Northern Ireland beaches are clean and safe — we should improve access to them and other beauty spots

For a country so small, Northern Ireland has a long and twisting and beautiful coastline.

Much of it is so rocky and steep, and other parts so developed, that swimming is not feasible. But for tracts of the water frontage, beaches and shallow water make bathing possible.

All 26 bathing points along the NI coast have met the latest Bathing Water Compliance report.

Three out of four of them were graded excellent. This is good news for a variety of reasons, including two key ones.

First, global pollution of the oceans is one of the biggest environmental challenges in the world, with plastics and discharges. Yet across Northern Ireland, people can be reassured that they are bathing in clean and safe waters.

Second, lockdown has produced a renewed interest in the province’s outdoors. It is one of the upsides of the Covid rules that we have reconnected with NI’s countryside and waters. In particular, there has been an upsurge in outdoor swimming at locations such as Helen’s Bay on the northern coast of Co Down, one of the beaches rated excellent.

Swimmers are taking a dip through the winter there.

Now that the beaches are reaffirmed as being of bathing quality, our politicians should be thinking of how we can increase insufficient parking space at popular beauty spots where cars are often being turned away. We should encourage those people who want to enjoy the simple pleasures of rural and coastal Northern Ireland.

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