight to me.

Who’s going to pay their executioner to swing the axe, afterall?

As far as I can see they don’t get nearly enough money to tackle the huge job in front of them - or employ anywhere near enough staff.

But none of this is surprising given the row brewing over in England where the Tories are doing their damndest to kill any nature still left healthy on these isles with by-balls for builders, a free pass for water companies pouring millions of tonnes of raw sewage into the seas and even their decisions to forgo laws aimed at protecting us from toxic pesticides.

At the very heart of the nature decimation we’re witnessing right before our very eyes - is whether government bodies are complying with the law.

Just like you and I, they have to - but they seem to think they can get away with it when they don’t/

DAERA has known for decades that Lough Neagh wasn’t in a good way. Their own reports told them.

But they haven’t done a damn thing about it except tinker around the edges with voluntary schemes that have come way too late for the precious resource, which is dying right in front of our eyes.

I, and many others, saw these issues coming. I spent years highlighting very serious concerns about decades of unregulated sand extraction - while fish and bird numbers plummeted.

The eel fishers, scale fish fishers and many more opposed planning permission for it to continue when the issue became so hot, Stormont had no choice but to make a decision.

Yet despite the proximity of their sand suckers to fish spawning grounds on the bed of Lough Neagh, Nichola Mallon gave them the green light to keep going.

That decision angered me and many others - but you know, a few jobs were at risk and that sand was needed for roads the Department for Infrastructure was planning.

Then we have the largely unregulated levels of pollution flowing into Lough Neagh from farms across its basin.

DAERA knew the lake was eutrophic and that nitrate and phosphorous levels were unsustainable.

One of their own reports highlighted that even if we stopped polluting the waters - it would take 21 years for it to be healthy again.

And still they did nothing of note.

Farmers here still get derogations to spread 250kg of slurry per hectare a year - even though the rest of the EU is stopping these relaxations and bringing other countries, like Ireland, into line with the law.

The Nutrient Action Programmes (NAP) Regulations (2019) limit the amount of nitrogen (N) from livestock manure that can be applied to land at 170 kg N per hectare per year on all farms - but some are still being allowed 250kg.

And I’m still waiting to find out if DAERA has any plans to get rid of the derogations - which come too late for Lough Neagh - but could help other areas.

The root cause of this issue is Going For Growth, which was ushered in by Michelle O’Neill and Arlene Foster in 2012 and signed off by the Exec.

I wrote in this column in August 2021 about how it has cost our environment dearly as the huge rise in intensive farming and increased in animals sent to slaughtered also delivered unsustainable levels of pollution.

The lion’s share of agriculture emissions come from beef, dairy cattle and fertilisation of land according to a KPMG report commissioned by agri-food businesses concerned about how the Climate Bill would hit their pockets.

I also wrote that month, about how slurry was ruining our lakes, rivers and the air around megafarms according to a nitrates derogation report by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs.

So, they can’t say they didn’t see this coming.

In their own words, DAERA told me: “We know that the underpinning drivers of the change include the excess nutrients from agricultural and waste water systems within the Lough Neagh catchment, combined with climate change and the associated weather patterns, with the very warm June, followed by the wet July and August.”

Yet here Lough Neagh is - a sludgy mess of toxic blue-green algae that is making people sick and killing animals; has decimated fishing, finished watersports and left many without jobs.

I’m glad the public is finally angry - but we are doomed to repeat this mess over and over again if we leave it until it’s too late to sit up and take notice and pressure leaders to actually do something about biodiversity loss and the climate crisis too.

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