Flossie Donnelly

Flossie Donnelly (born 2007) is an Irish marine environmentalist. A secondary school student, Donnelly was the first to bring seabins to Ireland, securing funds for two of the devices which remove plastic trash from bodies of water.
Life.
Donnelly grew up in Sandycove, Co Dublin. Her activism first began on a family trip to Thailand when she was eight years old. Whilst on holiday, she was taken aback by the amount of plastic pollution she observed on the beaches she visited. She spent a considerable amount of time on that trip collecting rubbish from the sea and bringing it back to the hotel her family were staying at. On her return to Ireland, she noticed more and more rubbish being washed up on local beaches and felt an urge to share her passion around protecting marine life and to educate others about plastic pollution. She has had several press mentions for her environmental conservation work since then and has been dubbed Ireland's Greta Thunberg.
Education.
Donnelly is a secondary school student in Booterstown, Co Dublin. She has previously studied in two primary schools in Brussels and a French school in Dublin. Her goal for the future is to study marine biology in Sydney. Her mother, Harriet Donnelly, has been her biggest and earliest mentor and educator.
Donnelly is dyslexic.
Activism.
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. Her mission is to protect Dublin's coasts from plastic pollution. 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 is the first person to have brought seabins into Ireland having fundraised €4,000 for the two herself. 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. She also runs a popular blog for children on her organization's website.
In an interview with Irish media in 2019, she saidI was inspired to become an activist by realising my generation might not have a future planet to live on.In another interview that year, she saidI don’t want my generation to suffer for what my parents’ generation has caused.Donnelly's activism is part of a rising worldwide youth movement that believes in intergenerational equity around climate and environmental issues. Although she acknowledges that the situation is dire, she has also repeatedly mentioned that she prefers to remain optimistic and proactive about the future. In a public interview in 2019, she saidI like to know that I am fighting for my future and my little cousins' future. I believe strongly that being positive and happy will help us save our planet. Donnelly and her mother often work together as a team. Other than her mother, her work has been inspired by Greta Thunberg, Cara Augustenberg and Irma Hutabarat. Public reaction to her work has been mostly positive.