Feargal Sharkey in Geddington near Kettering at River Ise

Clean water and rivers campaigner Feargal Sharkey meets Rosie Wrighting on the bridge over the River Ise in Geddington, Northamptonshire

Transcript

00:00This is the village that I grew up in, so I have many many memories of, you can see there,

00:07there's little slides that go down and playing in these boards and after 14 years of Conservatives

00:15our riverways are quite literally a mess. They have pumped water into rivers like this one and

00:24still there are children playing here in the summers. When I was looking at the sites where

00:30sewage has been dumped in Ketching this is our second highest site in this river here,

00:36so on a personal level it breaks my heart to see this happen with our waterways and if I'm lucky

00:42enough to be elected on the 4th of July I look forward to working with you, your campaign and

00:48My name's Fergal and here I am talking about poo on a bridge.

00:59I've had number one records, I've run some of the biggest record companies on the planet,

01:04I retired 12 years ago and here I am standing on a bridge talking about poo.

01:11Ironically enough if we're standing in the middle of a river not unlike this one

01:16with a little trout in it treating me with utter contempt refusing to indulge me by biting onto

01:22the end of my fly line and holding on for two minutes and while I was standing there

01:28and I guarantee you people in this river have seen this, they might not have realised what

01:32they were looking at but they have, the ugly underbelly of the sewage system came down in a

01:38little flotilla and if everybody will forgive me I can't find a delicate way to say this

01:44we are talking about used sanitary products, used male contraceptive products and any number of

01:52wet wipes in various states of being torn apart and disintegrated. That made me curious and angry

02:00and it is that curiosity and anger has led me here. Now to pick up what Rosie just said

02:06even in this constituency last year Anglia Motors spent over 3,800 hours dumping sewage

02:14into local rivers and a matter of a couple of feet that way at the sewage works last year

02:20723 hours worth of sewage was dumped out of that sewage works into the river

02:28and there's no need for it, it's illegal, it shouldn't be happening. There's now not a single

02:34river anywhere in England that is not polluted, every single river and one of the largest sources

02:41of that pollution is the water industry and in fact I checked this morning on the way up

02:47this particular stretch of river is now categorised by the Environment Agency

02:53as being in poor ecological condition i.e. that is bottom of the list but one

03:00and that grading tells me that this river is for all intentional purposes ecologically dead.

03:08Now I can see it already by looking at this thing here and I did notice the Ford as soon as I got

03:13out of the car and I already knew playground, Ford, summer, hell I'd be in that river. I wouldn't let

03:21my kid or anyone near that river. I would ban my kids from getting anywhere near. That's how bad this is.