Climbing out of Shannon, our big jet lays its shadow over the Aran Islands and I spy a pretty white beach I’ve not stepped on since 1981. A thought strikes me: how many stunning sandy strands I’ve stumbled upon in Ireland. Speak the word Ireland and people think of many pleasant things: The Edge’s stellar toque collection. Some old bollix pretending he drank with Brendan Behan. Romanian stag parties Euro-vomiting trendily over the rainy cobbles of Temple Bar.
A sunny, sandy beach replete with seals and porpoises is not the first image that springs to mind. Yet Ireland’s jagged coastline hides thousands of sublime strands, easy to journey to and, best of all for us anti-social types, blessedly free of the madding crowd. I have a few favourites, though I’d rather no one went to them but me.
Dollymount Strand is a fine Blue Flag swimming beach on North Bull Island, right in Dublin Bay. The island is a giant sandbar created by the tidal scour from nineteenth-century seawalls built on either side of the mouth of the River Liffey by the infamous Captain William Bligh.
I walk down to Dollymount the morning after my birthday celebrations at Harry Byrne’s pub, where a few too many jars were tippled. To stride a mile or two of flat sand seems an excellent way to clear my addled cranium and view the harbour traffic, the twin twinkling smokestacks of Poolbeg Point, and the hills of Howth.
Penitent, I stroll half the day, the salt air a tonic, only to find myself in a pub again, where my cousin tells me of a Dublin policeman he knows, a man not happy in his home, a man who takes shift after shift to avoid going home to his wife and children, who dislike him. One day this policeman’s wife asks him to pick up her sister at Dublin Airport. He does so. The sister-in-law is thrilled to be home, her first time back in ould Ireland since emigrating.
Now before we go anywhere, she says excitedly, I want to walk barefoot on Dollymount Strand. Her first steps back on the Emerald Isle. Your man glumly drives her to Dollymount and off she tears, trotting down the flat beach, happy as a clam.
He sits in the car, less happy than a clam, but then doesn’t he discover her duty-free bag. He drains one or two of his sister-in-law’s fine duty-free bottles and passes out in the driver’s seat. The sister-in-law returns to the car but she cannot rouse him, cannot even budge him, and she has to walk off the beach and uphill into Raheny to phone her sister. The sister-in-law’s first walk back in Ireland is a wee bit longer than she counted on; the policeman starts working even more overtime.
Howth’s hills and lighthouse and dramatic cliffs are visible from the beach at Dollymount. Howth has a Mediterranean look—palm trees and wild pastel walls, ruined abbey stones, and a quarry hidden in the rocks looming over the town. The poet W.B. Yeats lived for a time in Howth, and parts of J.P. Donleavy’s raucous novel The Ginger Man are set here.
Under Howth’s Martello tower I sit on a cliffside beach getting sunburnt. A dog appears magically, no owner visible. The dog stares at me, trying to communicate. I pick up a stick.
No, it says to me, a stick won’t do. I toss a small stone.
