Meet the 10-year-old blogger who cleans Dublin’s beaches

When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, George Mallory reportedly replied: “Because it’s there”.
​Asked why she has taken on the almost equally daunting challenge of clearing the rubbish from her local beaches, and from the sea beyond them, 10-year-old Flossie Donnelly takes a similar approach:
“I go crabbing in rock pools in Sandycove with my mummy and we see rubbish and we pick it up. I go swimming and see rubbish in the sea, so I dive and take it out.”
She first became aware of rubbish in the sea when kayaking in Thailand. “It’s a beautiful country, but there is an awful lot of plastic in the water. We filled a whole kayak with rubbish on our first day out. I hate to see the same thing building up in Ireland, so I want to help stop it.”

This article appeared in The Irish Times on 4 December, 2017. Read full version here.