Bull Island came from the sea and may return there

There is an inherent tension when a coastal area seeks to be at once a place of popular recreation and a Unesco biosphere reserve. This tension is revealed, for instance, on Bull Island and on Dollymount Strand which runs its length.

This island was the byproduct of 18th-century plans to deepen the waters of Dublin Bay and facilitate the expanding trade of Dublin Port. Two walls were built – a South Bull (1795) and a North Bull (1824/5) – and, in the wake of their construction, Bull Island formed where sandbanks had previously risen.

The new island grew out into Dublin Bay, decade after decade, its shorelines expanding with the deposition of sand and other material transported on the tides and winds.

Its proximity to the city centre marked it as an important place of leisure and recreation. Crowds grew with the extension of the tram system to the wooden bridge connected to the island in the 1880s and later with the provision of buses. In the culture of inner-city Dublin, Dollymount Strand was the seaside.

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It remains a vital place for popular recreation. By 2020, there were an estimated 1.4 million annual visits to Bull Island, with people walking, jogging, swimming, kite-surfing and much else

As coastal land parallel to Bull Island was swallowed by prosperous suburbs, use of the strand developed further: Dollymount was thronged with people seeking “a day out”, healthy exercise and a sense of wilderness.

It remains a vital place for popular recreation. By 2020, there were an estimated 1.4 million annual visits to Bull Island, with people walking, jogging, swimming, kite-surfing and much else.

There are also golfers. Between the 1880s and the 1980s, two private golf clubs came to own or hold a long lease on more than one-quarter of the island. During this expansion, there was tension between the competing desires of those who wished to extend the operations of their golf clubs and those who saw the island as a public space. At its most crude, it was manifest in the installation of fencing which marked out golfing territory as private property – and protests against this.

Slow change

Through the 20th century, the history of the island casts into light how popular behaviours can change, but also how slow such change can be and how it can be resisted or ignored. In the early 1900s the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and other members of elite Dublin society came to Bull Island to shoot birds. They shot snipe, pheasants, ducks, gulls, woodcock, herons and all manner of other sea birds from cormorants to a glossy ibis. Sometimes these birds were shot to be stuffed and put on display in private homes; mostly they were shot for sport.

Members of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (1885) and the Irish Society for the Protection of Birds (1904) argued repeatedly for a revised approach to the treatment of birds. This led to the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1930 and then, in 1931, to Bull Island being declared Ireland’s first bird sanctuary. The island was made a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1981 and then a national nature reserve.

[  Bull Island: Proposal to restrict dog walkers from areas of nature reserve ]

During the 20th century, increased awareness of Bull Island’s unique habitat and a changing approach to environmental matters added a further dimension. The dynamic ecological system with its salt and freshwater marshes, its dune system and its sandy beach demands the management of practices by users of the island that have presented a significant challenge.

The island’s hare population is now extinct, its seal population is routinely disturbed, and ground-nesting birds have their habitats destroyed; the island has not escaped the national and international collapse in biodiversity

Broader societal awareness of environmental issues has never been higher and yet, as Dublin City Council notes in a 2020 report, “a significant percentage of the people exercising on the island, either with or without dogs, do so without the realisation of the sensitive dynamics of the ecosystem in which they are recreating. These are not irresponsible people. They just do not have a full appreciation and understanding of the sensitivities of this particular nature reserve.”

Accordingly, the island’s hare population is now extinct, its seal population is routinely disturbed, and ground-nesting birds have their habitats destroyed; the island has not escaped the national and international collapse in biodiversity.

How can society accommodate popular recreation with the need to protect the environment? For more than 100 years, Dublin City Council repeatedly discussed the littering and vandalism of Dollymount Strand. By the 1960s, for example, an estimated 10,000 visitors came on long weekends, leaving behind much of their rubbish. There were sanitary towels and condoms, empty bottles of beer, wine and spirits, and all manner of discarded food wrappers. Children used bottles for impromptu cock-shots, leaving broken glass. The aftermath of barbecues and other parties scarred the dunes. The beach became a car park as the explosion in car ownership led more and more to drive out on to the sands; it was also the place where many Dubliners learned to drive.

And then there is the water: James Joyce got to the heart of Dollymount’s contrasting aspects when he wrote in Ulysses of its “grainy sands” and its “sewage breath”.

Extensive flooding

Ultimately, the greater context in which the history of the Island – its pleasure-seekers, its sportspeople and its nature-lovers – will be forged is the wider story of climate change. The most recent surveys from scientists project that by 2050 ongoing environmental damage will see Dublin Bay’s coastal area suffer extensive flooding.

The rise in the global mean sea level set out in the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has dire implications. The projected depths of inundation render Bull Island hugely vulnerable. The place which grew from the sea in the wake of human intervention may soon revert to from whence it came through human intervention of a more destructive type.

Paul Rouse is a professor in the UCD School of History.