As the years pass, the sea rises and nothing is built, some begin to doubt the council can defend Clontarf and Sandymount from the tides

On Thursday afternoon, neighbours Tony Dwane and Terry Laughton were standing in their front gardens, talking over the waist-high wall.

The day is cold and slate grey, the sea calm and low where it lies, out across the road, beyond the promenade, on the other side of the sea wall. But it isn’t always.

Dwane recalls a day in the 1980s when it rose up and flowed across 70 metres or so and right into his house. They both tell of the close calls they’ve had since.

And they say they’re worried something worse is coming.

“It’s only a matter of time,” says Laughton, standing in his front garden, gesturing out towards the sea.

“If we get a wind headed into the bay and a high tide, we’re doomed,” says Dwane, from his own, adjacent, front garden.

They say they’re frustrated Dublin City Council hasn’t improved the flood defences along the coast here. They are not alone.

Years are passing and the sea is rising and getting stormier. The council and residents in coastal Clontarf and Sandymount have continued to think and talk and think and talk about how best to defend those communities from flooding without damaging their seaside beauty.

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground has been changing, requiring updates to plans.  “The longer you take the goal post shifts a bit,” said Gerard O’Connell, a senior engineer in the council’s flood defence projects office, at the 29 November meeting of the council’s climate committee.

Does this mean the climate is changing so fast, and the council moves so slowly, that it’s being outpaced by events on the ground? “No, this is an incorrect interpretation of what was being set out at the meeting,” a council spokesperson said.

But they also said that after all these years the council and residents have not yet been able to agree a scheme for Clontarf, and as they move forward “the design will now be based on updated Climate change estimates in line with best practise”.

And in Sandymount, the council already has a scheme planned, but before building, it’s planning to bring in a consultant “to determine if the design is in line with current national guidelines and standards”.

At the meeting, some councillors questioned whether the council is acting with enough urgency to defend the city against flooding from the sea – and one councillor questioned the state’s ability to deliver large infrastructure projects like this at all.

Recognising a problem, planning to address it

There was major tidal flooding in Dublin in 2002. That prompted the addition of flood defences, according to the Office of Public Works (OPW), the state body that takes the lead on flood mapping and coastal flood defence.

“Before 2002 we were not aware that Dublin City was at significant tidal flooding risk,” a Dublin City Council spokesperson said last year. When another very high tide hit in 2014, “we were prepared”, with the new defences, they said.

Since at least 2016, O’Connell has been talking about improving flood defences at Sandymount.

In 2021, he told local councillors the council planned to start raising the existing wall along the promenade before the end of the year.

But that hasn’t happened. Instead, they decided they needed to get some consultants in and have a re-look at the design, a council spokesperson said in March 2023.

At the meeting in late November 2023, O’Connell said they’re still working on that, and hope to appoint a consultant in the first quarter of 2024.

On Saturday, a council spokesperson said that “Dublin City Council is in the process of procuring Consultant Engineering Design Services to validate the existing design, and to determine if the design is in line with current national guidelines and standards”.

It is “undertaking the necessary due diligence to ensure that the existing proposal has the required consideration for climate change adaptation measures, including sea level rise and potential wave overtopping”, they said.

On the north side, efforts since the 2002 flood to defend Clontarf against tidal flooding have also faltered.

Dublin City Council was forced in late 2011 to abandon one idea for flood defences after local residents turned out in their thousands to protest that it would destroy the promenade and make it unsafe.

In the decade since, it has been talking with local residents about a way forward. In May 2022, O’Connell told local councillors his team was drawing up contracts to choose a consultant and team to do design options.

But that hasn’t happened yet. At the November 2023 climate committee meeting, O’Connell said “we’re hoping to appoint a consultant probably quarter 3 of next year”.

The council spokesperson said on Saturday that “Unfortunately, we could not reach a consensus with the Joint Working Group/Local residents to allow the preferred design to proceed.”

So the council has had to “recommence the process of identifying a suitable flood alleviation scheme that is acceptable to the local residents/joint working group and the design will now be based on updated Climate change estimates”.

Frustration

What can be done to speed up big flood defence projects? Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney asked at the November meeting. “We’re fighting the clock here.”

Her party colleague, Claire Byrne, the committee’s chair, also voiced her frustration with the council’s pace.

“We know that things are moving very very fast, and they’re changing very very fast,” Byrne said. “We really don’t have time to be waiting seven or eight years to be building things like floodwalls.”

Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey asked for a meeting involving the Office of Public Works (OPW), local TDs, local councillors, the Sandymount and Merrion Residents Association, and council staff, “where we try and see how on earth we can speed up this process”.

“The state’s decision-making procedures are not capable of delivering major infrastructure projects,” Lacey said. “The current state structures cannot deliver.”

Council executive manager James Nolan, however, pushed back against this criticism.

“I disagree. I think we can deliver and we will deliver,” Nolan said. “Within maybe 18 months we’ll be delivering the scheme in Sandymount along the promenade.”

The Clontarf project, meanwhile, is a few steps behind the Sandymount one.

In their front yards fronting onto the Clontarf Road on Thursday, Laughton and Dwane say they don’t expect the council to do anything, at least not anytime soon.

“They don’t have the will to do anything,” said Dwane.

“They’ll just kick the can down the road,” said Laughton.