Caring about our coast

Another Life: It is among Ireland's south-westerly islands that one tunes in best to the pulse of the ocean: among the Blaskets, say, or the Skelligs, whose western cliffs receive the endless procession of Atlantic swells.

Here, on one height or another, you feel the wind at full fetch and look out across the glitter and drifting cloud-shadows to the furthest horizon on Earth. The ocean seems enormous and revelatory, filling quite ordinary souls with noble emotions.

Such Wagnerian scenery is probably the "best" bit of coast that Ireland has to offer, depending on one's mood. But this island is blessed with an extraordinary diversity of seashores within its 7,500 maritime kilometres. Rock pools, sand-spits, pebble strands, machair and salt-marsh, glittering estuary mud - each is a natural world of its own and has played its own part in local life and economy. Today, more than half the population lives within 10 kilometres of the coast, but its meaning for most people has greatly changed.

As the currach gives way to the jet ski, and scuba divers frolic with the seals, a new book takes stock of the wave-washed habitats, their wildlife and human heritage. Widely-researched and often thrillingly illustrated, Richard Nairn's Ireland's Coastline (Collins Press, €30) is the first overview of our maritime fringe in an era of science, recreation and environmental concern.

Nairn is one of a select band in Ireland: a naturalist who has made his vocation pay. His first job after graduating in natural sciences from Trinity College Dublin was a blissful five-year interlude as a warden of a sand-dune nature reserve at Murlough, Co Down. Later came censuses of seals and waders, bird expeditions to Greenland and Africa, and an "environmental appraisal" of Irish coasts paid for by oil companies.

Today, as all kinds of development call for impact assessments, he heads Natura, a firm of environmental consultants, and travels the country in a glossy Land Rover with the latest in rubber dinghies strapped to the top. In the often lean and always sharply competitive world of nature consultancy, he has done outstandingly well. But the spirit behind his book is still that of the wanderer on a lonely shore.

Environmental consultants like to stay out of controversies: they can never be sure where their next client is coming from. Last autumn, Nairn felt bound to express outrage, in this newspaper, at the assault on sand dunes to extend a golf course in west Donegal. Most of his book was written in a house on that coast, but the episode came too late to disturb the generally cautious tenor of his chapter on "Respecting the Coast".

"Whether the recreational uses of coastal dunes and other areas for golf links, caravan parks and the like are sustainable remains to be seen . . ." is as far as he goes. And - remarkably for such a lover of Co Donegal - he finds nothing to say about the ramparts of bungalows that have eclipsed many of its headlands.

However, mentored by the late and lamented Prof Bill Carter of the University of Ulster, he does warn of the consequences of ignoring the natural cycling of sand between dunes, strands and sea, and using "hard" engineering in attempts to halt erosion. Along with a striking photograph of the new wind turbines towering above the Arklow Bank, off Co Wicklow, he comments on the "artificial stabilising of naturally dynamic features". How far such fixing of offshore banks of gravel and sand may interact with the erosion of neighbouring coasts is, he says, "poorly understood at present" (and thus, no doubt, well suited to study by environmental consultants).

He saves his toughest comments for Ireland's failure to press forward with the draft policy for Coastal Zone Management (CZM) drawn up for the Government by consultants Brady Shipman Martin in 1997. Some 1,500 kilometres of the coastline are at risk of erosion and the big, destructive storms of the 1980s prompted engineers to set up a National Erosion Committee. It agreed on the need for managing the coast in an integrated way, so development on shore takes the sea's dynamics into account. One practical result was Ecopro, an excellent manual for environmentally friendly coastal protection.

But the bigger CZM framework, demanding government reorganisation, is still far from realisation. For example, Nairn points out, local authorities still have no jurisdiction over planning below high water mark: central government controls developments in the intertidal areas and inshore waters.

"Despite much posturing and paperwork," he writes, "there is little change."

Ireland's Coastline is, first of all, a beautifully-produced celebration of a natural and human heritage. The book assembles some eye-catching photographs, particularly those shot underwater by Nigel Motyer, and it encourages enjoyment of the coast by divers, surfers, anglers and the rest. But, as sea-level rises, the warnings about the "difficult and complicated process" of managing the coast may need to become less mildly phrased.