Minding our own backyards
FOR a couple of glorious hours on Dublin Bay yesterday the sun came out. And Dubliners came out to play along the shore. At Seapoint, the bathers were out. Men were helping their kids into wetsuits as they had a bit of daddy-daughter time and instilled hobbies and habits that will last a lifetime. From eight to 80 they were out. Kids screaming as they jumped reluctantly into the still, chilly water. And that particular brand of fit, sinewy, smiling older person you see at Ireland’s sea-swimming spots. Outside, looking fit and lively, instead of sitting inside, waiting.
If you heard of another capital built around a bay, with swimming spots dotted around the suburbs, you’d go there for a city break. In another city, there’d be a walking and cycle path around the whole bay, from Howth to Dalkey. And they’d sell the place based on this spectacular marriage of city and sea, with a quaint fishing town at one end where the world’s greatest drummer lives and you can eat seafood along the pier, to the picture-postcard village at the other end where the world’s most famous rock singer has a pint and you can kayak out around islands and see seal colonies a few hundred yards from the shore, as you look back on our bay of Naples. And in the middle, growing out from the docks, a magical wall that allows you to walk out into the sea and infinity.
Instead, as a centrepiece to it all, we built an incinerator, finalising the decision under a Green Party environment minister who lived near it and was opposed to it, but whose hands were tied.
The water was fresh and clear at Seapoint yesterday afternoon, and as you paused in the sea and looked around, the terraces of Monkstown basked beautiful in the sun, Howth looked stunning, the Poolbeg chimneys were an elegant piece of reassuring history, and then there is this sinister box. We now know that as soon as they started burning rubbish there, 11 men had to go to hospital after a leakage of toxins. A door not sealed properly apparently. Knowing how competently things get done in this country, this is not very reassuring.
Some visionaries wanted to build an Irish Hollywood near the incinerator, but that’s not being encouraged. We know the value of burning rubbish in this country, but not of making art.
Maybe those of us who live around Dublin Bay and worry about a giant incinerator being plonked in the middle of a highly populated area are just Nimbys. But you know, for all the stuff going on in the world now that we are expected to worry about — Brexit, Trump, terrorism, UK elections, DUP, Theresa May, radicalisation — at heart, we are parochial creatures of our community, and the truth is, right or wrong, we worry most about our own doorstep.