Fine Gael TD and Minister Martin Heydon and Cllr Brendan Wyse have welcomed progress on construction work at the new Allenwood Playground which is now very near to completion.
Minister Martin Heydon was speaking following a visit to the construction site of the new Allenwood Playground with Cllr Brendan Wyse and Martina O’Neill of Allenwood Tidy Towns earlier this week to see how construction has progressed since commencing last year.
Minister Heydon has been very supportive of the community group which has driven the project forward for a number of years now. “At a cost of over €600,000, the new playground is one of the biggest in County Kildare, and with no similar amenities nearby and a growing number of young families in Allenwood, it will be widely welcomed when it opens in the coming months. I was talking to the contractor on site here and it is just a matter of weeks now before the work on the playground will be completed.”
Minster Heydon thanked Allenwood Tidy Towns for driving the project forward when it lost momentum several years ago, “I attended a community meeting in Allenwood GAA in 2016 which was organised by Brendan Wyse of Allenwood Tidy Towns to get agreement on a site for this playground and once the location was decided, the group put in huge work with the excellent Parks team in Kildare County Council to see the project planned and funded.”.
Cllr. Brendan Wyse is secretary of Allenwood Tidy Towns and was also on site with chairperson Martina O’Neill to show Minister Heydon around. Cllr Wyse outlined how the project has been a long and difficult one to deliver, “Agreeing a location was the main hurdle, and this had caused the project to stall for several years before we restarted it. We got consensus at our community meeting that the site kindly offered for free by ACDAL was the best available and we drove on from there. There were some setbacks relating to the site location and getting tenders for it but we are very happy now to see something of this scale delivered for Allenwood and surrounding areas by our group”.
Minister Heydon concluded “This has been a great achievement for this area. We are both really looking forward to seeing this playground completed and opened in the very near future for the families of Allenwood and surrounding areas”.
