Fall in love with the Mayo coast this year

This Valentine's Day, An Taisce’s Clean Coasts Programme invites Irish photographers to fall in love with the coast with the return of the Love Your Coast photography competition for 2025.

Building on Clean Coasts’ 2025 theme of connection, the competition encourages photographers to capture the intersection of Ireland’s captivating coastal beauty, rich heritage, and biodiversity, alongside the deep bond shared by those dedicated to protecting and preserving these vital blue spaces.

This year photographers are being asked to think about how spending time by the coast fosters a deeper connection to ourselves, nature, and our communities when taking their photos.

Now in its 16th year, the Love Your Coast competition consistently draws hundreds of photographers from all over the country every year. This year, the dates have been moved to line up with Valentine’s Day in order to encourage our photographers to fall in love with the coast and capture its breathtaking beauty.

With a prize fund of €5,000, Love Your Coast offers photographers the opportunity to showcase their talent across five distinct categories. Each category of the Love Your Coast photography competition highlights different aspects of Ireland’s coastal environment, celebrating our unique coastline.

From tranquil waves, dramatic cliffs and golden sands to vibrant coastal communities, diverse marine wildlife and rich heritage, each category offers a chance to showcase the beauty and significance of the Irish coast.

The five categories are: Coastal Landscape, Connecting with the Coast, Source to Sea, Wildlife and the Coast, and Underwater.

These categories invite photographers to capture the diverse and breathtaking elements of Ireland's coastline, celebrating its natural wonders and the vital connection between people and the sea, taken within the last 36 months.

To support participants, Clean Coasts will provide helpful resources and guidelines to improve their skills and submissions. This includes a detailed guide with tips from the competition judges and information on each category which will be published on our website.

Bronagh Moore, Clean Coasts programme manager, said: “Given our theme this year is 'Connection', we thought Valentine's Day was the perfect day to launch the Love Your Coast photography competition. As an island nation we have always had a special connection with the sea, and what better way to celebrate that relationship than to capture it, in all its glory, through a camera lens.

“The coast is always there waiting for us, giving us joy and energy, and always makes us feel better when we spend time with it – which is a lot more than can be said for some of our Valentine choices!

“We had some fantastic entries last year and we’re really looking forward to seeing how our photographers capture their love for the coast in 2025.”

For more information about Love Your Coast and to submit your entries, visit https://cleancoasts.org/our-initiatives/love-your-coast.