No need to be ‘all at sea’

MANY people will, by this stage of the summer, have visited a beach and while most of us have favourite stretches of shoreline, how much do we know about what actually goes on in the shifting sands beneath our feet?

Ireland has more than 7,500km of coastline, no part of the country is more than 100km from the sea and about half the population lives within 10km of it. So our lives are intertwined with the sea and the shoreline could be said to be our final frontier with the ocean.

As we roam the tide lines, step on rocks and pass shallow pools, we can easily miss out on all the life there, some of it invisible. But we can see a lot of it without really taking in what’s going on. Maybe that’s because of a deficiency in the education system.