Two dads are on a mission to make it easier for Dubliners open up city streets for their kids to play on

In Stoneybatter on Sunday afternoon, a gaggle of eight- and nine-year-old girls – two in yellow neon vests, and one in raspberry-print leggings – were playing badminton in the middle of their road. 

Harold Road, a one-lane street lined on both sides with parking spaces and red-brick terraced homes, was blocked off to cars with orange traffic cones to keep them safe.

Eight-year-old Vivien Lennon was volleying birdies while on roller skates. A couple of her friends jumped in to say they had been rollerskating earlier as well, and also cycled down the middle of the road.  

A Dungeons and Dragons game was afoot. Kids had balloons and face paint from the Stoneybatter Festival just one block over. And they’d chalked pictures and hopscotch on the road. 

At either end of the road, signs explained that for the next couple of hours, the road was  a “play street”. Cars should take alternative routes or exercise caution so kids could play on their road safely.  

Neighbors had spread the word in advance, although not everyone had heard so some learned about it upon arrival. Cars were parked by the footpaths, and when a neighbor needed to drive out, they did. 

But otherwise, the block belonged to the kids.

Some kids said it was their first time given full reign over the streets, while others say they had been on a play street once before. Anyways, the kids agreed: they would like their street blocked off like this more often.

“Because you can run around. Be free,” said eight-year-old Íde Shanagher Hoewer. 

Organising this play street wasn’t super official, said Seán Shanagher, Íde’s dad. They let An Garda Síochána know, and the guards dropped off the traffic cones that morning, and said they’d come back later to pick them up. “Otherwise, it's just, here's the street, join us on the street,” he said.

But Shanagher, along with another dad, Emmet Ó Briain, want to move this kind of thing beyond DIY. They want Dublin City Council to formalise and promote this reclaiming of the streets from cars, for children.

To try to make that happen, the two dads formed D7 Play Streets, which Ó Briain said, “is just a name for the two of us, going around saying people should hold play streets”. 

And about a year ago, the council’s Central Area Committee established a play streets subcommittee, which the two men chair, says Green Party Councillor Janet Horner.  

Pilots and one-offs

Councillors have expressed support for play streets since at least 2013, Ó Briain says.

Dublin City Counil’s BetaProjects section has explored the idea. The council closed Raphoe Road in Crumlin in 2022 “to facilitate a community play street initiative”. 

In Fingal, too, the idea has been on the agenda – the council ran a pilot project in 2023. Over that summer, the council awarded a €100,000 contract to the organisation A Playful City to run a dozen play streets across the county. 

That same summer, Labour Party Councillor Joe Costello asked Dublin City Council’s chief executive if the council would “devise a plan for designating certain streets play streets in parts of the City where there are few safe play areas for children”.

But Dublin City Council’s chief executive told Costello that there wasn’t a good way to close streets for play, legally. “A key constraint identified as part of this process was legislation that supports temporary street closure for ‘play’,” his written response said. 

That autumn, local Labour Party TD Duncan Smith flagged the Fingal pilot with Eamon Ryan, the Green Party TD who was then Minister for Transport. Had Ryan’s department “considered how to facilitate the establishment of play streets within the road and traffic law framework in this country”? Smith asked.

Ryan said he thought the pilot was a great idea and he “would encourage all Local Authorities to monitor its progress with a view to rolling out similar schemes country-wide”. “Currently the requirement of temporary road closures to facilitate these play streets is at the discretion of the relevant Local Authority,” he said.

Still, there’s no easy, official process set up for residents to get permission – and assistance – from Dublin City Council to close their street for a couple hours on a weekend afternoon so they can play badminton on rollerskates.

The informal play street on Harold Road on Sunday wasn’t associated with the council, Ó Briain said. And it can’t be, because that would make the council liable if anything happened, he said. 

Towards an ongoing, official process

While D7 Play Streets do want to do these informal closures like the Harold Road  one Sunday, they also want a mechanism for Dublin City Council (DCC) to formally recognise and support them.

Right now, “DCC does not do any closures for play – there is no mechanism for closing streets for the purpose of play, outside a very expensive and unwieldy road closures”, Ó Briain said.

In London, the council in Lewisham has a webpage where people can apply to close their streets temporarily for parties or play streets. 

There’s an online application form that asks about consultation, keeping the noise down, cleaning up afterwards – that kind of thing. “Applications for Play Street road closures should be made at least 6 weeks before the event,” it says. 

Ó Briain said he hopes the play streets subcommittee in the north inner-city can push for a formalised system like that. 

They hope to use it “to advocate for formal recognition / provision of street play by the Council, along the lines of the resident-led temporary play street model they have in the UK,” he said.

There’s still a ways to go though. For starters, it’s unclear even which department within the council would take charge of this issue, parks or traffic.  

A small ask

What D7 Play Streets want is simple, they say: more weekend afternoons with streets blocked off for play. Fewer cars, more kids.

Melanie Hoewer, Íde’s mother, said she grew up with play streets as the norm in Germany.

“When I did my traffic licence when I was 18, that was something we learned,” Hoewer said. “I do remember that was my first question on my theory test. What does that sign mean, and what is the reduction that's required in speed?”

She’s excited about the effort to raise awareness about play streets in Dublin. “There are kids, you know, living in our neighbourhood, not just the cars,” she said.

Letting children explore their space, she said, is essential. “If they are just confined to the house, and then getting brought by car to the next place – it’s really confining their development.”

And when they’re always told cars are always prioritised, “they get a totally, I think, a wrong sense of what community should be like”.

She said getting outside builds relationships and growth. “It's so much learning. I mean, what do kids learn if they're never allowed to be in the space they live, you know? “

On Harold Road on Sunday, Amara Abramowicz, age eight, said the girls have play dates. They play family, do crafts, sometimes put on shows. 

Other times, they go to the playground “or just on the footpath. And sometimes in the road, if it's not blocked”-- by cars.

But with it cordoned off today, nine-year-old Eve Heffernan said, “there's more space, like you can do different stuff”.

Normally they don’t have access to the black asphalt. “You can’t do chalk and stuff,” Eve said.

“You can’t do as many cartwheels,” said Íde, who promptly took off cartwheeling down the street.“Ow,” she said. It hurt her hands. The girls soon went back to jump-roping.

Next steps

Now it’s about momentum, said Ó Briain. Closing streets more often, for a few hours at a time. 

He said he likes to keep the ask modest: “Is it okay if kids play for a couple of hours once a month on the streets where they live?” 

“To make the request so ridiculously small that people feel embarrassed about opposing it,” O’Briain said. 

He said while it seems it’s something everybody intuitively agrees with, he’s frustrated he has to sell it to get over the line. When he was a kid, that’s just what life was like, he said.

“I mean, we were just gone. I mean, literally, we – no one saw us – like, I suppose there were so many of us, the parents weren't worried about safety. There weren't that many cars,” he said Emmet. 

He gets the irony of what he is trying to do: organising unstructured play so kids can play without being organised.

“I'm really motivated to try and get some form of recognition that, yes, what you're saying is not crazy,” he said. “The children, you know, should be allowed to play in the streets. And we've actually put a system in place whereby that's recognised.” 

“So, yeah, I'd love nothing more than to in a few years, not to be talking about this. Because it's in place.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.