Kathriona Devereux: Loud music, giddy dogs, booze - my pet hates on Cork beaches
When the temperature goes over 20 degrees, there is nothing like a swim in Irish waters for a bracing jolt, and when temperatures go over 25 degrees Cork’s coast becomes thronged with those keen to cool off.
Sadly, a pleasant trip to the beach in the middle of a heatwave can quickly be tarnished by the bad behaviour of fellow beachgoers. These are my Beach Beefs 2025 - see if you agree with any of them...
Bluetooth Speakers
Forget fashionable bucket hats or itsy-bitsy bikinis, bluetooth speakers are the ultimate accessory on beaches for summer, 2025. They are seemingly de rigueur.
Beach towel? Check. Sunscreen? Check. Piece of technology that subjects everyone on the beach to your personal musical taste whether they like it or not? Check!
I hear myself say “Is their CD skipping?” and know I’m officially an aul wan.
But a repetitious digital racket is not the background music I want to listen to on my beach trip, so I channel my inner aul wan and approach these bunches of bluetooth buckos and ask them to turn it down…. and most of the time they comply.
Sometimes, they’re just so excited to be spinning choons with their pals, they don’t even notice the volume’s set to ‘make toddlers cry’ and offer little resistance to a volume reduction request.
That said, I was at Inchydoney Beach last week in the glorious sunshine - I said, “How lucky are we?!’ so often even the seagulls rolled their eyes - and wasn’t disturbed by one single bluetooth speaker.
Avoiding beaches frequented by unaccompanied teenagers is a crucial beach tactic to cure bluetooth speaker blues.
To be honest, I’m in favour of a total ban on bluetooth speakers in public spaces, but realise I may be waiting a while for that law to pass through the legislative process.
In the meantime, if you like your outings free of other people’s music, I recommend piping up and asking, politely, for a bit of hush.
“Ah sorry, he’s just very friendly, he wouldn’t hurt a fly,” says the dog owner whose unleashed pet has just frightened the daylights out of a small child and knocked them out of their standing.
Or the ineffectual calls by owners calling their unleashed dog away from sniffing at unguarded lunches or snacks.
Or, the worst of all, the owner who lets their dog off to poop on the sand and strides on purposefully without a backward glance to what their canine companion has dumped on shore.
One in four households in Ireland have one or more dogs, but loads of us are not that into dogs, don’t care for your pet, and definitely don’t want them sniffing around our small kids or picnic boxes.
Please, if you must bring your dog to the beach, put the bloody thing on a leash.
I get it. It’s nice to have a cold beer in the warm sunshine. But carting a box of Corona to the beach is not cool behaviour.
There’s something off about a gang of lads lashing into bottles of booze beside toddlers lashing into sandcastles.
Inevitably, the booze loosens tongues, boisterousness, and bolshiness, and turns the beach into a party zone that almost everyone else is not invited to.
The volume and general messing escalate with every bottle sunk, and if they are in possession of a bluetooth speaker too? Well, you might as well pack up and go home - or rage drag your beach platz to the other side of the beach.
During the recent heatwave, the scramble for beach spots reached such chaos that cars were abandoned in ditches, on grass verges, half up on walls - anywhere that vaguely resembled a space.
It got so bad the gardaí had to issue appeals asking people to stop coming to certain beaches altogether.
The whole story reminded me of that classic D’unbelievables Crimebusters sketch - Pat Shortt and Jon Kenny’s gardaí wagging fingers about the “blatant abandonment of cars at the side of the road” at a county final, and their immortal line: “You can’t be doing that, lads.”
And, honestly, every time I see a car wedged sideways into a hedgerow in a crazy attempt at parking, cue the imaginary Garda in my head muttering, ‘You can’t be doing that, lads.’ (Bonus recommendation: look up the sketch on YouTube for a solid three-minute giggle)
After a hot and sandy day at the beach ,the last thing anyone wants to do is face into cooking a dinner in a baking kitchen.
It is almost obligatory to finish a long day of swimming and sandcastling with a pile of scalding salty chips in lieu of a balanced meal. Tomato ketchup counts as a vegetable on these occasions.
I dream of the day when solar-powered food trucks serve zero-emissions, vinegar-soaked chips. It’s coming!
I know these Beach Beefs make me sound cranky - maybe it’s the heat getting to me!
But when the sun is shining and the sky is that impossible shade of blue, there’s honestly nowhere better to be than a beach in West Cork.
I’d happily swallow these grumbles (and a bit of sand with my chips) for a day like that.
I just won’t forget to pack a decent pair of earplugs along with sunscreen!
App?
