“You stand on the pier and it’s different every day. The sky is changing, the water, the clouds. It’s the most wonderful facility. The whole prom is.”
The tide is in. A man flings a ball into the sun-shimmered water for his dog to paddle out to and fetch.
Morning swimmers chat as they prepare for a dip off the Clontarf pier, opposite the Yacht & Boat Club.
“Any stress you have disappears very quickly when you’re in that water,” says Pat Penny.
It’s a bright Thursday morning. Penny and her friend Ruth Lehane are out for their almost-daily swim and catch-up.
“You don’t know what characters you’ll meet and get chatting to. Everyday can be different,” Penny says.
“It could be young kids out from the city centre, older people who live nearby. It’s just brilliant to have it, really,” she says.
Yet, the pier is showing signs of disrepair, says Alan Barkley, another regular who has cycled down for his morning dip.
“You can really see it underneath, when the tide is out. The damage is quite clear. It’s going to be a serious issue eventually,” he says.
He points to an old marker pillar further out at sea that collapsed just a few weeks ago due to erosion.
“It’s only a matter of time here too,” Barkley says.
Enter the community group Reimagine Clontarf Pier, driving a grassroots movement to revitalise the public amenity.
The committee is made up of members from Clontarf Yacht & Boat Club and the Clontarf Residents Association.
The Yacht & Boat Club is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. While the pier is an amenity open to all, it is also essential to the club’s existence.
Donal Heaney, a Yacht & Boat Club member and Reimagine Clontarf Pier committee member, says that Dublin and Clontarf have grown.
The pier is no longer fit for purpose, he says. “In the sense that it's not providing the facilities to support the kind of activities that people want to use it for.”
“It's over 70 years old, it’s at the end of life,” he said, on the phone on Wednesday.
For many, both the jetty and slipway are simply known as “the slip”. But the group are calling it “the pier”, and hoping it will encourage people to “reimagine that location in a different way”, Heaney says.
The only upgrade that Heaney has seen since childhood was when older wooden handrails were swapped out for metal, he says.
As the push to reinvigorate the pier gained momentum, the group set up an online form so that anyone in the community could offer ideas for what they feel should be done.
Suggestions include a lido, a café “that is not trying to just be a fancy place”, a community-run sauna, changing facilities, a bandstand for musicians, a children’s playground, and toilets.
Heaney says it’s important to “extend the tidal range” of the pier. That would mean the water is accessible for more of the day.
It is not just a case of extending the pier, he says. “With a dredged channel to deeper water and a floating pontoon, users could access the water for longer periods both before and after high tide.”
Heaney says there is a need for a clearer division of areas for different water users.
The opposite side from the slip can’t be accessed by boats or swimmers, he says. So, everyone uses the slip, which can cause danger for swimmers during busier times as they navigate around the boats.
“It’s a matter of installing steps on the other side for swimmers to get into the water, and everything would be hunky dory,” he says.
Ian Sargent, now 80 years of age, also feels it’s overdue a major revamp.
He agrees with many of the ideas put forward already for improving amenities – adding shelters, a playground, and particularly, toilets.
Regular swimmers Pat Penny and Ruth Lehane say they would be wary of changing or adding too much. Maintenance is sorely needed, they say, but they also enjoy the rough and wild aspect.
Says Lehane: “Things do work well the way they are. The place can be thronged with boats, canoes, swimmers – all sorts. But we all make it work and look out for each other.”
“And what’s with the obsession with coffee docks nowadays,” she says, laughing. “I love coffee, but do we really need one in every possible place?”
Both women agree that the Clontarf Baths are an example of what not to do.
The once-extremely-popular seawater swimming pool on the seafront, after falling into disuse, was eventually reopened primarily as a restaurant, with the baths a secondary feature. While the water is still accessible, Lehane and Penny say it hasn’t been the same.
“Things can get too formal. It takes the magic out of it,” Lehane says.
Both Lehane and Penny are lifelong swimmers in Dublin Bay.
Lehane’s father also swam there regularly all his life. Tragically, he drowned after getting into trouble off the nearby Bull Wall a few years ago, she says.
“This place is just very special to me,” Lehane says, “I don’t want it to change … too much anyway.”
Sargent has vivid childhood memories of the 1940s and ’50s, when his life was already centred around the Clontarf Yacht & Boat Club and the pier.
His grandchildren are fifth-generation members of the club, he says.
Sargent’s earliest memories are of being brought down by his father to watch boat sailing during the summer, he says.
“He was one of the guys who organised the sailing ashore and ran races. I was his assistant,” Sargent said by phone on Thursday.
“We caught crabs and made cork boats,” he says.
They would stitch corks together with matches, add makeshift sails, and a rudder from a flat bit of slate, he says. “These things would sail off downwind, and I’d picture myself heading off on the high seas with them.”
The bay is, and always has been, mesmerising, he says. “You stand on the pier and it’s different every day. The sky is changing, the water, the clouds. It’s the most wonderful facility. The whole prom is.”
Accessibility is key for the Reimagine Clontarf Pier committee, they say.
Not just connecting people with public transport and parking, but also making the pier itself better for wheelchair users, Heaney says.
Andrew Semple, a member of Clontarf Yacht & Boat Club and a retired occupational therapist, says there are simple things that can be done.
“It is already accessible in that we can get people in wheelchairs onto boats, and do so regularly. It’s always going to be relatively tricky for a wheelchair user on their own,” he says.
“But we can make the surface non-slip, add decent railings, small changes like that would make a big difference,” Semple said by phone on Wednesday.
Dún Laoghaire has a hoist system to help wheelchair users in and out of boats. “That would be a possibility,” he says.
Rumble strips for those with visual impairments should also be added too, similar to those at traffic lights, he says, to alert people that they are near an edge.
At the recent Dublin City Council North Central Area meeting on 14 April, six councillors presented a joint motion recognising the work of the campaign.
The motion asked the council to support the movement “in their efforts to engage the local community and develop a proposal for the future of the slipway and surrounding area”.
The pier hasn’t seen any major upgrades for 75 years, says Kevin Breen, an independent councillor for Clontarf, and one of those behind the motion.
“When they did that work back then, it was money well spent because all this time later, people are still using it and it’s getting more and more popular,” said Breen by phone. “This is a legacy project.”
Breen says the movement is still in the pre-consultation phase. But the desire for an upgrade is clear, he said.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
“Having private, for-profit care goes against all you are trying to achieve for children in care,” says Terry Dignan, a spokesperson for charities that run children’s homes.
This week the roadway was again covered in shattered glass fallen from the Boat House office block there.
Changes would bring more routes into the green spaces, as well as natural play areas, added amenities and upgraded pitches.
“These motocross bikes are going up and down the streets outside their houses because normally they'd have somewhere to go, now they've nowhere to go.”
