My Ocean- Heritage Week 2026 “The sea is a healer”

Video transcript

So I love the ocean. Absolutely love the ocean. I’m surrounded by water. I live in East Wall, so the Liffey, the Canal, the Tolka, and the sea has me all wrapped up in… I’m getting a hug by the sea every day.

But for me, the sea is all about the health benefits. It’s about you go into the sea and you’re like, “Oh my god, there’s going to be freezing,” “Oh, there’s going to be a jellyfish,” and you have all this apprehension and tension, and after a couple of seconds you go in and you just go, “Ahhh,” and you just feel amazing.

And the next thing, you’re swimming around as we say, we’re swimming with the women. I belong to a group called the Dollymount Danes, and the motto of the Danes is “nobody swims alone.” It was… this group grew during COVID, so that people, everybody was drawn to the sea on COVID, especially if you live beside it, because that’s where you had to do your 2K and your 5K walk.

So this group started up and it was all about making sure you were safe. That you didn’t go into the sea on your own with no knowledge, as was spoken about earlier on. Knowing the tide is coming in, knowing when the tide is going out, what way is the current, what’s the tide bringing in with it. At this time of year it brings in jellyfish. They hang around for a while and then they go back out on the outgoing tide. So when is the best time to swim, and when are the jellyfish around? What do they attach themselves to? Can I put something on to protect myself? Am I actually going to come in if there’s jellyfish there?

And I share a story which I was in Donegal a number of years ago when I was on this beautiful, beautiful beach, and to go for a swim I had to walk through… I couldn’t see the bottom because it was just baby jellyfish everywhere. And I said, “I don’t care, I’m going for it.” And I walked straight through them, and when I got out to the depth I needed, it was beautiful, there wasn’t a jellyfish to be had. Now when I got back in here there was little tingles, I could feel the tingles, and that’s all it was. Not every jellyfish is harmful, but it’s knowing so you just treat them all as harmful [laughs]. That’s the best model to have.

But I absolutely adore swimming. For me it’s my healer, water is my healer, the sound of the water, and the senses. I’ve been quite ill the past few weeks so I haven’t been able to get into the sea. So this morning before I dawn, I had to drop somebody to work over at Grand Canal, and there’s where the sea locks meet the Grand Canal Dock, where the Grand Canal and the Liffey all meet and the sea all meet together. There’s three different locks there, and you used to be able to walk over them to go into Ringsend, but unfortunately they’re closed at the moment for renovation which was due to be finished the end of August. And today there was no work going on with it. But anyway, that’s an aside, that’s me moan over.

But I sat there and I listened to the noise of the water lapping over the gates of the lock, and it was just so healing. So if I can’t get to the sea, I need to be by the sea. And if I can’t get to the sea, I have to go to somewhere like a lock gate on a canal where I can hear the water. For me, it’s all about the sound, the senses, the sound, the feeling of the sand when you’re eating your banana sandwich on Thursday [laughs].

The last touristy or summer holidays and you’ve been dragged down to Dollymount Beach to have the best, the last day of the summer holidays. I would have spent all of my summers on Dollymount Beach. And also in Clontarf Baths, the outdoor pool, which I still use today. And thankfully, they’re putting in a sauna. Yes, I’m so happy!

But I actually, one of the things I did fulfill, one of my ambitions I did fulfill was I learned how to do synchronized swimming in sea water in the outdoor pool in Clontarf. And we’ve done that three years in a row to raise funds for St. Francis Hospice. So that was an ambition of mine. I always wanted to learn how to synchronized swim, so I learned how to do that. Thankfully, I’ve done it in the sea water, which is a lot harder to do because you float naturally in the sea, but to spend most of your time under the water, you have to put a lot more effort in.

So for me, the sea is about healing. It’s about very happy childhood memories, and I mean very happy childhood memories. It’s my one go-to. I always say Midlands, you can keep them, I’m sorry [laughs], I don’t want to offend anybody, but give me that fresh air by the sea. Like, it could be a beautiful day. As has often happened, I’d be at home and I’d say, “I’ll go for a swim.” Beautiful day, and off I’d go. And the hair would be blowing off your head when you get down to the sea. It would be gorgeous when you walk up over the wooden bridge, and you’re like one road inland—beautiful. But as soon as you hit that seafront, oh, knock the socks off you! But you’re alive, you’re awake, you’re energized. There’s something about the ions in the sea that just make you feel good. They just put everything to level.

And then as well as that, we have kind of a responsibility programme that we run with the Danes where if we bring anything down, we bring it back. So we don’t leave any trace. We also take other rubbish with us if there’s anything left there. And when there’s a real low tide, we go out and we pick up any pieces of things that’s left in the sand, because I swim off the Bull Wall where the shelters are, so you have access points to get down onto the seafront, and we pick up all of the bits of plastic. I wouldn’t even begin to tell you what we’d find down there, but anyhow, the glass is the most important thing that we want to take up out of the sea so that nobody gets cut.

What else do I want to say about the sea? I’ve swam everywhere. I love swimming. I spent my summers down in Wexford as well, and I swim in Magheramore Beach. I love it, it’s a piece of heaven. It’s a walk to get to it, it’s a trip down the hill, but oh my God, it is a blissful place. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: we do a nude swim there [laughs].

Every year there’s a charity that we do, a strip and dip for… called Aoibheann’s Pink Ties, a children’s charity. So yeah, we bare our bottoms for that [laughs]. And we do this… and there’d be, like this year there was nearly, I think it was 565 women on the beach. We broke a world record again, and we all done our naked swim, our strip and dip. And I do one on Portmarnock, I’ll tell you some funny story and I’ll finish on that.

So first year ever I was asked, “Would you come and do the strip and dip for the ARC?” ARC Cancer Support Services up on Eccles Street. And I said, “Yeah, why not? You know, sure, we might as well,” because I myself have been through cancer. So there’d be people there that would have one boob, no boob, half a boob, a bit of a boob, a stoma bag, no stoma, like bits and pieces missing and reattached and all that kind of stuff. So we go down and there’d be a handful of us, let’s say there was about 30 of us there that day. Early, early morning down to a certain place in Portmarnock Beach.

And of course the tide is out, and you know what it’s like in Portmarnock when the tide is out, it’s got to hold, yeah [laughs]. So we’re going, “Oh my God, how are we going to get in here?” So the first day I’m really nervous and I go, “Oh God, I’ll never do this.” So we go down onto the beach anyway and we have a Zumba class, we have an instructor there to give us a warm-up, and then the next thing you just turn, you drop, and run. So that’s what we’ve done anyway, and it was the most magical morning ever. The sea was like a mirror, there wasn’t a ripple in the water, it was beautiful. And the sun was rising, you couldn’t have asked for a better morning. So we’re all swimming away, totally enjoying it, and then we turn around to stand up to walk out, and of course there’s not much water, we stand up and walk. And I said, “Girls, look!” They went, “What?” I said, “Look at all the people hanging out the window of the hotel!” [Laughter]

So I think we should have raised a bit more money that year [laughs]. So my thing is go to the sea, it’s healer. For me it is a healer, and like that, if I can’t get in I have to go and sit by it, or sit near running water. So thanks for listening to me, thank you.

Hilda O'Grady