Beach threat to bay Joyce made famous
Man-made sandy shore could ruin marine life
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor writing in The Observer,
Sunday September 14 2008

It is named after a regiment of the British army, is a magnet for bathers who bravely plunge into its icy depths in all seasons, and was immortalised in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Joyce opens what is regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century with 'Stately Plump Buck Mulligan' and the semi-autobiographical Stephen Dedalus looking over the 'snot green ... scrotum tightening sea' at Dublin Bay.

But now the famous Forty Foot at Sandycove, Co Dublin, where Joyce himself swam, faces a lethal threat from a new potential enemy - sand. Ecologists and local campaigners are predicting that, if Dun Laoghaire county council's proposed two man-made beaches are introduced into the bay, the spot which inspired the first passages of Ulysses will be lost forever.

Read McDonald's full report here.