Bit of land chosen for Balbriggan swimming platform has been swept away in storms

Steel fencing cordoned off nine spaces in the car park beside Balbriggan’s Martello tower on Monday morning.

Fingal County Council had erected them to block off what was left of a small grassy ledge overlooking the northern end of the beach, a sizeable chunk of which had collapsed.

The small cliff fell into the water during a spate of stormy weather back in February.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the spot where a swimming platform that Fingal County Council had been planning was to connect to the headland, said Declan Ryan, a Fingal senior executive officer, at a meeting of the council’s Balbriggan/Rush-Lusk/Swords area committee on Thursday.

“So this does cause a problem for us with this particular project,” said Ryan, who works in the council’s Economic, Community and Cultural Development Section.

They have spent a lot of time gaining expertise and consulting local groups, he said. “I suppose now we are at a little bit of an impasse.”

In a motion at the meeting, independent Councillor Tony Murphy suggested the council look again at how to build a swimming platform at the spot, but one that could serve a dual purpose as a coastal defence against erosion too.

Concrete action

The bit of coast next to the Martello tower is the perfect site for a swimming platform, says John Moore, chairperson of the Balbriggan Amenities for Sea Swimmers group. 

“It has enough water there to swim and it wouldn't be tidal,” he said on Tuesday. “If you want to swim off the front beach, you pretty much need to go down at high tide.”

Plus, a concrete platform could protect that stretch of the coast from erosion, said Murphy, the independent councillor, on Monday afternoon. “You’re gonna have to do something anyway. They can’t just leave the bank as it is.”

This was “an area which used to contain about 40 car parking spaces which has now become dangerous”, he’d said at the meeting.

A feasibility study for developing a swimming platform in Balbriggan was carried out by Langan Engineers, Ryan, the Fingal senior executive officer, wrote in response to Murphy’s motion at the meeting on Thursday.

But it did not assess whether this could have a coastal protection function, Ryan said. “This study is available to the Operations & Strategic Infrastructure Departments, within whose remit coastal protection resides.”

“I have no remit for erosion per se,” he said.

Still feasible

The swimming platform project has been through the design and feasibility phases, Ryan said.

Almost four years ago, the council allocated €50,000 to carry out a feasibility study that would look at whether to build a tidal pool on the coastline beside the Martello tower, according to a council press release from August 2022.

The feasibility study was published in the summer of 2023, says Moore of the Balbriggan Amenities for Sea Swimmers. “It had a fantastic tidal pool and also a swim platform.”

In January 2024, Ryan told the area committee that they would need a second consultation report and a foreshore licence, estimating at the time that such a facility would take between five and seven years to deliver.

But, when the council’s local rejuvenation project, Our Balbriggan, published its plan for 2025 to 2030 in May 2025, it said an early-stage concept design had been completed for only a swimming platform area – not the tidal pool.

The general area where this platform could be developed has been affected by the stormy weather from earlier this year, however, Ryan said on Thursday. “I suppose, in its simplest form, the swimming platform would not require a redesign or a repositioning per se.”

But the access path down to the platform would need to be reassessed because the piece of headland where that connection was intended is no longer there, he said.

They were stuck right now, he said. “So I look forward to basically seeing where this goes if there are any solutions that would suit all our needs with regards to delivering these type of projects, this type of project in particular.”

The design is going to have to change here, Murphy says.

But, more broadly with climate change affecting the whole coastal area, the council will need to step up the amount of funding that it is putting into protecting its coastal area, he said. 

“In the meantime, if there’s a public amenity that we can actually deliver on that, sure that’s a win-win for everybody,” he said.