Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The point is that the general principle is right. We need some body that is genuinely representative of all stakeholders, all those who have a real interest in protecting and enhancing the bay, protecting its biodiversity as an amenity, representing the various stakeholders in the bay area and ensuring that the water quality is the best it can possibly be. That body should have real power and teeth and, critically, should be genuinely representative of all stakeholders. That is the key.

I will flag just a few issues that are important in that regard, some of which have been a preoccupation of the Save Our Seafront campaign for many years. I commend the Save Our Seafront campaign on its work. We were set up in, I think, 2004. It still has a great standing committee that has been very active all those years. Some of its leading members have passed on. I remember the very first meeting we had was in the Dún Laoghaire Christian Institute and was attended by John de Courcy Ireland. He was one of the founding members of Save Our Seafront. He was a mariner, a socialist, a lover of the sea and the harbour, somebody who had campaigned for many years, even before Save Our Seafront was set up, and somebody who should be long remembered for the passion he had for marine and maritime issues. A further commemoration of John de Courcy Ireland is something we should think about in Dún Laoghaire and elsewhere. Bob Waddell, who was, I think, the founding member, or certainly for a long time one of the leading figures, of the Sandycove and Glasthule Residents Association, was on the committee of Save Our Seafront and was a real voice in that campaign on many bay-related issues.

That campaign began over an issue to which Deputy Bacik alluded in her contribution, the Dún Laoghaire baths. The story of the Dún Laoghaire baths is illustrative of both the dangers and the potential of developing our seafront and Dublin Bay amenities. When the campaign was first set up there was, incredibly, a plan, backed by the majority of political parties on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council at the time, for a 19-storey office block to be built on the site of the Dún Laoghaire Baths. I ask the House to think about that. Save Our Seafront was set up and campaigned on that basis. I remember our first protest. I would say we had about 30 people there when we began.

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