Northern Ireland

Hopes to bring Lough Neagh into public ownership

The Lough Neagh Development Trust will try to bring the lake into public ownership
The Lough Neagh Development Trust will try to bring the lake into public ownership The Lough Neagh Development Trust will try to bring the lake into public ownership

PLANS to bring Lough Neagh into public ownership have moved a step closer after a trust was set up to buy key assets.

An interim Lough Neagh Development Trust board has been established following a consultation exercise over recent months on behalf of the Department of Agriculture.

The results of the research, which involved public meetings and a three-day conference, have been published by Development Trusts NI.

The bed of the freshwater lake, which is the largest in Ireland, is currently owned by the Shaftesbury estate which is based in England.

A priority for the new board, which includes former civil rights campaigner and Mid Ulster MP Bernadette McAliskey, will be to purchase the lough bed in the coming years.

The current Earl of Shaftesbury, Nicholas Ashley Cooper, is said to have been supportive of the process to date.

Interim board member Kate Clifford said the “ambition of this is to put the ownership of this into the hands of the people who have the biggest interest”.

She said the board will “have to be imaginative” in how it raises cash to finance the purchase of the lough bed but the setting up of the trust is a “starting point from which to build”.

Nigel Kinnaird, chair of Development Trusts NI, said: “This report looks critically for the first time at community acquisition on a scale not previously envisaged and its findings and recommendations come at the end of an intensive seven-month period of work.”

Agriculture minister Michelle O’Neill welcomed the publication of the report.

“I welcome this significant step forward in recommending that a development trust is established and I look forward to the day where the lough is returned to public ownership, so that it can be developed for the entire community who use and live by it,” she said.