The Solution to Pollution is Socialist Revolution
Gerry Grainger, 28th September 2026
Last Saturday the Workers Party took part in a large demonstration outside Stormont where people from all over Northern Ireland marched to protest against the environmental crisis at Lough Neagh.
Lough Neagh is the largest wetland in either Britain or Ireland, supplies 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water and is a haven for wildlife. For generations it has been a source of income for local fishing communities and a place of recreation.
Now, however, like many other lakes and waterways in Northern Ireland, it is in danger of destruction, polluted by sewage and chemicals and witnessing falling fish populations, vanishing bird life and deteriorating water quality. This summer the water turned into a thick, toxic, green soup of blue green algae, feeding on the high levels of polluting nutrients from farmlands and sewage, killing wildlife and domestic animals.
The protection of the environment has become a key concern for the peoples all over the world. In Northern Ireland, the bourgeois parties, both orange and green, can never address the fundamental problem of environmental destruction and in order to exonerate capitalism from the destruction of the environment they blame the individual habits of working people.
Environmental degradation, water contamination, unsafe working conditions, and public health consequences are treated as someone else’s problem rather than the responsibility of the monopolies. The social costs are borne by workers, consumers, and public health systems, while profits remain private.
Capitalism cannot rationally use natural resources, and the working-class, local and fishing communities are going to pay the cost. The so-called “green transition”, green growth and carbon markets which divert public funds to private monopolies can never provide a solution. The capitalist system is profit-driven, disregarding the cost for nature, humans and other living species.
Environmental destruction is not an accidental by-product of capitalism. It is a result of a system which treats nature as a commodity to be exploited for profit. No lake or waterway should be in private hands.
Capitalism cannot solve a crisis it structurally produces. Only a system based on collective ownership and central planning can facilitate the transformation required.
The environmental struggle cannot take place separate from the class struggle. Real solutions to environmental problems demand total social transformation - the overthrow of capitalism itself.