Agency says policy needed to protect coastal areas

Nearly 30 years after the publication of a landmark National Coastline Study, Ireland still has no coherent policy to protect coastal areas. Coastal Zone Management (CZM), as proposed by an official report in 1997, remains stranded in a bureaucratic limbo.

Responsibilities fall between two departments - Environment and Marine - and, though an inter-departmental committee meets occasionally, it has never published an annual report. Legislation is supposedly being drafted, but nobody knows when it might emerge. In the meantime, responsibilities for habitat protection (one of the most crucial issues in the coastal zone) are "passed around as in basketball warm-up" when crises or problems arise, according to Ms Karin Dubsky, co-ordinator of Coastwatch Europe.

She complains about "gaps and overlaps", as exemplified by the Foreshore Act and the Planning Act, and says there is an urgent need to establish a CZM task force, even on an ad hoc basis, to tackle immediate problems and conflicting responsibilities.

Mr John O'Sullivan, planning officer of An Taisce, said all coastal local authorities should be required to prepare CZM plans, just as they are statutorily obliged to prepare housing plans.

Ms Dubsky, who first proposed the CZM approach in 1994, believes it is mere tokenism to give an environmental award to the ground-breaking Bantry Bay CZM pilot study while not confronting the issues affecting coastal zones nationally.

She describes law enforcement as "exceptionally poor", saying the chances of catching anyone for dumping in coastal wetlands or other illegal activities are small. "That's why we should have at least one environment garda attached to every full-time Garda station." Ms Dubsky also called for an end to the planning exemption for land reclamation, which threatened wetland areas, and for a "wetland awareness campaign by the Minister for Arts and Heritage, Ms de Valera.