Uggool is on the County Mayo coast south of Louisburgh, where the land swings down toward the long fjord of Killary Harbour - Ireland's only true glacial fjord, and the border between Mayo and Galway. Mweelrea rises behind the beach to 814 metres, the highest peak in Connacht, its slopes blocking the morning sun until late. The Bunanakee River cuts across the strand on its way to the Atlantic. At the southern end, Dooneen Island appears and disappears with the tide. On a calm day the water turns the impossible bright turquoise that the west coast can produce when conditions cooperate.

In 1989, fencing went up across the approaches to Uggool Beach. The official explanation was protection of agricultural land. The Ombudsman, examining the case in 1999, concluded otherwise: the fencing extended onto the foreshore and the beach itself, well beyond anything needed to control livestock. The intent, the Ombudsman wrote, was to prevent access. The Council did not dispute the conclusion. In 2001 the Irish Times uncovered correspondence in which Mayo County Council acknowledged it had decided to acquire access by Compulsory Purchase Order. The purchase order has not, twenty-five years later, been completed. Public access to Uggool Beach has not been restored.

In September 2013, Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly told an Oireachtas committee that the Uggool case was one of the most intractable issues her office had ever dealt with. Journalist Fintan O'Toole has returned to it repeatedly in the Irish Times, framing it as a small but vivid case study in how Irish state authority dissolves at the edges of private property. Citizens, in his telling, are charged for access to land they should be able to walk on for free, while the state that nominally guarantees their right looks the other way. The argument has not, so far, changed anything on the ground at Uggool.

There is one way to see Uggool clearly without negotiating the fences. From the summit ridge of Mweelrea, the beach appears far below as a near-perfect crescent, white sand against the deep blue of the bay mouth, with the cliffs of Killary Harbour curving south and the open Atlantic widening west. Walkers who make the climb often describe the view as the best argument they have ever seen for a public right of way. On the ground, the dispute continues - fences mended after storms, gates locked, the occasional altercation - while one of the country's most spectacular beaches sits in a kind of permanent civil twilight.