As part of a new initiative to encourage children to play outdoors, a number of streets around Fingal will be closed on July 30th to allow children to take over the area and play.
Castleview Avenue in Swords has been selected to take part and the community group there will receive a play bag of equipment worth €250 to help get the party started on the day.
This video helps explain the concept:
Following a call for expressions of interest, 11 locations have been identified and they will be participating in a Play Street on 30th July and 27th August for two hours between 12 – 4pm. The pilot involves identifying key interested stakeholders within the community that the Playful City team will engage with on developing their event. Their role is to encourage the residents in agreed, suitable locations to participate and to become stewards for the day and they will be supported in this with the Playful City team.
The concept of a Playful Street is to encourage children to play outdoors on a temporarily closed street in a simple format. The role of the council is to streamline the process of the temporary road closure whereby the group will be able to take on this themselves in the future. From 6th July, the council will be advertising the road closures across 11 locations for playstreets taking place in July and August.
Cllr Ian Carey said:
“This is a really excellent initiative and I hope that this time next year we have streets all around Swords being converted to Play Streets for the day. We see other countries doing this really well and its fantastic to see communities take more control of the public space right in front of their hall doors.”