Saturday, 13 August 2022 | 14.1°C Dublin

Balbriggan Swimming Socks, a group of predominantly female sea-swimmers from Balbriggan, are celebrating having recently been chosen for a photo shoot by Her Outdoors and Swim Ireland.

T he group, which has been active since 2020, won the photo-shoot for Balbriggan Front Strand Beach, which it has used to highlight the water quality issue at the beach.

Collette Murphy is co-founder of Balbriggan Swimming Socks. She says: “It wasn’t really a competition as such, I’d call it more of a survey, they were looking for groups just to let them know who was out there and what they were doing, and I just basically answered the call. 

“Myself and a friend of mine started swimming in 2020 during the first lockdown, and from that now our group has grown to almost 300. We don’t just have swimmers, we have body-boarders, we’ve surf-boarders, we’ve hikers we’ve all kinds of things going on.

“So we’re very much an outdoors group, mainly women. So basically I just said all that, myself and my friend Michelle started it off and here we are today and it’s amazing.”

Balbriggan Swimming Socks is made up of a group of Balbriggan locals, mostly women, who take part in sea-swimming. The group has various messenger groups so that if a member wishes to go for a swim, “nine times out of ten”, they’ll be joined by two or three others from the group.

Collette says: “It started off, myself and Michelle, we’ve been friends for years and now the group is massive and I’ve met people and befriended people that lived literally five minutes from me that I never knew. So it’s been great in that respect.”

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As well as winning the photo shoot through Her Outdoors, which took place on Saturday August 6 on Balbriggan Front Strand Beach, Balbriggan Swimming Socks also won 100 swimming hats from Swim Ireland.

As Collette explains though, Balbriggan Swim Socks took full advantage of the Her Outdoors photo shoot by encouraging members of the public to join in when the photos were taken.

She says: “It’s just the chance to promote that in Balbriggan we get terrible press for different reasons, but the beach has been off-limits now for almost two weeks, and for us that’s a major, major pain.

“So we just want to show Fingal County Council, Our Balbriggan, Irish Water, all the stakeholders that they need to sort out the problem with the water.

"They can’t keep blaming cats and dogs and birds on the problem, it’s run-off, the pump station can’t cope when there’s heavy rainfall.” 

She concludes: "There’s a problem in Portmarnock at the moment and immediately the problem is there they could identify the source of it. We’ve been having this problem now since 2017 and they’ve done nothing to try and resolve it.”

Collette says Balbriggan Swimming Socks want to show that Balbriggan beach is a very much utilised and important feature of the town, in the hope that stakeholders will finally do something to address the problem.

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