In Fingal, councillors call for more transparency in how council is tackling coastal erosion

In June, Fingal County Council’s newly elected councillors gathered for its first monthly meeting since the local election.

The order of business included the appointment of chairpersons and members to the council’s many committees, forums and task forces.

And among these many committees was the Fingal Coastal Liaison Group, set up in 2016 for members to discuss and respond to the growing challenge of coastal erosion and flooding.

But before its new members were chosen, Green Party Councillor David Healy raised concerns about how the committee operates.

“It really hasn’t operated very effectively in terms of adequate notice of meetings, proper reports being given, often reports given verbally,” said Healy.

Communication with the public has been poor, says Social Democrats Councillor Paul Mulville.

“It was agreed, at the very start, that a section of the council website would be maintained regularly,” he said. “There’d be the minutes and a brief report of what was going on for the public.”

But council officials have failed to share the minutes of these meetings publicly online for the last five years.

Healy proposed that the group be wrapped up – especially as the council now has another forum for handling similar issues – the Marine and Coastal Strategic Policy Committee (SPC).

It hasn’t been working properly, he said, speaking after the meeting. “And it’s a duplication of the coastal SPC.”

But there are no plans to make changes, a council spokesperson said.

What’s it for?

The Coastal Liaison Group predates Fingal’s Marine and Coastal SPC by six years.

Council officials first proposed it in response to the issue of coastal erosion in Portrane, says Mulville, the Social Democrats councillor.

“It would give us a chance to have a focused approach to coastal erosion in areas that are affected, like Rush, Portrane, Burrow Beach, Sutton and Rogerstown,” he said.

It also reviews and makes recommendations in relation to the management of these issues, according to its terms of reference.

Like an SPC, not all members are councillors. Residents of impacted areas sit on it too, he says.

“You had people from the community councils and residents groups with local councillors and council officials coming to it on a quarterly basis to progress a solution,” he says.

But it’s been very slow in driving improvements in recent years, he says. “At the start it was moving a bit faster, by getting temporary seabees brought in.”

Those seabees, also known as honeycomb seawalls, are a grid of hexagonal concrete blocks and were placed along the coast in Portrane in October 2018, Mulville says.

Marine and Coastal SPC members have expressed concerns that these are creating a hard coastline, and affecting the local habitat.

The liaison group also focused on a landfill in Rush, which was breaking up due to coastal erosion, he says. “The council had to figure out a way of dealing with that. It was to stop pollution in the sea.”

The group had a lot of discussions around the lack of a national policy to inform councils on how they can address coastal erosion, he says. “But it’s been very useful and good for discussion.”

Five years missing

To those sitting outside of it, the Fingal Coastal Liaison Group isn’t particularly transparent.

No record of any meeting has been published on the council’s website since its 16th meeting on 11 September 2019.

But the liaison group has, in fact, continued to meet, says Mulville, the Social Democrats councillor. “The minutes haven’t been put up. I’ve been trying to get them up.”

As far back as September 2020, he was told by council officials that they would share those minutes “at the earliest opportunity possible”, he says.

It is particularly bad when it comes to providing a record of discussion, said Healy, the Green Party councillor over the phone in June. “There are things that aren’t being put in the minutes.”

Many of the items that are discussed are not provided to members in advance, he says. “We will be told that a report will be given on the day, and that will be a PowerPoint presentation, which could’ve been emailed.”

These weren’t being put in the minutes either, he says.

His proposal at the monthly meeting on 24 June was to abolish the liaison group in favour of the Marine and Coastal SPC, he said. “That didn’t happen.”

What do the minutes say

As of 27 August, the council had still not published the minutes for any of the nine meetings convened since September 2019.

A spokesperson for the council said on Tuesday morning that the site would be updated. But they didn’t say why they weren’t up.

Minutes circulated among attendees for those meetings do show the kinds of discussions that have taken place.

In July 2020, councillors discussed works to add 1,287 seabees along the coastline at Portrane.

In April 2023, members were alerted that some of the beach behind the seabees at Burrow in Portrane was taken away at high tide the previous month.

Minutes from February 2022 show that the council was investigating the possibility of purchasing the land at the Brooks End landfill site, while those in December noted there were delays in the transaction.

Minutes not shared on the website also report on an in-depth meeting to address coastal changes in Rush, briefings on the long-term plans for dealing with erosion at Outer Rogerstown Estuary, and Fingal’s Coastal Monitoring Programme.

There needs to be a better reporting structure in place for the liaison group, Mulville says. “There isn’t a regular way for this information getting to the full council, and without stuff being put on the website, there wasn’t much reporting coming out of it.”