Can we reverse the damage done to our polluted rivers and seas? What was it like to write Teenage Kicks? How has Brexit hamstrung the music industry?
From punk singer to political activist, Feargal Sharkey is now the leading figure in the fight against sewage and water pollution in the UK. On today's episode of Leading he sits down with Alastair to discuss environmentalism, growing up in Derry, the success of The Undertones, and much, much more.
TRIP Plus:
Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics.
Instagram:
@restispolitics
Twitter:
@RestIsPolitics
Email:
restispolitics@gmail.com
Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Restless Polities Leading with me Alastair Campbell flying solo today without Rory Stewart who is logistically challenged shall we say between between airports But I'm delighted to be joined by somebody who you'll have heard if you listen to the rest of this politics question time a few days ago and who has got a very very interesting history.

We'll talk a bit about your childhood, we'll talk a bit about your career, very successful career as a musician.

But the reason why you're on leading is because in recent months in particular you've become a really prominent and significant voice in a very very important cultural, political, social, economic debate and that is water.

Alasdair Campbell, thank you very much and thank you for the glorious praise and wise words and insight, all of it completely untrue of course and I hope I don't be bashful and retire quietly back to my home in North London.

I think that there's a wonderful quote from Roosevelt who said, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Now, I get the impression that you know a lot about the water industry, that you do your homework, you do your research, you're mildly obsessive, but more importantly you care.

Now I guess your character is key to this, You've obviously got a personality that you're driven and you if you decide upon something you go for it.

I just want to go right back to the beginning.

You ended up living most of your life in England.

But how much of a Northern Irishman do you feel?

I would listen distinctly because it's what created me and it is very Freudian but invariably tell me about your childhood and in my case that was quite an interesting childhood.

My father was chairman of the Labour Party in Derry when there was such a thing.

Yeah, do you think, by the way, do you think there should be again?

And that's ironically enough, when my father passed away, the Irish Times did this quite big obituary.

And even in the 1950s, he spent huge amounts of time in this ultimately futile effort of trying to reach out to the Protestant community on the simple basis that everybody needed to bury the hatchet of sectarianism because the industrialists in Northern Ireland were using that division to separate the working classes, to diffuse their ability to make a cohesive strong argument about pay conditions, holiday pay, maternity pay, housing and everything else, and it was used to exploit the working classes in both communities.

Now, as it turns out, I could argue that my dad was clearly 40 years ahead of his time and trying to make that argument.

He was also branch secretary of his local union, the electrician's union.

I'm still traumatised and probably spend years in therapy about being taken as an 8, 9 year old child to a meeting, a union meeting, and I'm in a room with 400 other men and my father, they're all referring to him as brother Sharky and as a confused eight-year-old I'm going who the hell are these people I've never met none of these you're not my brother you're not my uncle you're not my dad's brother I've no idea who you are why you calling my dad brother Sharky?

The truth is in the Sharky family it wasn't my dad was the political powerhouse.

Like all good Irish matriarchal families, that would be my mother.

My mum was massively motivated about the Civil Rights Movement, massively motivated about trying to preserve the Irish language and culture and the arts and was friends with people like Brian Friel and Shanno Casey and all kinds of people.

And it was my mum who on the morning of April the 9th, 1969, demanded that the whole family climbed into the car, the dad drove us all to the opposite side of Ireland where as a family we took part in the People's Democracy Civil Rights March between Belfast and Dublin protesting against injustices to the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.

Just a minute, and just on your names, we know you as Fergal Sharkey, you're actually called Sean Fergal Sharkey.

Oh bloody hell, you're called Shan Fergal Sharkey, right?

If anybody knows the song, an Irish song called Sian South and Gorial.

I'm afraid not even the Restless Politics podcast can afford that excessively modest fee.

Sian South and Freglo Hanlon were killed attacking a police station in Northern Ireland in January of 1957, a year before I was born.

My mother clearly without the aid of Ultrascan or other aids clearly decided that if her newborn child was going to be a boy she was going to name him Sian Firdle in honour of 2 dead IRA men.

Now what might that tell you about my mother's politics?

Well it gives me a fair indication that she wasn't maybe as committed to the Labour Party cause as your dad.

Oh listen, conversely it's 1 of those things that I grew up in a household where it's extraordinary thinking about it and it is incredibly frightening but I hope it does answer your question.

There was nights in my kitchen that the local plumber, the electrician, the housewife, the local poet, the local schoolteacher would discuss bringing down the national government in Northern Ireland.

year old child, I watched the local housewife, electrician, plumber or electrician schoolteacher bring down the bloody government in Northern Ireland or play a role in achieving that.

So I grew up in a house where, well, anything's possible.

The other bit, my mum organised this festival called Fist and I'll call him Kill which was all about preserving the Irish language and culture and everything else.

So other nights there'd be people having mad philosophical arguments about the merits and disdains of how much Seamus Heaney tried to replicate William Butler Yeats and maybe he should get his own gig together.

So when I reflect upon it, you just got 1 extraordinary householder now, an extraordinary opportunity to grow up in, 1 extraordinary life to have led.

And would you say you share the basic politics of your parents?

There's no way around that whatsoever and I still have this very simple belief that society has an obligation to protect the vulnerable and that's kind of my opening game in any game of politics whatsoever.

And so When did you leave Northern Ireland?

That was the early 1980s, I think 83, 84.

It'll come as no surprise that the early undertones, we tried quite hard to kind of still live there.

I think we were incredibly conscious that, oh God, are we going to be that classic little band, has a bit of a hit and that's it you're out of there within 5 minutes and the next people see of you you're in some national newspaper surrounded by champagne bottles and lots of cash and we tried really hard to just be those kids back in Derry But by the early 1980s and particularly when I was clearly focusing on going out to try and make my own records, invariably that was going to mean a move to London.

And just tell me a little bit, I'm fascinated in the way bands come together in the whole creative process.

I mean just give me a flavour of what being a young, want-to-be professional musician was like at that time.

It was a completely random act of coming together where there was literally 2 brothers and a couple of their friends.

Okay but we've got no gear and by the way it doesn't matter because nobody can play anything anyway.

Oh but well we need somebody that can sing because we're not good any good at it.

Oh well I know this bloke in school called Sharky.

He's on all these feshes and all these Irish singing competitions.

He wins loads of medals, I'll ask him and maybe he'll come and sing.

And the first time I turned up and met the other guys that were to become the Undertones, Little did I know that all the kit they had, the guitars, the amplifiers, the drums, they actually owned none of it, they completely borrowed every bit of it and as it turned out nobody could play a thing.

So what are the chances in the big universe we all live in that 5 random kids with no outward talent, ability or background could just come together and within 2 years have created Teenage Kicks.

It was literally people just sitting around going well I've got this tune, I've got this idea for something, what do you think?

And ironically enough we were always driven curiously at the time by criticism and by people going you can't do that.

See there's more Freudian, it's just occurred to me.

At the time in Ireland and around where we grew up, there were kind of tribute bands.

So there was a local band that could play the whole of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, absolutely note perfect.

And that's what they would do every Friday night.

We'd get up in a pub and they would play Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, absolutely note perfect.

They looked at us and went, well you can't play.

And that would just kind of make us go and practice even more.

And then we realised, well they can't play their own songs so you know what, we're going to write songs.

And it is just 1 of those random acts of creativity.

You can put 5 people from creative backgrounds in a room and nothing will happen.

It'll be the most boring hour you've ever spent of your life.

But you just put 5 different personalities in and for some unknown reason, the way they interact and relate to each other, suddenly this magic occurs and suddenly we, the original idea was, thanks to a guy in Belfast called Terry Hooley who ran a little record shop who let us borrow a hundred quid to pay for 8 hours studio time.

So 1 week we went and spent 4 hours in the studio recording.

We went back a week later and spent another 4 hours mixing it.

Oh by the way, we had no idea what we were doing.

And I still to this day think I was standing there going, well a bit more of the blue knob please, but I've no idea what the blue knob actually bloody well does.

And if you've ever seen the movie, and if you haven't, Good Vibrations the movie, it's about Terry.

We're there in the studio and everybody else, we're just doing our thing and everybody else in the studio sitting there listening to Teenage Kicks being recorded for the first time just going oh my god we've never heard anything like this.

And we're just going, yeah but we're 5 kids from Derry and this is what we do.

Talk about your life going in a different direction.

I never listened completely and that's, if you now go back and look at the footage you'll see that some of the band were wearing black armbands.

This is 1 of the most iconic developments within the whole piece broke, well the whole troubles was this Bobby Sands hunger strike, he became a symbol,

Without question, unfortunately in Irish history it was just repeating a game that had been played out any number of times before.

So was it a monumental moment in Irish history?

Yes it was And that's invariably you get into those conversations of well we cannot do it and would that be a protest?

And by the way for a three-minute slot on top of the pops there'll be 50, 000 other people out there will take that in which case nobody even knows you've done it or do we do it and without mentioning anything to the BBC do a couple of the band turn up wearing black armbands and the BBC just film it and broadcast it they'd no idea what was going on until it was explained to them several days later.

Alright Fergal, lots more fascinating stuff in your life to come after a break.

How do you feel about what's going on in Northern Ireland now?

How have you seen Northern Ireland develop and how do you feel about it now?

Well you see, ironically enough, Ireland's kind of an extraordinary place where the Republic of Ireland, 30 years ago, 85% of the population of the Republic of Ireland would go to mass on a Sunday And priests would get up in pulpits and tell 85% of the population what to do and we would all do it.

So here's the thing, in 30 years, the Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world to have a national referendum to pass a quality of marriage legislation, has amended the Constitution not once but twice to legalise abortion and contraception, and as we speak at this very moment in time, it has been governed by the openly gay son of an Indian immigrant and an atheist poet who was re-elected for a second term as President.

I left you alone for 5 minutes and look what happened.

So it's true and it's part of where politics fails and it brings us back to Westminster.

Is it divisive and is it an affront to democracy in the modern world that there is not an assembly in Northern Ireland?

That is an outrageous situation and it's 1 that needs to be resolved.

And I will point the finger, both the politicians in Northern Ireland, but I might add Alistair, if you haven't seen it, and in fact, I think at this point, it should be compulsory viewing for every single politician, certainly in Northern Ireland, if not most definitely in Whitehall.

Once upon a time in Northern Ireland, the first episode, there is a clear lesson and reminder that's where we've come from under no circumstances should we have any ambition to go back there.

But equally, I'm afraid I have to say it, Alistair, you end up tracing the world back to Whitehall at number 10 and the complete disregard and scant regard that number 10 and this government has shown towards Northern Ireland and the people of Ireland and the future of Northern Ireland, whether as part of United Ireland or not, but they have just shown little if any interest, if not utter disdain and disregard.

And again a plague of locusts on all of the houses for that.

Northern Ireland's possibly on the edge of going through quite a few difficult years

would be really resentful to see that happen.

S1 So just give us a sense of what your life is like at the moment, when it seems to me every time I turn the radio or the telly on they are talking about water.

DL In reality I actually had retired from life 10 years ago.

And that, by the way, is an extraordinary thing for a man to be able to say that at

I kind of just went, that's it, I'm happy to hang up my boots and I've made my contribution to life and I'm gonna retire.

And then by osmosis and accident found myself engaged in something.

I became chairman of the oldest fly-fishing club in England.

You've now shed most of your listeners at this point and I suddenly realized that here was 2 and a half miles of river in Hertfordshire that for a hundred and eighty-five years a group of men and women with an interest in fly-fishing had looked after and preserved and a hundred and eighty-five years later that river was about to die.

It was suffering from eutrophication, it had become nothing more than a stagnant pond and this is a chalk stream, 1 of the rarest ecosystems on the planet.

I, like a lot of people, thought well this is easy because there's a big regulator out there called the Environment Agency and Parliament set them up and give them all these powers and control and I'll just huddle off and have a quick meet with the Environment Agency and go this is dreadful you need to do something about it.

And I think it was about 10 minutes into that first meeting when my BS detector went off and went, oh my God.

And then I realised that I was going to have to go and pick a big fight.

Was that that specific stretch of water that triggered this whole thing?

Yes, to give you a little indication of this, Southern England is unique.

There are about 225 chalk streams on the planet.

They're a complete freak of geology and think 50 to 75 million years ago when London was sitting somewhere off the equator and we were still joined in northern France and there are

of them are here in southern England and most of them right now are tatering on the brink of extinction because of the way we've treated them, abused them and exploited them.

And the 1 that the Ammo Magna looks after we have been in charge of for 185 years.

It is 1 of the last remaining places on the very edge of London where you can still find a breeding, sustainable population of wild brown trout.

I know that seems like a silly thing to say, but let me put it this way, I suspect we might come onto it.

There are within the M25 about 200 miles of river.

I have walked every single mile of every single 1 of those rivers.

Not that long ago they would have been full of hundreds if not thousands of populations of trout, salmon, sea trout.

We've decimated all of them, we've killed them all off, we've brought them to the eggs of extinction.

Apart from 1 little 2 and a half mile stretch in Hertfordshire.

And rather curiously I thought that might be worth saving.

Yeah, so why haven't you saved the rest, Vogel?

Well I'm doing my best right now Alistair, which is why, funnily enough, I guess we're here.

The short version is I ended up working with a charity, taking the Environment Agency pretty much to the steps of the High Court, simply to get them to do the right thing.

Now I will admit that at this point we've resolved our issues with the Environment Agency.

There is more water and plentiful water going down that river than we've seen in decades, but that experience of having to put the very government agency charged and given responsibility and the legal power to oversee and protect those rivers, having to take them to court just to get them to do their job.

And as I sometimes explain it, that gave me an itch.

And foolishly, stupidly, naively I scratched that bloody itch and every time I scratch that itch I just end up with an even bigger itch.

So what's the biggest itch at the moment?

Oh, simple fact, at a national scale, there is not a single river in England that is in good overall environmental health.

Every single river in England is polluted.

And you scale that back, most of that, or at least a large deal of it, has been driven by the water industry.

And this is an industry that is supposed to provide water, supposed to collect and dispense with in an appropriate manner our sewage, but as we have now discovered, and I hope I may have made some small, meagre contribution, to help the public understand, this is an industry that has made off with £72 billion worth of our money from our pockets, have left these companies in £60 billion worth of debt, now spent 7.5 million hours over the last 3 years dumping sewage into our rivers, decimating whole landscapes and ecologies, and has now created a situation where, believe it or not, I can't believe I'm saying it, London is now number 9 on global cities most likely to run out of drinking water.

We're now on a list, along with the likes of Cape Town, San Paolo, Mexico City and Jakarta.

I should say by the way, back to my point about nobody cares how much you know to the note, you're sitting here without a note, you kind of do seem to me to know this stuff inside out.

What do you think it says about our politics that it's taken, you know, false modesty aside, it has taken you in a way to bring this to the head?

Oh well listen, the simple truth of the matter is we have a regulatory system that has failed.

And you are right, that makes me quite furious.

Within the next 24 hours there will be yet another hearing and another select Committee in Parliament calling in the Chair and Chief Executive of the Regulator, the leaders of Thames Water and holding another inquiry.

My argument is why are we calling in the Chair and Chief Executive of Ofwat?

They're the ones appointed by the Secretary of State to act on behalf of government and therefore Parliament and indeed to then act on behalf of the general public.

Why are we not holding those people to account for the decisions they've made on our behalf and not some helpless chief executive.

If you have to sort of, I hate the concept of apportioning blame, but if you had to apportion blame for the mess that we're in, just go through the various culprits.

Well you have to listen, you have to start, for me there's a very simple thing and I'm very happy and I can compartmentalise things quite quickly and simply.

Did the water companies make an awful lot of money and was an awful lot of corporate greed involved?

Or as Jonathan Ford from the FT refers to as, the water industry is just a legalised rip-off?

But that's why the regulators were there.

And we've not got 1, but we've got 2 regulators overseeing the water industry, Ofwat and the Environment Agency.

And both of them, and I say this as a former regulator, Both of them have been the most catastrophic failure I can think of.

The impact that we're now going to be faced as society is there is a catastrophic amount of money that now needs to be spent repairing the sewage system, securing London's water supply.

I suspect we taxpayers and customers are going to end up picking up the tab for that incompetence and if we have any kind of will at all to ensure that you can, as I know is a passion of yours, walk into the nearest river and go swimming in it without being confronted with the ugly underbelly of our sewage system.

And I do mean wet wipes and sanitary products and contraceptives.

Then we now have another even bigger amount of money to be spent.

And all of it is now probably, directly and indirectly, going to be picked up by the taxpayer and by the bill payer and all of it actually boils down to nothing more than utterly incompetent, catastrophic failure of regulation.

Okay, so that says to me that you're basically saying the regulations failed, the companies are greedy.

What about the original decision back in 1989, privatisation?

Did you see any merits in that at the time?

But then, as you know, I come from a socialist background.

Where, here's the thing, 30 years later, England, so far as I'm aware, England is still unique in that we're the only country in the world that has an absolutely 100% privatized water system.

That there's not a single country anywhere else on the planet that went for that model.

Clearly there may be some kind of inherent flaw to the whole design and application of it.

There's any amount of joint partnerships with local authorities, national governments, private sector, that England is the only country 30 years later with a completely 100% private sector and clearly it's an experiment that has catastrophically failed.

Even the Financial Times said that last weekend, this is an experiment that's failed.

What do you make of the current, I'm assuming, Therese Coffey is the Minister in charge?

Well, listen, the best assessment I can give you is, and I did it, it's a badge I wear with honour and pride.

If you go and do have a look at my Twitter profile, you see I've actually quoted on there, chunters on Twitter, quote, in quotation marks, Therese O'Coffey, Secretary of State for the Environment, UK 2023.

So that's clearly what Therese thinks of me and my little efforts.

Have you had any meetings with her at all?

No, no, listen, I had 1 brief meeting 4 or 5 years ago with Rebecca Pye.

And Alistair, you ask about kind of my encyclopedic knowledge of these things.

I very quickly realised from my early interactions going back 4, maybe 5 years ago, Every time I spoke to somebody from government, spoke to somebody from the Environment Agency, Ofwat, or the industry, and I'm trying to say this as diplomatically as I should, maybe not as diplomatically as I really should, I quickly realised that at best I was being given a half-truth, if not a downright fabrication of what the reality of the event and situation was.

And that's why I had to go and spend hours digging this stuff out by instinct and just replicating the instinct you have as a journalist and many others.

You just know there's something going on here and you're just going to have to keep pushing until you find it.

So whenever I sit down and people go oh well it's because we've got this Victorian sewage system, I'm really sorry, we may as well blame the bloody Romans for traffic jams on the M2 and M25.

Oh but government's got to spend £56 billion fixing this.

That works out at £181 million per company per year.

To give your listeners a bit of context, just before Christmas, Thames Water declared

Now Compare the supposed government grand scheme investment of £181 million a year against Thames Water's half a billion pound profit in 6 months.

Do you feel you're making headway or banging your head against a brick wall?

Oh no, I'm happy to admit it and I know some people in Whitehall find that I feel I'm being disruptive, but I'm genuinely not.

The water industry's lost control of this.

If you're not aware, 3 weeks ago, YouCov did a poll.

of voters think that the water company should now be nationalised.

Well, it's not because we can't afford it.

So you accept that it's economically pretty impossible?

I think we can assume right now and since we probably share a number of acquaintances, I think that if there is a change of administration at the next election there's 1 certainty we can actually all depend upon.

The economy is just in such a catastrophic state that government will be utterly focused and just trying to maintain some basic public services and functions like education in the NHS and by the way that nurse that needs a pay rise.

Are you really going to explain to that nurse that you've just given several more tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds of the public's money.

Right now it's all about the campaign and right now we have the situation where Thameswater is now teetering in the bank of bankruptcy.

There are 4 other companies to my certain knowledge are not that far behind.

We now have the opportunity to now start dictating the shape and future of those companies and personally speaking I think the legislation is already there.

We need now to sit down with these companies and the shareholders and the bond managers and go here's how this works.

You're going to feel a lot of pain for the next 5, 10, 15 years.

But if you agree to what we're going to suggest, you will end up with successful debt-free companies facing a profitable future at a amount of cost a taxpayer a penny.

So you have government control without government ownership?

I'm going to give you the wherewithal for it.

Section 18 of the Water Industries Act 1991, whoever drafted it, predicted this very situation and it was a very insightful judgment.

Theresa Coffey, the Secretary of State, could fix most of this this afternoon with nothing more than the stroke of a pen.

She's had that power since the day she took office.

The question actually becomes why hasn't she actually used that power and that authority.

See all Leading transcripts on Applepodcasts

Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers