Shit Lessons

When I was six, my parents returned from Australia to the village Dungiven, high in the Sperrin mountains in Northern Ireland. On my first day in the village primary school I felt like the odd one out with my Australian accent and was nervously playing with the salt and pepper glass containers on the table at lunchtime. Unfortunately, I managed in my nervousness to smash one of them. The headmaster’s wife flew down vulturelike and was furious with me.

She proceeded to tell the entire school and a terrified me, that since the top of the small salt seller was mirrored, I had, in fact, broken a mirror and would now have 7 years of bad luck. My maths was good enough to work out that my life would be pretty horrid until I turned 13. 

Lesson 1: Shit can happen. 

Strangely when I was 13, seven years later, and waiting outside my secondary school for the bus home a bird pooped on my head. I remember the embarrassment of all the white shit in my hair. Given that the seven years bad luck had almost ended I remember hoping that it had marked the last of an unlucky seven years. However, another cynical part of me made a mental note.

Lesson 2: Unexpectedly, shit can even fall from above.

In my university, studying science, one of my friends was really into shit. He was keen on building biodigesters (this was almost half a century ago!) and eager, to point out that slurry (shit) could be fed into a biodigester and be broken down into wonderful useful compost and valuable methane.

Creating good stuff out of crap seemed a no-brainer to us all. He graduated with a first class, honours, and did a PhD on the same subject and spent ages promoting biodigesters everywhere to anyone who would listen. To his distress, farmers and industrial polluters alike weren’t interested at all. They explained it was simply cheaper to dump it in rivers and lakes and pay a fine. He approached government authorities like the department of Agriculture and the Water Service and explained the situation. They weren’t interested either. 

Lesson 3: Some people simply don’t give a shit.

Two decades passed and I had a family with three sons and a new home, a gatelodge in Magheramourne.  Before long, I discovered, there was shit in my garden. Not a solitary dog poop messing up the green lawn but a swimming pool of the stuff at the bottom of my garden. I flagged it up to the relevant authorities and soon a man in overalls came to inspect. Over two years, more and more men came, in increasingly better clothing, and all agreed that it certainly looked and smelt like a ditch full of shit. Eventually, even our local MP came to view my shit ditch.

One of the Department of agricultural officials politely expressed concern about the health and safety of my three young children with such a hazard so close.   It turned out that our lodge house was suffering from the sewage funnelled from the neighbouring stately home. It had been converted into a hotel but still used the same septic tank designed for a single family. As a result, raw sewage poured in and out of the septic tank. When sized correctly solids have time to settle at the base of the tank and the overflow pipe higher up the tank allows water to drain out. It’s not a high-tech affair but when shit capacity exceeds the septic tank's ability to separate solids from liquids then the consequences are pretty dire.  Shit flows in and out unchanged by its quick visit to the septic tank.

After doing two years of everything by the book, eventually writing to even the ombudsman, the hotel was fined a tiny amount. Much less than the cost of replacing their useless septic tank. In hindsight, I should’ve had the courage to take two bucket loads of the raw sewage to the hotel lobby and poured it around the reception area explaining that I was returning their shit from whence it came. No doubt I would’ve been arrested but the subsequent bad publicity for the hotel would have caused them more than the piddling little fine. 

Lesson 4: Sometimes you have to spend years dealing with other people’s shit.

It is now almost sixty years from my first shit encounter at primary school and my biodigester friend was in the local news this week.  He had been invited on the radio to speak about the blue-green algae causing devastation in Lough Neagh (the biggest lough in the UK and Ireland) and our rivers and coastlines.  For the first time people were instructed not to swim in these waters due to the high levels of toxins.  Dogs can die from ingestion of the contaminated water and it can cause suffocation of fish and other creatures.  My friend explained why there was an increase in this blue algae blooms (they are actually not algae at all but a type of bacteria called cyanobacteria which requires sunlight, nutrients and carbon dioxide to grow and reproduce).  He explained that agricultural fertiliser runoff and waste water systems provide the perfect conditions for the algae to flourish.  It is easy to only blame farmers, industries and businesses for their contribution to the problem we are now facing however there are other surprising contributors too. On the 12th September it was revealed that NI Water (a government owned company) was fined 170, 000 pounds for releasing 70 million tons of untreated sewage into local rivers and lakes over the past ten years.  In fact, it is estimated that each year they now release 7 million tons of untreated sewage.  I remember being so disappointed with the department officials who did nothing when the hotel poured their sewage into my garden.  Decades later it is these very departmental bodies themselves who are pouring shit into our waterways.

Lesson 5: It’s important to find out who is responsible for the shit.