Northern Ireland Nature Nonprofits

Northern Ireland packs a great deal into a small space: the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway, the granite of the Mournes sweeping down to the sea, and Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, sitting in the middle of it all. The lough supplies drinking water to much of the population and supports the last major commercial eel fishery in Europe, fished in a tradition that goes back to the Bronze Age.

Lough Neagh is also in crisis. Nutrient runoff from intensive agriculture, principally poultry and dairy, has fed algal blooms so severe that the water has turned green and toxic in recent summers, an ecological emergency that is impossible to ignore and impossible to fix without confronting the farming model that causes it.

The organizations here work on that agricultural nutrient problem, restore the peatlands of the uplands, and protect the coast and the loughs. It is a small place where the connection between what happens on the land and what happens in the water is unusually visible.