Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey has detailed how a politician told him he’s never had as much success in getting through to people as the Derry musician has when it comes to environmental activism.
I spent decades with random people walking up to me to talk about music and the gigs they went to and records they bought,” the 64-year-old recently told The Times.
“Let’s face it, to go through life and have people coming up and wanting to talk about nice things – how utterly fantastic is that?
“Now here’s the thing: I went to Cornwall in the summer and it took me an hour and a half to walk from one end of St Ives Bay to the other because people stopped me to talk about sh*t in rivers.
“I got married last year, went away on a stag weekend and one of the group, a senior Labour peer as it happens, went to the bar, came back with a round and said, ‘Feargal, I have to tell you I’ve been in politics my whole adult life and I’ve worked at the Treasury, I’ve worked at No 10, and I cannot believe the cut-through you’re getting.’
“We were in a bar in East Anglia and the barman asked, ‘Is that Feargal Sharkey? Tell him I love what he’s doing about our rivers.’”
The former punk rocker has become prolific in the political world and the social media spectrum, with over 140,000 Twitter followers and counting.
At this year’s Labour conference he delivered a short speech outlining how water companies had dumped sewage for six million hours in the past two years.
He claims that since privatisation, the industry has paid out £72bn in shareholder dividends and in the past seven years it found £58m for the salaries and bonuses of its top bosses.
The Teenage Kicks singer ended by accusing the industry, regulators and the government of waging “an unprecedented attack on the environment”.
However, he insisted that he “would rather not be doing this”, but that his love of fly-fishing set him on his righteous path, when he realised through his new hobby just how bad the state of the UK’s waterways are.
“Fly-fishing, I have found, is one of the things that I focus on so intently that it allows me to shove all that noise and static to the deepest reaches of my brain so it becomes this perverse form of relaxation.
“You have to focus. Fly-fishing does not involve putting your feet up on a chair and sitting there with a six-pack of beer – fly-fishing is trying to deceive a trout that this thing made from silk, fur and feather actually resembles a real live insect. It has provided me with a way to relax, which is something I normally find quite difficult.”
He became a member of the Amwell Magna angling club near his north London home but was “appalled” that the club had been in discussions with the Environment Agency for 15 years about why the flow in the river had been steadily reducing.
It was then that he began looking into the sector and government actions surrounding water issues.
“They have let big multinational companies come in and exploit not only the billpayers in England but the environment, while they profiteered,” he continued.
“If that’s not a social injustice I don’t know what is. If you want to get Freudian about it – as Defra, Ofwat and the Environment Agency have discovered – all those signs were there from a very early age.
“I know for a fact that four years ago when I was getting into this, government ministers were told by some mutual friends that, ‘You do realise it’s Feargal. If you think he’s gonna walk away from this you’ve lost your mind, cos it’s not in him. He doesn’t know how. He’s gonna say you shouldn’t be doing that, it’s wrong and it’s obscene and immoral – and he’s going to keep going until you give in.’
“The argument is over and the government and the water industry need to acknowledge that fact,” he said.
“I know they think I’m being disruptive when I’m saying it and, like all good counter tactics, disruption is a fantastic weapon – but I’m also being completely honest with them. It’s over. Right now the water companies are helping the government lose the next election.”
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