Feargal Sharkey urges Keir Starmer to finish air pollution profiteering | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Feargal Sharkey is the epitome of a joyful warrior. He nonetheless brims with the punk vitality which propelled the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks into the charts in 1978, and he’s each a gentleman angler and the nation’s foremost campaigner in opposition to the fouling of our waters.

It is an exquisite morning once we meet by the Palace of Westminster and the solar lights up the Thames. Does he fancy a swim? “Under no circumstances whatsoever,” he tells me, including: “Every single river in England is now polluted.”

His outrage on the desecration of nature by no means dims. He damns the water sector as “one of the biggest polluters in this country”. The 67-year-old sees himself in a battle with “an industry that’s out of control, that is unmanageable, that doesn’t want to be managed”. He is incensed at “profiteering from pollution” – and a technology born a few years after the Undertones fashioned in Troubles-era Derry shares his ardour.

As he makes an attempt to flag down a taxi a well-spoken younger man named Hugo rushes over to specific his admiration for his work as a musician and as a campaigner. Handshakes are exchanged and a photograph is taken. An older man calls throughout to Mr Sharkey to maintain up the struggle. The erstwhile chart-topper delights in such interactions which gas his zeal.

“The game is over,” he tells me. “We need to seize control of these companies again, and Government needs to grow a big pair of trousers, pull them up tight, and get on with doing the job we know all needs to be done. We need to prosecute these directors, we need to bring these companies back into state control, and until that happens, none of this will end.”

He describes the dumping of sewage in waterways because the “biggest fly tipping operation” within the nation, and has a torrent of recommendation for Britain’s beleaguered Prime Minister.

“Oh listen,” he says. “If I was him I would be leading the charge on this right now. Because, clearly, not only has the public lost trust in the water industry, the public has lost trust in government and in politics in general.”

Labour has shied away from taking more durable motion, he provides, “because of this absolute and utter terror of the bond market”.

“It appears the Government isn’t running the country,” he says. “It appears the bond markets are running the country.”

He takes me to the Academy, the delightfully weathered Soho membership co-founded by Evelyn Waugh’s son, Auberon, the place we each order the Arbroath Smokie and Mr Sharkey describes how he was first hooked on fly-fishing.

The credit score goes to the Christian Brothers, the spiritual order which ran his college. The clergymen, he explains, had a coverage that “your evenings and your weekends were not going to be your own”.

He remembers a stipulation to enroll to 6 after-school golf equipment. Alongside enjoying hurling (“I wasn’t born with this nose, it’s been finely crafted at the end of three feet of ash”) and debating, he enlisted for periods on “fly-fishing” and “fly-tying” and a lifelong love was born.

No one who glimpsed the 11-year-old casting a line would have guessed he would go on to to chair Amwell Magna Fishery, the oldest fly-fishing membership in England – or that he would someday belt out unforgettable songs for one of the crucial iconic bands to emerge from Ireland. But he grew up in a house which prized politics and efficiency.

His dad was deeply concerned within the Labour social gathering and the electricians’ union, and his mum was on the coronary heart of planning for the Irish tradition pageant Feis Dhoire Cholmcille. The younger Feargal was entered in conventional singing contests.

“There would be local playwrights and poets hanging out in my house and all kinds of mad things going on endlessly,” he remembers. ‘You were allowed to have any opinion you wanted, so long as you could intellectually justify it – and if you couldn’t intellectually justify it, well, then you were going to be in real trouble.”

Derry was notorious for sectarian gerrymandering which denied the Catholic majority population proper democratic representation, and for chronic unemployment which locked families in poverty. But this was the same era when the civil rights movement in the United States harnessed the power of peaceful protest to put a global spotlight on endemic injustices.

The bravery demonstrated across the Atlantic was a major source of inspiration in the Sharkey household. He remembers his mum herding the family into their car and his dad driving them to Drogheda so they could join a march with the People’s Democracy motion.

“Campaigning runs in the blood,” he says. “I’m what, 10 years old at that point, walking down the middle of the main road from Belfast to Dublin waving very enthusiastically what I later learned was an anarchist flag.”

A easy rule underlined day by day life for the Sharkeys: “If you see something that looks like a social injustice, it was demanded that you did something about it. Just sitting there and looking the other way, that was never, ever going to be allowed in my house.”

His popularity as a prize-winning singer received him an invite from his second cousin Billy Doherty to hitch the band which grew to become the Undertones. Their gigs on the Casbah Bar are right now the stuff of folklore.

He remembers his shock when he met a fan who had journeyed from Cork, flummoxed as to why anybody would “hitchhike all the way from the other end of Ireland to come to Derry to watch us play”.

The magic of the performances contrasted with the horrors unfolding all through Northern Ireland because the Troubles took maintain. The band had no intention of enjoying the nationwide anthem of both the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, or letting any political motion direct their agenda.

The youngsters on the gigs didn’t want a “reminder about bombs and bullets” – not when there was an Army checkpoint with a “bunch of blokes in green uniforms and big guns” outdoors the venue. Each efficiency was a chance to flee into the joy of music performed quick and loud.

Describing the environment on the Casbah, he says: “You know what, we’re stepping through the wardrobe, my friend, and Narnia awaits on the other side.”

They responded to stress to sing about “barricades and petrol bombs” by recording More Songs About Chocolate and Girls.

The Undertones had meant “to put a record out and then break up” with the members then forming “five other local bands, just to try to generate a more healthy, interesting local scene”. That plan was derailed when their debut single, Teenage Kicks, struck a chord far, far past Derry.

He had but to surrender his day job when the invitation arrived to carry out on Top of the Pops. They flew to London to broadcast to the nation after which, “Friday morning I’m back at my delivery van delivering tellies for Radio Rentals.”

Today he’s again within the limelight, with Britons pinning their hopes on him delivering an finish to the scandal of the nation’s polluted waters.

In this battle, and in his life, he takes inspiration from the phrases the poet Seamus Heaney (one other Derry-schooled icon of recent Ireland) texted to his spouse earlier than he handed away: “Noli timere” – don’t be afraid.

“Those are words to live and die by, right there,” he says, including: “It doesn’t matter how bad it looks… Do not be afraid. Go and do it.”