Thousands of Irish women shed their inhibitions and their clothes on a secluded beach 30 miles south of Dublin today for a world-record setting 'skinny dip' to raise funds for a children's cancer charity, writes Daily Mail.

Lucia Sinigagliesi, the Guinness World Records official that adjudicated the naked swim, said that 2,505 women spent five minutes in the chilling sea to set the new world record.

The previous record was set in Western Australia in 2015 when 786 participants swam naked to promote body positivity near the regional capital Perth, in waters that are usually around 23 degrees centigrade at that time of year.

Today the sea temperature off Magheramore beach, where the Irish swim was held, was a bracing 12 degrees, despite a recent spell of warm weather.

The swim has been an annual event since it was started by Dubliner Dee Featherstone in 2013 - just weeks after her own mastectomy. 

The events have raised more than €153,000 (£135,000), not including what will be raised this year.

'Oh my god it was amazing. I have never been naked in front of anybody before, except my husband, and it was brilliant and bracing. It was great craic,' Deirdre Betson from Dunboyne told a Reuters reporter after leaving the water.

'We are all different shapes and sizes and ages and it was just super.'

This year the money raised will go to Aoibheann's Pink Tie, a charity set up in 2010 by Mick Rochford and Jimmy Norman, after Jimmy's daughter Aoibheann died from cancer aged just eight.

'Aoibheann went to school with my daughter. She would have been seventeen this year. We did it in her memory,' said Betson.