Flossie Donnelly – Keynote Speaker

Flossie Donnelly is a 15-year-old Climate Activist and Marine Environmentalist.

She has actively cleaned the beaches since she was 8 years old and is the Patron of the charity ‘Flossie and The Beach Cleaners’ – Flossie is passionate about marine life and the damage climate change is having on our seas and oceans. The planet is covered by over 70% of water which means that protecting our oceans and seas is doing so much to help towards climate change. Flossie is always positive, never negative. As Mary Robinson once said.

Flossie Donnelly regularly engages in climate strikes either outside her school or the Dáil and organizes beach cleanups in Dún Laoghaire and Sandycove, along her local South Dublin coastline. She started an environmental charity and action group called Flossie & the Beach Cleaners when she was eleven to raise awareness about plastic pollution and its consequences for oceans and marine life. She raised €4,000 for two seabins into Ireland. The devices can remove up to 83,000 plastic bags or 20,000 plastic bottles from the sea in a year.

On World Oceans Day in June 2018, she led Ireland’s only March for the Ocean event in Dún Laoghaire. She spoke at a TEDx Dún Laoghaire event in October 2018. In October 2019, RTÉjr announced that they would follow Donnelly’s journey to the Citarum River in Indonesia, one of the world’s dirtiest ‘plastic’ rivers, in a two-part documentary series titled My Story: The Beach Cleaner. This was one of her many public engagements with schools and the youth in Ireland on the solutions to plastic pollution.