𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

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

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

His outrage at the desecration of nature never 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 generation born many years after the Undertones formed in Troubles-era Derry shares his passion.

As he attempts to flag down a taxi a well-spoken young man named Hugo rushes over to express his admiration for his work as a musician and as a campaigner. Handshakes are exchanged and a photo is taken. An older man calls across to Mr Sharkey to keep up the fight. The erstwhile chart-topper delights in such interactions which fuel 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 as the “biggest fly tipping operation” in the country, and has a torrent of advice 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 tougher action, he adds, “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 club co-founded by Evelyn Waugh’s son, Auberon, where we both order the Arbroath Smokie and Mr Sharkey describes how he was first hooked on fly-fishing.

The credit goes to the Christian Brothers, the religious order which ran his school. The priests, he explains, had a policy that “your evenings and your weekends were not going to be your own”.

He remembers a stipulation to sign up to six after-school clubs. Alongside playing 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 sessions 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 club in England – or that he would one day belt out unforgettable songs for one of the most iconic bands to emerge from Ireland. But he grew up in a home which prized politics and performance.

His dad was deeply involved in the Labour party and the electricians’ union, and his mum was at the heart of planning for the Irish culture festival Feis Dhoire Cholmcille. The young Feargal was entered in traditional 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 movement.

“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 simple rule underlined daily 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 reputation as a prize-winning singer won him an invitation from his second cousin Billy Doherty to join the band which became the Undertones. Their gigs at the Casbah Bar are today the stuff of folklore.

He recalls his shock when he met a fan who had journeyed from Cork, flummoxed as to why anyone 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 throughout Northern Ireland as the Troubles took hold. The band had no intention of playing the national anthem of either the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, or letting any political movement direct their agenda.

The kids at the gigs did not need a “reminder about bombs and bullets” – not when there was an Army checkpoint with a “bunch of blokes in green uniforms and big guns” outside the venue. Each performance was an opportunity to escape into the excitement of music played fast and loud.

Describing the atmosphere at 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 pressure to sing about “barricades and petrol bombs” by recording More Songs About Chocolate and Girls.

The Undertones had intended “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 beyond Derry.

He had yet to give up his day job when the invitation arrived to perform on Top of the Pops. They flew to London to broadcast to the nation and then, “Friday morning I’m back at my delivery van delivering tellies for Radio Rentals.”

Today he is back in the limelight, with Britons pinning their hopes on him delivering an end to the scandal of the nation’s polluted waters.

In this battle, and in his life, he takes inspiration from the words the poet Seamus Heaney (another Derry-schooled icon of modern Ireland) texted to his wife before he passed away: “Noli timere” – don’t be afraid.

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