Our Wild Atlantic Way may be about to get much wilder

Visitors and writers captivated by the Irish coast have often commented on the coexistence of beauty and tragedy. It was both the harshness and softness that entranced playwright JM Synge, for example, who first visited the Aran Islands in 1898. His time there generated a literary bounty; in his own words, this was because of “the continual passing between the misery of last night and the splendour of today … the moods of varying rapture and dismay”.
The Irish coast continues to allure and fascinate as evidenced by the rich visual feast provided by RTÉ’s new series Ireland’s Coast, inspired by University College Cork’s The Coastal Atlas of Ireland, published in 2021. A deeply layered and weighty project, the atlas underlines the scale of scholarly engagement with Ireland’s coastal and maritime history, right back to the Mesolithic period, when our earliest settlers were coastal communities. It’s all there: wildlife, shipwrecks, forts and monastic sites, the points of arrival and departure, the sources of food, the biodiversity. Management of the coastal and marine environments are also covered in the atlas and television series, as is climate change, not just in a foreboding sense, but in relation to positive potential, especially regarding the generation of energy. But it is also crystal clear that coastal areas will feel the brunt of severe climate change patterns, meaning conservation and coastal engineering are more urgent than ever.
The late Michael Viney, who wrote the weekly column Another Life in this newspaper from his home in Thallabawn in Co Mayo, was an adept and humane chronicler of nature and biodiversity. He was also well attuned to the rhythms of lip service, observing bitingly in 2006 that when the Irish government’s Department of the Environment was seeking to enhance its green image for an EU audience when holding the EU presidency 20 years ago, it crafted honeyed words of wisdom and responsibility: “Biodiversity loss matters. It matters for ethical, emotional, environmental and economic reasons. Ethically, we have a responsibility to future generations to maintain the diversity of life on Earth.”
But the “we” seemed conveniently abstract. In subsequent years, it became clear that climate change policy was seen as something too unpalatable to withstand the pervasive localism and short-termism of our political culture. In 2012, for example, Comhar, the “National Sustainable Development Partnership” established in 1999, was shoved aside and subsumed into the National Economic and Social Council for the purposes of “rationalisation”. Reigniting the economy necessitated, it seemed, a sidelining of climate consciousness. As was editorialised in this newspaper in 2015, the government’s response to demands for a more robust climate change policy was “as milk and watery as any of its backbench TDs could have hoped for”.
At least the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) was established that year, and targets, plans and legislation have been elevated in the years since, but climate matters still do not generate the sort of urgency they so obviously require. We have endured weeks now of auction politics and dispiriting myopia. The discussion about what to do with the €14 billion due to Ireland arising from the Apple case highlights the continuity of this approach. We have often heard about “rainy-day” funds; such a description should surely now take on a literal meaning given the climate’s tumultuous shifts and a trajectory that suggests our greatest coastal tragedies lie ahead of us rather than in the past.
The latest instalment of the CCAC’s report for 2024 lays much bare about the need for action to adjust and prepare. Shirking those decisions now will create increased long-term expense and chaos. Severe coastal erosion is apparent, alongside storms and excessive rain. From July 2023 to June 2024 global surface temperatures were at least 1.5 degrees warmer than in pre-industrial times. The report states: “adapting to climate change will require significant investment but will save money and offer multiple co-benefits over time. Sectoral adaptation plans are key for enhancing resilience in communities, infrastructure and nature and have additional benefits for water, soil and air quality, but to date these have not been adequately implemented, evaluated or resourced”. The report also highlights cost: “When looking at initial impacts, the cost of coastal flooding (which does not account for the cost of erosion) without adaptation is projected to be approximately €2 billion annually by the year 2050″. The report also notes the “secondary impacts … displacement of people from their homes because of flood impacts, or other associated impacts of flooding such as contamination of drinking water and resultant impacts on the population’s health.”
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When the Wild Atlantic Way was launched 10 years ago, much was made of the appeal of exploring flora, fauna, culture and leisure “on the edge”. What began as a feast of possibilities has the potential to take on a much darker meaning as the wildness takes over.
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