Feargal fighting to save Britain’s waters
Undertone goes from teenage dreams to rivers and streams
FEARGAL Sharkey has gone from reeling in chart hits to becoming an eco warrior fighting to protect the perilous state of Britain’s rivers.
After quitting the music business 10 years ago, the ex-frontman of rock band The Undertones is now likely to be found spending a few tranquil hours fishing in order to get his post-Teenage Kicks.
He is just as passionate and excited about his lifelong love of fly-fishing as he was when he sang his band’s anthem.
Spending decades standing in rivers, means he has gained an encyclopedic knowledge on endangered chalk streams and the agencies he says are responsible for letting them die on its watch.
The Northern Irish singer, 62, who also had a number one solo hit in 1985 with A Good Heart, said: “Chalk streams are the northern hemisphere’s version of the Amazon, these streams contain some of the most pristine water on the planet.
“It spends anything from six months to 60 years filtering through chalk.
“The water companies have been allowed by the Environment Agency to deprive rivers of the very basic resource they need to survive – water.
“There is not one river in England in
good ecological condition. Every single one is being slowly poisoned by sewage. It is a shocking state of affairs.”
Not a single lake or river recently tested in England achieved “good chemical status”, according to a report released last year. Only 16% are considered to have “good ecological status”.
Chalk streams hold a special place in fishermen’s hearts but they are also incredibly important ecologically.
With waters at a constant 10C and gravel beds, they host a variety of creatures such as trout, voles and kingfishers.
There are only 210 chalk streams in the world, and England is home to 85% of them – Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows was set on one.
We are standing on the banks of the
River Lea, at the Amwell Magna Fishery, Herts, the oldest fly-fishing club in England, where Feargal is chairman.
It was at this spot that he told me he first discovered the plight of the nation’s waterways – after the chalk stream had almost completely dried up, putting the brown trout at risk.
Although the club was able to save the fish, the incident spurred him on to become an environmental champion.
“In a word, the state of them is catastrophic,” said Feargal. “There is not a single chalk stream that is not suffering from extensive environmental damage.”
He added: “How can we lecture other countries at COP26 [the climate conference the UK will host in Glasgow in November]? How can we chastise Brazil over fires in the Amazonian rainforest and criticise Indonesia about deforestation? We are destroying a globally rare resource in our own backyard. “We’re simply taking all the water out of them and, believe it or not, dumping raw sewage in them. If we don’t do something, we’ll lose them.” Raw sewage spilled into UK rivers and seas more than 400,000 times last year, according to Environment Agency figures. Overflows are designed to discharge diluted sewage into waterways during heavy rainfall to prevent it from backing up into homes.
Feargal described the volume of overflow as “shocking” and said it demonstrated why the country’s water infrastructure needs a “radical overhaul”. He called the Environment Agency a “discredited, failed organisation”. With campaigners Good Law Project he plans to launch a judicial review of the way the agency and the Department for Environment,Food and Rural Affairs manage England’s rivers.