By Tony Lowes
Slowly. Silently. The sea lettuce crisis began in 1995, writes Tony Lowes. The Tipping Point: Courtmacsherry, Timoleague and the sea lettuce. A tipping point is the scientific point when one stable state becomes a new and irreversible stable state — a threshold beyond which there is no turning back.
It also refers to a certain point when a process — say climate change or the spread of an invasive species — results in a large and sudden changes of the behaviour of a system. The sea lettuce of Courtmacsherry and Timoleague and nearby bays, including Inchydoney, are experiencing such a phenomenon. Sea lettuce — ulva maxima — is a seaweed that flourishes when fed by nutrients.
The nutrients come mainly from human sewage, animal manure run offs in slurry and industrial discharges. Its growth began slowly around the Clonakilty area about 1995. Slowly. And silently. Because no one wanted to talk about the bad smell that arose every summer as the sea lettuce died and rotted along the strands and harbours, thickening and expanding up the bay each year. According to the public health authorities, the mounds of rotting sea lettuce that lined the bays not only impact on public amenities but pose “a danger to public health concerns due to the releases of hydrogen sulphide H2S, which also gives rise to significant odour issues (smell of rotten eggs)”.
Irish bays are not alone in facing this phenomenon. Venice removes 40,000 tons each year. In China, 13,000 kilometres of yellow sea coast are cleaned by 20,000 people with 1,800 boats per day removing and burying 750 million kilos of sea lettuce. But the growth continues in west Cork. In the late summer, islands of dead vegetation float gently on the water. Folded duvets of grey rotting mass back up around the piers and moorings. When the tide is out the sea bed looks like a vast golf course.
Geoff Felton and his wife Lin moved from Kerry to Courtmacsherry five years ago, in part because he is a keen angler. “When I came here to live you could still fish in the winter months and there was no weed. Now, even in December, you can only fish when the tide is very full or when it is entirely out. Today, I’ll only get three or four casts at best before the tide turns and weed will foul my line.” A Cork County Council sea lettuce taskforce report in 2009 concentrated on removing the piles of rotting sea lettuce. The proposal was to remove 10,000 tons a year from the beaches. In 2010 and 2011 about 5,000 tons were removed. But even if the target of 10,000 tons was reached, it was only practical on the little strands, not on the extensive rocky foreshores.
As to sewage treatment, former environment minister John Gormley promised a local committee the “sun, moon, and the stars”. But, in fact, the current situation is that a tender is only now out — and only for a study for a new sewage plant and its location, always a contentious issue. Damien Enright, long-time friend to the environment and nature writer, explains: “In the 1990s, one didn’t want to drive people away from coming to Courtmacsherry. Then during the Tiger Years, property became awfully valuable. It was positively anti-social to raise the fact that there was no sewage treatment.”
John Young, who chaired the committee, admits they have never gone public with the fact Courtmacsherry has only a holding tank for tidal discharge: afraid that visitors would be revolted by the truth. His voice shakes with anger when he speaks of Timoleague, where there is not even a tidal holding tank, the raw sewage discharging directly into the bay. Raw sewage from the villages is reinforced by the explosion of new development along the bay and the Argideen River with the new septic tanks inspection scheme cursory at best.
The slurry spreading season has been extended two years in a row into November, when growth is far too slow to absorb the nutrients. The Good Agriculture Practice Code is not designed for a bay where the ecological balance has passed the tipping point. Not only does the growth share with climate change the idea of a tipping point, it also exemplifies “positive feedback” — when the problem starts to amplify itself. Some sea lettuce now survives through the winter.
Its luxuriant growth insulates itself, as well as feeding the growing colony as it begins to decompose and return the nutrients it had greedily absorbed. Even if every problem was solved overnight, it would be many, many years, before the sea lettuce retreated. As with climate change, we seem incapable of realising that the natural systems our world depends on cannot take the ever increasing load we are placing on them. But unlike climate change, which is impacting most on the poorest and most remote countries, the residents and businesses of these coastal bays will be the ones who pay the price for silence and inaction.
Source: Irish Examiner – Sea Lettuce: Residents and Businesses will Pay Price for Inaction
