citizen kilkee

Once again Kilkee Beach was closed from May 22nd to May 28th. This regular swimming ban is having a corrosive effect on the reputation of Kilkee as a safe place to enjoy a seaside holiday. Who is responsible?

In the first instance, Irish Water is the body reponsible for maintaining the quality of the water going into the sea at Kilkee Strand. Two years ago they promised a delegation of concerned citizens from the town, which was seeking answers to the water quality problem, that it would be issuing contracts for a new treatment plant in 2020 and works would be completed by end of 2021. On the Irish Water website it now claims that the new water treatment won’t be installed until 2025. Would such incompetence be tolerated in any other place in Ireland?

Another responsible body is Clare County Council. This is the body which actually issues the closure notices. Does it not have a duty of care to the town of Kilkee to investigate thoroughly all instances of alleged pollution before it rubber stamps Irish Water request to issue such closure notices?

HSE. This is the go to body to get information on disease and the causes of same. Some Clare Co Council official contacts someone(?), presumably by phone to get an ‘opinion’ on the safety of Kilkee Beach. Is this someone a bacteriologist who asks for more information before giving a considered opinion or is it some desk-bound bureaucrat who takes the easy option of saying – ‘close the beach’?

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) must also share a major part of the blame for these ongoing scares. It is the statutary body which is obliged to protect Irish citizens from harm due to environmental pollution. It is failing in it’s legal duty to do this in Kilkee.

Citizens of Kilkee feel almost helpless in the face of the abdication of responsibility by organisations funded by them.

Kilkee beach is one of the safest in Ireland. There are no currents, no rip tides and no sudden drops in sand levels.That makes the job of a lifeguard not too difficult. And yet according to this week’s Clare Champion ((01.08.2019) a young boy was almost drowned. It was a child with special needs and he didn’t realisewhat was happening. The boy’s father called out and woman nearby who had been a lifeguaard pulled the child in. The boy had swallowed a lot of water so the distraught parents took him to the lifeguard station. To say the on duty lifeguards were unhelpful is an understatement. They claimed the child should not have been where he was if he couldn’t swim.The only advice they could give was to phone Shannondoc, an out of hours GP service and this was the middle of the day. The parents eventually phoned a local GP who called an ambulance and the child recovered in Limerick Hospital. What were the lifeguards doing (all three)? Sitting in their little hut with music playing and looking at their mobile phones, thats what. In the last couple of years a very narrow stri of the beacch is ‘designated’ for swimming. Who decides on the size of the strip or if there should be a designated area at all on such a safe beach? What was wrong with the old ssytem where one lifeguaard patrolled the shore line and another one in the station kept lookout with binoculars and alerted the person on the shoreline of any apparent incidents. Is there any supervision of these young people and the important role they have to play in sea safety? Clare Co Council has questions to answer.

This August week-end two young swimmers were pulled out of the water at Edmond Point. With high seas running they found it difficult to get out of the water. Fortunately there were quite a few people on the rocks nearby so the two swimmers were pulled to safety. In rough weather this is a dangerous spot. One of the causes of this problem is the absence of diving boards at Newfoundout. This is a favourite diving spot and has been for many generations. A few years ago Clare Co Council decided to remove the boards on health and safety!! grounds. There was such an uproar that Clare Co Council asked  Irish Water Safety to carry out a safety audit. Much to the embarrassment of Clare Co Council IWS passed the site and boards as safe. They were then re-instated.

Fast forward to August 2015 and modern new diving boards were purchased by Kilkee Chamber of Commerce because the previous ones were vandalised. Problem: Clare Co Council won’t erect them until they get a guarantee that they are fit for purpose. Fair enough you say but the previous ones with exactly the same spec were there for years. No manufacturer is going to stand over diving boards because of the accidents that can happen. Now, however, we have a bigger problem. Young people are now jumping off the rocks at Newfoundout. This can be very dangerous. The old diving boards took the diver out over six feet from the rock face and so they were very safe. Somebody is going to get hurt. The incident this week-end at Edmund Point is an example of this. Where Kilkee is concerned Clare Co Council has a history of shooting themselves in the foot.

AIB in Kilkee is closing its branch in October 2012. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. How can a sub-office which never employed more than two people and had queues regularly waiting for service could possibly be described as loss-making? Taking into account the inevitable loss of business which will ensue from this decision, this appears on the surface as a box ticking exercise without any in depth look at the office. As the structure of the building (listed building) is such, the sale of the property is most unlikely even in the longer term. It will stand as a deteriorating monument to the decision-making gob*****s in the bank. AIB were asked to supply a cost/benefit analysis of the branch closure which of course they did not do. In response to this request they issued a mealy-mouthed PR inspired letter about ‘current economic climate’. No mention of the fact that they were one of the main causes of this climate. And nobody seems to care.

Friday 20th July Kilkee beach (along with Lahinch and Spanish Point) was closed on order from Clare County Council following consultations with EPA, HSE and An Taisce. This was a very serious decision to take and I would like to know who made the decision in each of these organisations and their competence to make this decision. The decision we are led to believe from press releases was based on the level of E.coli in the water. I have studied bacteriology at third level but I would not feel competent to make such a decision. The coliform bacteria range of bacteria contains so many types of E.coli that it is a branch of bacteriology in its own right. The many strains vary from those that are useful, those that are benign right through to the pathogenic strains which can cause illness. The different strains can mutate from non-pathogenic to pathogenic depending on the environment, concentration, dilution, pH, salinity, temperature and many other variables. Sometimes E.coli are just indicators of the presence of other organisms. So it is an area where the interpretation of readings requires considerable expertise and experience.
Leaving aside the technicality of bacterial count did the raised level cause pollution? The answer is quite clear for anyone with a modicum of scientific knowledge. The massive volume of Atlantic Ocean tidal water entering Kilkee Bay twice daily makes pollution by bacterial contamination next to impossible. The same applies to all the beaches on the western seaboard which of course includes Lahinch and Spanish Point. How is it that the county councils of Galway and Kerry did not close their beaches especially as one would expect the water run-off to be greater because of their more mountainous terrain. In the whole country only 3 beaches were closed and they were all in County Clare! Clare Co Council in their statement stated that they were pleased that the level of bacteria count had dropped. Of course it had –the next incoming tide would have brought it down to normal levels.
The next question is the damage that this over-reaction has done. Apart from the direct loss of income from those that earn a livelihood on the beach and in the sea, the cancellations were significant and also the unquantifiable numbers of those tourists who decided not to go to the seaside because of ‘pollution’. Then there is the long term damage. Over a decade ago Clare County Council unnecessarily closed half (!) Kilkee bay and beach. For a number of years afterwards tourists would ask ‘Is it safe to swim?’ or ‘Is the water still polluted?’ Another comment which I have heard a number of times is ‘I have stomach trouble or I have skin trouble (……..fill in whatever illness you like) and I was in for a swim –it must be the pollution’. This myth became so embedded that a geography textbook on the Leaving Cert course quoted Kilkee Bay as an example of water pollution! So there will be long term effects.
On the Friday and Saturday in question, both the bay and beach were deserted. On the finest day of the summer so far, the beach should have been crowded with sunbathers, children building sand castles and people playing beach sports. The bay should have been full of people swimming, scuba diving, kayaking, yachting snorkelling and all the other activities which make Kilkee bay such a hive of activity on a summer’s day. Instead all was deserted by an unnecessary bureaucratic order.
Another annoying aspect is the unthinking support Clare Council got from the two local papers. The Clare People editorial told the people of Kilkee ‘get over it ,move on’, while the Clare Champion claimed that people’s health was paramount (as though those that opposed the closure didn’t think the same). This support for the Council had nothing to do with the large amount of advertising, statutory notices, that body places in every edition.
This is the third year in a row that flawed bureaucratic decisions have impacted adversely on Kilkee. Last year it was the vandalisation of the Cliff Walk and the year before it was the removal of diving boards on bogus health and safety grounds.
What will it be next year.