ABSTRACT
Ireland, comprising Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, has a long and geologically diverse coastline in relation to the size of the island. The northern part of Ireland has been dominated by land uplift and sea levels have been static or falling for the past few thousand years. The southern part of Ireland, which was deglaciated much earlier, has experienced continuous rise in sea levels over the same period. The demographic and economic context is of some importance in understanding the impact of, and response to coastal erosion in Ireland. Coastal processes on the western coast of Ireland are driven by long-period swell waves that begin to interact with the seabed far from shore and consequently arrive at the coast fully refracted. Long-term erosion rates in eastern Ireland are variable both in time and space depending on past sediment supply and dispersal to a large extent.
