COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF CLONDALKIN AREA COMMITTEE

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

MOTION NO. 5

MOTION: Councillor K. Egan

"This Area Committee calls on the Chief Executive to suggest methods of engagement with the youth that congregate on evenings to understand why and to prevent reoccurrence of the burning of playground features."

REPORT:

The Council actively engages with young people during our Teenspace consultations, young people and teenagers in particular report that they need places to meet up in groups.  This is part of normal adolescent behaviour. They are generally unwelcome in town centres, shops, and other public places.  They seek out places where they can sit and hang out with friends so playgrounds are an obvious choice. In the vast majority of cases this behaviour does not result in damage to the playgrounds.

Since the start of the playspace programme in 2014 there has been 15 incidents involving substantial fire damage in Playgrounds.

To put the problem in context, of these 15 incidents we believe that 5 were not related to teenagers but were to do with other factors and some were caused by adults.  That leaves maybe 10 teenagers who actually started a malicious fire and probably another 30- 40 who may have been in  some way accomplices.  So at most 50 teenagers from a teenage population of about 22,000 teenagers who have been involved in this type vandalism over a 7 year period.  This is a tiny proportion of the overall teenager population so trying to solve this problem by talking to teenagers is unlikely to do anything other than stigmatise them as a group. 

Given that there are close to 50 playgrounds/exercise areas/Mugas across the county which are open 24/7 it cannot be argued that we have a major incidence rate of fires. It is certainly no worse than 15-20 years ago when wheelie bin fires were commonplace and when broken glass in playgrounds was a major issue.

We believe the solution involves improving the fire resistance of our playgrounds. We have continued to make the playgrounds more robust and vandal proof in recent years mainly by making them less conducive to groups hanging around there in the first place- removing areas of tarmac and clean areas like wetpour surfacing. You have to walk on the grass, woodchip and sand now as hardstanding areas are minimised. Our Achilles heel in the playgrounds remains the susceptibility to fire damage.  Where possible we have removed flammable materials- plastic and rubber components, rubber matting and wetpour and we have kept their use to a minimum where we cannot avoid using them. The robinia timber is remarkably fire resistant and the woodchip is also very difficult to burn.  Neither can be set alight without burning something else highly flammable close to them

We still have plastic in disability seats and some spinner seats as we have not found suitable alternatives for these items.  We have rubber swing seats as there are no comfortable safe alternatives and we use wetpour where necessary such as around spinning disks where loose play surfacing would be displaced.  Rubber matting is sometimes used on mound slides where wetpour would be prohibitively expensive. 

In the past the vast areas of rubber surfacing, and plastic equipment was far more susceptible to fire and removing those materials has been very beneficial.  Public Realm continues to look for non-flammable alternatives for equipment and surfacing.

As the Teenspace Programme rolls out there will be more areas provided for teenagers to hang out so congregation of teenagers in playgrounds is also likely to reduce.