It is difficult to categorise and describe Northern Ireland without some careful consideration.  Some call it a province; others, a statelet. ChatGPT refers to it as a ‘constituent country’ and I consider it to be a country – just about. To me, it is a small, troubled, dysfunctional, resilient, misunderstood and neglected country. The political and constitutional confusion and geographical location of Northern Ireland is the main reason I believe it can also be described as an environmental ‘Sacrifice Zone’. Northern Ireland is located on the island of Ireland, yet devolved from Westminster and part of the United Kingdom. It is not geographically connected to the island of Great Britain, though many staunch supporters of this political union here identify as British. The residents here can have either British or Irish passports, and many hold both.

This small, difficult country, just over a century old, is most famous for being the site of thirty years of guerilla warfare. This three decades of domestic terrorism is often referred to by the British and international press as ‘The Troubles’. The Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, bringing the domestic terrorism to a precarious, but thankfully lasting end. Yet while peace has largely held, the highly acclaimed and internationally celebrated agreement has been criticised in recent years by scholars and activists for neglecting the often-forgotten victim of war, our environment (Doran, 2024; Hwang, 2024).

In recent decades we have seen multiple environmental scandals costing the population millions of pounds and leaving devastating ecological impacts. The Renewable Heat Incentive scandal and the discovery of Europe’s largest illegal landfill at Mobuoy are just two examples (Hwang, 2024). Since 2023 we have had the blue-green algae crisis of Lough Neagh caused by decades of nutrient overloading and unregulated amounts of raw sewage entering waterways and our drinking supplies (Reid et al., 2024).

Lough Neagh is the largest ecological commons in Ireland and the United Kingdom, yet it was not factored into or accounted for in the peace process. This oversight is difficult to account for but has cost the population dearly in terms of environmental and public health. It supplies drinking water to 40% of the population and........

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