Eoin O Broin, of the University of Limerick's Environmental Society, had as good a reason as any to come to The Hague at the weekend. He wanted to help build a symbolic dyke around the UN's sixth climate change conference "to protect the delegates against the rising tide".
As diplomats, officials and number-crunchers continued haggling and horse-trading behind closed doors over how to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, some 5,000 supporters of Friends of the Earth managed to build the sandbag dyke, 1.5 metres high and 500 metres long, in just two hours.
Having spent the night partying in a vast "flood refuge tent" on the soggy greensward of Malieveld, near the central station, hundreds of them were back again yesterday outside the Netherlands Congress Centre beating drums, blowing whistles and yelling cat-calls at delegates.
Unlike the violent demonstrations that dogged the World Trade Organisation in Seattle and Prague, the protests here are entirely peaceful and done with official permission. Indeed, the last sandbag was put in place by Jan Pronk, the Dutch Environment Minister who is chairing the Hague summit.
Dutch police were taking no chances, however. The congress centre is already surrounded by security barriers, roads in the vicinity have been closed to traffic and sinister-looking vans, packed with riot police, are lined up in side streets to crack down on any troublemakers.
Energetic young people from more than 40 countries - including a busload of 34 students from Ireland - took part in the dyke-building exercise. According to Ricardo Navarro, chairman of Friends of the Earth International, it was the largest action ever staged by his organisation.
In his speech to the rally, Mr Navarro pointed out that the congress centre itself lies below sea level. "The Dutch people have been building dykes for centuries to keep their country safe from the sea. Recently, they have had to build them even higher as sea levels begin to rise."
The purpose of the action, as he put it, was to "bear witness to the world's politicians as they meet and talk endlessly in their air-conditioned bubble . . . that the price of climate change is too high for the world to pay".
Although the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change was only a small step in the right direction, "we have seen the rich countries of the North try every trick they know to avoid changing their ways as they enlarge every loophole, quibble over every clause and search for every excuse."
Wijnand Duyvendak, director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands, said its key demand was that the conference should address global warming through "real and permanent" reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions rather than "the rag-bag of loopholes, get-out clauses and compromises" currently on offer.
Earthwatch Ireland and the Irish Doctors' Environmental Association were among dozens of non-governmental organisations that signed a petition demanding "a fair and effective agreement to protect the global climate based on the principle that nobody has a right to pollute more than anyone else".
Environmental groups are keeping a "Fossil of the Day" scoreboard, branding those countries they regard as least helpful to progress. Even the official slogan for the conference is "Work It Out!", with the exclamation mark formed by a splash of blue paint above the globe.
As usual, the sixth climate change conference, COP6, is awash with reams of documentation on emissions trading. But few of the participants would agree with commentator George Monbiot's view that there was something surreal about discussing "how the atmosphere can be bought and sold".
One of the great lines doing the rounds is an apposite quotation from Mark Twain: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Whether agreement can be reached here on a deal that protects the Kyoto Protocol's "environmental credibility" was still up in the air last night.
