Jan Carson: Could a work of fiction draw attention to plight of Lough Neagh?

Could you really flood Lough Neagh - the UK's largest inland lake - to try to deal with the ecological crisis being caused by blue-green algae? It's what author Jan Carson examines in her new novel Few and Far Between, but the idea isn't as far fetched as it sounds, because it was almost attempted before. In 1958 Northern Ireland's then finance minister Terence O'Neill proposed a plan to drain Lough Neagh to create a seventh county - County Neagh - to try to boost employment. When he became Northern Ireland's prime minister in 1963 he pushed ahead with the controversial scheme but ultimately it didn't work. There had been previous successful attempts to lower the level of Lough Neagh, which had exposed some small islands when the water dropped. It was the idea of the freeing of these submerged islands that inspired Carson to imagine what life might have been like for those living on the islands and what if the only solution for blue-green algae was to drain the lough, or to flood it? Carson, who grew up in Ballymena, not far from the shores of Lough Neagh, came up with the idea for the book when her friend sent her a clipping about the scheme and she "very quickly went down a rabbi