Mr. Louis Duffy:

We look at the issue of coastal erosion, sea level rise and coastal deposition. These are issues that have challenged our island for many years. They have been dealt with generally by trying to protect anything that has been identified as damaged or exposed. Nationally, and as a sector, we are trying to look at it more strategically now, and trying to plan how we will deal with it in the future. Both erosion and sea level rise would have been seen as risks that led to the assignment of the Atlantic Seaboard, as a pair of CARO regions, to look at the whole area. Nationally, the issue has been led very much by the Office of Public Works, OPW. There is an interdepartmental committee reviewing the issue. A draft report has been prepared. It will be reviewed by the committee and hopefully published within the next number of weeks or months. The OPW has identified that 2 million people live within 5 km of the coast in Ireland. It has looked at the various different types of coastline, including hard rock, beaches, artificial coast, erodible rock and muddy coastline. Through the OPW, and with the assistance of Geological Survey Ireland, we are starting to identify the areas of coast that are at risk. Building on that, we will look at where interventions have been undertaken in the past, and where areas are generally at risk. In 2017, Fingal County Council carried out a survey of a number of coastal counties in the country. The survey identified what work had been done already and what work is ongoing with regard to identifying the risk and mitigating it.

When Atlantic Seaboard South took up the baton in this area, we formed a working group which included members from the relevant Department and subject matter experts from right across the country.

We looked at counties that had already done some work on the issue. We brought officials from those councils onto the working group. The first stage in that was to rerun the survey that had been done by Fingal County Council in order to try to get a complete picture of the national coastline. We found that just eight local authorities have undertaken processes to identify the areas at risk. Those authorities identified 2,279 properties deemed to be at risk as a result of coastal erosion. We are starting to go through a lot of the statistics on that. Generally speaking, we are starting to get the point of understanding the areas that are at risk.

We are working alongside the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, which is the Department with responsibility in this area and which is leading the interdepartmental group. As a sector, we are trying to ensure that we can collect and collate the information at a local level, feed that into the national interdepartmental working group and then take the learnings from that, interpret them and prepare guidelines for local authorities to work on. Typically, Ireland has sought to protect what coastline we can, and attempted to ensure that no properties are damaged. Having said that, 12 properties have been identified as being lost to coastal erosion. That is an increase of seven since the 2017 report.

Ten local authorities around the coastline have outlined processes to identify roads at risk. These are developing areas, and we are also challenged by resourcing issues. However, we are starting to make some progress in the area. In recent discussions with officials from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, we have set out to develop a protocol for establishing a baseline, looking at the existing coastline, the existing interventions that have been carried out historically and the areas that are immediately at risk. This will build an overall national picture of the areas of coast that we need to consider in terms of protection or indeed, managed retreat, if that becomes necessary, which clearly is not the preferred path at this point in time. It is something that we will build a picture of over the next 18 to 24 months. In the sector, the work is led by Atlantic Seaboard South. Nationally, it is led by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.