Moy Park, a Northern Irish agri-food company and the largest private-sector employer in the region, has breached environmental regulations more than 500 times across three different sites without being prosecuted, according to an investigation by BBC Spotlight. The firm has violated legal limits on hundreds of occasions, under trade effluent consents, and discharges of effluent have potential to be highly polluting. The breaches were found during an investigation into pollution in Lough Neagh. Moy Park said it strictly controls and treats all trade effluent before it is discharged, adding that such breaches incur charges that are passed to Northern Ireland Water for further treatment to ensure safety.
Andrew Muir, Northern Ireland’s Agriculture and Environment Minister, said he was “very concerned” on being presented with the findings. He is to seek answers from his officials as to why Moy Park has not previously been prosecuted. The region’s regulator, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, acknowledged oversight of such cases. Campaigners fear that trade effluent violations, sewage spills and agricultural pollution are influencing the development of toxic cyanobacteria on Lough Neagh.
Moy Park, which has a number of factories in Northern Ireland, is owned by US agri-food firm Pilgrim’s. It has advertised at high-profile sporting events including the 2010 World Cup. Each of its sites at Dungannon, Ballymena and Craigavon has multiple breaches of the trade effluent consent and sits within the catchment area for Lough Neagh. Trade effluent receives additional treatment with Northern Ireland Water’s (NIW) treatment plants, but the broadcaster reported that raw sewage and untreated trade effluent spills happen on 25,000 occasions annually at NIW sites. NI Water blamed historic underinvestment for shortcomings in its network and said the spills cannot be stopped without additional investment
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