17/10/2023
I am posting this story, which is relevant to the Fingal area. Active Travel want to spend 1 million on a project that can be finished for 30 thousand euro to provide the same access over the hill in Malahide and the Council are concerned about installing a fence for child safety in another area of Fingal. Please read on.
Last Friday, Joanna Smith was outside her home talking about the two small greens in front of her at Sheepmoor View when a ball flew off and onto the road and a young boy ran after it, oblivious to an oncoming car.
The car slowed and stopped, this time. But the threat from vehicles keeps parents around here vigilant.
“Whenever I hear a noise, I rush out,” says Stacy Costigan, who lives in one of the two-storey pebbledash homes that lie to the west of the green. “All parents do.”
For the last few years, residents around Sheepmoor View near Blanchardstown have banded together to make the two green spaces at the heart of their community a place for the neighbourhood’s kids to play.
Mostly, they’ve made improvements themselves.
But they’re still worried, they say, about the risk from scramblers and fast cars that rush past the green – and want Fingal County Council to put up fences to stop the balls and the kids rushing out into the road.
At a recent meeting of the Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart, Castleknock, Ongar Area Committee, Natalie Treacy, a Sinn Féin councillor, put forward a motion asking the council to do just that.
Parks manager Oliver Hoey at first seemed wary of putting up a fence. But later said that marking off some of the area should be possible.
A neighbourhood effort
Decades back, kids around Sheepmoor View had loads of green spaces to play on.
Costigan recalls a time when the houses across the street did not exist. “It was all a huge football pitch,” she said.
Smith points to another area, now all houses and cars. “That used to be the bee field. That was just a huge field, we used to go there and catch bees in it.”
But with each passing year, and more and more homes, the play areas were lost.
At the council meeting, Treacy, the Sinn Féin councillor, who lived in the area when she was younger, said she remembers a playground. “When the infill houses were built, they lost the playground and they never got it replaced since.”
