Requests for a school warden were previously turned down because it was considered too dangerous, said a councillor. In recent times, two other schools have been told the same.
Two women strolled down Main Street in Chapelizod. One pushed a stroller, the other carried a yellow “Slow Children Crossing” sign.
It was just before 9am on Thursday morning, and they reached the junction of Main Street and Chapelizod Road, both of which were congested with cars heading towards the city centre.
The two women stopped outside the gates of St Joseph’s National School. The sign-carrier wore a high-vis vest, and the other, parked her stroller just inside the school entrance, and returned a moment later, also now in high-vis.
A few metres away, they reached a small crossing on the Chapelizod Road.
The woman with the sign walked across to the other side of the street, and the other stayed put.
A couple of minutes passed, before a mother and her daughter approached the crossing, and the two women walked out into the middle of the street, assisting the pair as they made their way to the school.
To any motorist or pedestrian passing through the village, it probably looked like a perfectly ordinary scene: two school traffic wardens ensuring that a pupil was allowed to safely cross a busy road.
Only, neither of these women were school wardens.
They are among a group of local volunteers – parents mostly – who in the absence of an actual warden, have decided to handle the job themselves, says Jill Murray, whose two children attend St Patrick’s. “We’ve all been worried about this traffic and the safety. It feels like we are sitting ducks.”
It’s an interim solution while they wait for Dublin City Council to decide whether it will hire a warden in the area, she says –which after recent conversations, they’re hopeful they will. “We said, let’s just bring some visibility to the area. If we can do that, drivers will remember there’s a school here.”
They have been requesting a traffic warden in the area for a long time, says Green Party Councillor Ray Cunningham on Wednesday evening. “They were told ‘no, it’s not safe enough.’ So the children can cross there. But the wardens can’t. It’s kinda crazy.”
To date, the council hasn’t recommended for a school warden to be put in place outside the school, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday evening. “However, it has been agreed that an assessment will be carried out in the coming weeks to assess its suitability for a school warden service.”
In total, there were seven voluntary wardens stationed at three different points leading into the village, said Murray as she walked through the village with Greens councillor Ray Cunningham. “We try to have nine.”
Two by the school gates. Another pair about 100 metres away on Maiden’s Row, a small street at a T-junction with the Chapelizod Road.
And the rest were across the Ana Livia Bridge where Chapelizod Hill Road and St Laurence’s Road meet at a crossroads, awkwardly shaped like a St Brigid’s cross.
By the time Murray and Cunningham approached the crossroads, all the volunteers were at their spots, while the city-bound congestion worsened.
This wasn’t too bad, Murray said. “This is a good day.”
The crossroads had a lot of blind spots, and many vehicles that use it seem to have difficulty seeing traffic lights, she says. “It’s totally crazy.”
A truck came skidding to a halt midway across the pedestrian crossing.
“Did you hear him skid to a stop there,” a voluntary warden said to Murray.
It was back in June when a few locals decided to don the high-vis vests and become wardens, Murray said. “There was an accident. A kid was hit by a car and broke his leg.”
In November 2024, a car also crashed into the barrier outside the school’s front entrance during the evening time, she said. “If it had happened at a different time, there would be a lot of parents and a lot of kids involved. But it just happened at a lucky time.”
Everybody had been worried for a long time, but those incidents were the inciting event, she said. “That’s where this rota came from.”
They are only able to do this work in the mornings, however, she says. “We don’t do it in the afternoons. We don’t have the numbers, and the going home is staggered, so junior classes leave at two, and then the higher classes leave between three and four.”
Traffic in the evening time is bad too, she says. “And it’s dark as well.”
The council’s Transport Advisory Group decided to carry out an inspection in the area on 10 April.
But, a report from the Transport Advisory Group (TAG) says following an assessment by the traffic department’s school warden team, they concluded that a warden wasn’t recommended for both St Patrick’s National School and St Laurence’s School, a small, two class primary school nearby on Martin’s Row.
Drivers tend to behave better when the parent wardens are in place, said Cunningham, the Green Party councillor, bringing up this conclusion at the South Central Area Committee meeting on 15 October. “So I think if we have proper wardens, proper lollipop ladies, lollipop men, that would make the junction safer just by their presence.”
Still, Cunningham said he was “delighted” to hear that the council was in the process of designing a pedestrian crossing at the junction.
Independent Councillor Vincent Jackson said he too had asked the council over the years if a warden could be provided in the area. “And I’ve always been told it didn’t meet the required numbers.”
The school warden team is going to reassess the junction again, said South Central area manager Bernard Kelly. “With a view to hopefully putting in some wardens there.”
St Patrick’s in Chapelizod isn’t the only school that has experienced difficulty getting sign-off for school wardens.
In 2024, Dublin City Council received ten requests for school wardens, documents show. Of those, six were refused, four of which did not meet the criteria for a school warden, the council said.
The remaining four were referred to TAG for assessment.
School wardens are appointed to assist unaccompanied, mostly primary school children, typically between the ages of eight and 12, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Documents show that two of these schools were not recommended for a warden because the area was deemed unsafe for a warden.
Scoil Chaitríona on East James’ Place wasn’t provided a warden because, documents show, there isn’t a suitable safe crossing point.
There is no footpath opposite the school gates, this council assessment says. “Therefore, a school warden is not recommended.”
Across the city, St Aidan’s Secondary School on Collins Avenue wasn’t approved for a warden outside its vehicular entrance by the TAG, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Again, there wasn’t a safe crossing point, the spokesperson confirmed. TAG found that an appropriate footpath doesn’t exist, and therefore, it couldn’t recommend a school warden here either.
But, the school management was informed to redirect students to the safest crossing point at Falcarragh Road’s junction with Larkhill Road, which is 80 metres away from the gates, and has a smaller, second entrance into the school grounds.
A controlled pedestrian crossing is in place there, the council spokesperson said, noting too that a second crossing is located around 260 metres west of the gate entrance.
The volume of traffic on Collins Avenue is excessive, says Liam Reilly, the school’s principal, speaking by phone on Tuesday. “The last couple of years, the traffic count measured 5,000 cars going east and west daily. So that’s a lot of traffic.”
Reilly and the caretakers have been trying to manage the crossing situation in the area, he said. “So we campaigned to look for pedestrian access at our entrance.”
While TAG refused them a warden, they are working with the local area engineers to find an alternative solution, he said. “We are hopefully, in the next couple of months, going to get a traffic management plan.”
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