Dublin Bay is many things to many people - industrial estate, millionaires' row and maritime playground - but it is also the city's spiritual heart. Marine Correspondent Lorna Siggins reports on the ongoing development of the port and bay, and in the stories that follow, we present a recreational guide to the capital's coastline.
Joyce opened the first chapter of Ulysses on it. For writer James Plunkett, it represented freedom for early 20th-century city dwellers. Mrs and Mrs SC Hall, those intrepid travel writers, were struck by its "magnificent" topography back in 1841. Yet one can count specific guidebook entries for Dublin's "blue lung" on the fingers of one hand.
"When the tide was fully out there was level sand for miles, with pools and lakes to reflect the sky, and the blue outline of Howth Hill with its yellow gorse bushes floating in the distance," Plunkett wrote in The Gems She Wore, describing how hundreds of poor mothers and children would escape from the city centre "armed with teapots, kettles, cups, parcels of sandwiches, towels and bathing togs". "Their picnic fires added the smell of wood smoke to the salt air, the children bathed or built sandcastles and collected shells. In the evening the trams and the trains brought them back to the city streets again, often enough to grinding poverty and airless tenements, where memories of sea and sand made it easier for mothers and filled the dreams of sleeping children ..."
Alluding to Plunkett almost two decades ago, environmentalist Jack O'Sullivan noted how the bay represented even more of a release for the populace of the city and its "vastly increased suburbs". By then, it had been focal point for some controversies including proposals to build an oil refinery, to establish a rubbish dump on Bull Island, and to excavate caverns for liquid petroleum gas storage.
Dublin Port's plans for land reclamation to allow it to expand had already been mooted. At the same time, increased prosperity had placed greater demands on the resource from the leisure sector - accommodating as it did then 10 different activities, from bathing to diving. And that was before the Dollymount kite-surfers came along.
O'Sullivan was critical of the fact that at that time some 37 official bodies had some sort of interest in the bay. He called for a "paradigm shift" which moved away from piece-meal responses to crises, in his contribution to Managing Dublin Bay, published by the University College Dublin's (UCD) Resource and Environmental Policy Centre in 1987. One of the book's editors, Professor Frank Convery, also criticised the system of management by "default", whereby a "mixture of good luck, good decision-making, an alert public and a network of informal contacts between agencies" had "prevented the bay being irreversibly destroyed".
Almost 20 years on, the littoral landscape has changed dramatically. Dublin Port is now one of the State's biggest and most successful industrial estates, with 4,000 employed in the area, 300 shipping movements a week, including ferries carrying more than 1.5 million passengers, and annual imports and exports representing more than 23 million gross tonnes. Dublin Port Tunnel is nearing completion, and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) is transforming the estuary - home to two financial service centres (see panel).
Waterside property prices are at a premium on both sides of the bay, thanks in no small part to the DART line breaking the Liffey divide, with high profile coastal residents ranging from former RTÉ broadcaster Gay Byrne on the northside to musicians Enya, Bono and The Edge and writers Maeve Binchy and Hugh Leonard on the south. Dún Laoghaire has its marina, a new one is being constructed at Poolbeg Yacht Club on the Liffey's south side, and the plastic bag tax has played its own small part in protecting the UNESCO biosphere at Bull Island.
And of course the €300 million tertiary sewage treatment plant has been commissioned at Ringsend. Joyce's "snotgreen" sea, though still "scrotumtightening", is now cleaner than ever, according to Dublin City Council, though there have been complaints about the plant's smell. Peadar O'Sullivan of Dublin City Council points to the Bull Wall on the bay's northside as the barometer, given the clockwise currents from Ringsend out. Up to 2002, it was too filthy to consider swimming there, but since June 2003, 90 per cent of water samples taken there are within EU standards, he says. Dollymount Beach is also recovering, to the extent that it has surpassed mandatory limits - and may apply for a Blue Flag next year.
Yet there is still no integrated management forum, Prof Convery points out. In fact, Ireland lags way behind in terms of developing coastal zone management nationally, according to Ms Valerie Cummins, manager of University College Cork's Coastal and Marine Resource Centre (CMRC), who says that a recent EU recommendation encouraged the development of a national coastal policy by all member states by 2006.
Successful precedents have been set elsewhere, such as in California, where the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission has been in existence for 40 years. It includes representatives from all the main agencies, the counties and cities bordering the bay and the public. "What's really significant is that it commissions serious research - something which is lacking here in Dublin," Convery says.
A Dublin Bay Commission wouldn't be short of such work. It could examine issues such as the capacity problem which the new Ringsend treatment plant may be facing in the next five to 10 years, and the State's ability to continue funding it. "Experience in the US has shown that when the money runs out, the waste water is just let through," Convery says. It could review in detail Dublin Port's case for landfill on the north side in the face of opposition from local residents and environmentalists.
"Given that the bay is so shallow, infill is an ideal way, from the port's point of view, to create land at very low cost," Prof Convery says. However, the issue is currently before the European Commission, and he is personally not convinced of its necessity. "They've been making a case since the 1980s and yet the port is still in business and doing better than ever. In spite of the dramatic increase in shipping traffic, it obviously hasn't been a serious constraint."
The port's move to sell off Skerries and Balbriggan harbours might never have got to the stage it did, had there been a bay authority; last-minute intervention by the Environment and Marine Ministers appears to have shelved that plan for now.
An authority could address conflicts between different leisure interests, introduce zoning for various watersports - and perhaps even create an estuary for dinghy sailing and suchlike around the Sydney Parade area, according to Dr Andrew Kelly, Prof Convery's colleague at the UCD Environmental Institute.
An overall authority might also re-ignite the debate on the very future of Dublin Port, and the proposal mooted by ESB International more than a decade ago to move it to Loughshinny, close to the M1 and the Dublin-Belfast railway line. Prof Convery believes the refusal to move the port was a missed opportunity, and one which would have had a dramatic impact on traffic and on land use potential. "It wouldn't have required the cost which we are now incurring of building the Dublin Port Tunnel."
Dublin City Council's acting chief planner, Mr Dick Gleeson, believes the move should be looked at again, given the international trend toward moving ports out of central city areas. As far as Dublin Port is concerned, it isn't for budging. It is the city's very raison d'être in the authority's view, and the centre of Dublin's economic life. Its chief executive, Enda Connellan, a former merchant mariner, is a keen yachtsman and prides himself on links between the port and the inner city river community.
A factor influencing any debate on the bay's future is thefact that it was, once, a graveyard for many vessels - particularly during hostile easterly winds. The treacherous nature of its waters may be one explanation for the city's attitude to it, artist and writer Brian Lalor observes in his wonderful depiction of the bay, in words and drawings, Dublin Bay from Killiney to Howth (O'Brien Press, 1989). In spite of its magical setting, it has never been described in "Bride of Adriatic" or "City of the Bay" terms, he notes.
Air travel has also played its part in this disengagement. "Shipping on the bay was once seen as a lifeline of movement, travel, business and goods," Lalor writes. "When a Georgian or Victorian citizen of Dublin looked at those paintings of the bay crowded with shipping, they saw something which we cannot experience, a symbol of not being cut off from the rest of the world." The "sense of anticipation" expressed by Jonathan Swift - "in Dublin they'd be glad to see/A packet, though it bring in me" - has, Lalor says, "no contemporary parallel".