40 years of fly-tipping in the Lagan and ten years of political silence. The second the cameras show up, Alliance and the UUP can’t wait to talk.
Alliance holds 13 seats on Lisburn & Castlereagh Council, the second-largest bloc in the chamber. Cllr Nicola Parker isn’t some backbencher who just noticed the car. She’s Vice-Chair of the council’s own Environment and Sustainability Committee.
That’s not a coincidence, that’s the job. And her own quote gives the game away: colleagues have “been working on this for 10 years.” Ten years of minutes, motions and meetings, and the car is still sitting there rotting.
UUP’s Robbie Butler has held elected office in Lagan Valley since 2014 and has chaired the Stormont committee that exists to scrutinise water quality and environmental enforcement for the whole of Northern Ireland since September 2024.
That’s not a junior brief, that’s the post built for exactly this. Two years in that chair, and all he’s found is a microphone.
Green Party Cllr Anthony Flynn, who first raised this issue, said: “We’ve been told for weeks that this isn’t anyone’s job. Not the council’s, not the department’s, not the agency’s.”
Flynn continued: “Now that it’s a headline, everyone’s suddenly got an opinion, but an opinion isn’t the same as taking responsibility.”
Here’s what nobody has actually answered: has anyone even checked whether that car is safe to leave where it is? A vehicle that old may still have a battery in it somewhere, full of heavy metals, quietly corroding in the water.
Everyone is treating this as a tidiness issue. Nobody has confirmed it isn’t also a pollution one.
Richard Gill, Lagan Valley Greens Co-chair, put it plainly: “We don’t know if the battery is still there, we don’t know what’s leaching into the water, and apparently neither does anyone else.”
“That’s not good enough for a river running through the middle of a town.” We’re not bothering with DUP or TUV on this one, nobody pretends they’ll do better.
But Alliance and the UUP have spent years selling themselves as the grown-ups, the competence parties, the “politics done differently” crowd. A decade of committee minutes and trolleys and tyres in the river is not competence.
Titles don’t clean rivers. We aren’t accepting warm words and a quiet removal after this story dies down. We want the car gone, we want the site properly checked for contamination while it’s still there.
And we want it confirmed in writing that this time next summer, the Lagan is clear, not just this car. Sign the petition, back a real Environmental Protection Agency with teeth, and hold these parties to the standard they set for themselves.
https://www.greenpartyni.org/remove_the_abandoned_car_from_the_river_lagan