Parents raise €15k to help open new Magic Garden Playground in Scoil Aoife

A PRIMARY school in Citywest have officially opened their ‘Magic Garden Playground’ which will benefit all students after parents at the school fundraised over €15,000 to help build it, reports Aimee Walsh.

The ‘Magic Garden Playground’ was complete and officially opened at Scoil Aoife Community National School in Citywest on Thursday, November 4. The playground, which features sensory equipment for pupils with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), was built with the money raised by parents of pupils in the school through various fundraisers they held.

As previously reported in The Echo, one of the parents of a child attending the ASD unit at the school, Mark Finnerty, completed a 200km cycle in February, raising €5,000 in the process towards the playground.

“We are quite well resourced inside and have a nice space for the children, but outside it was just this bleak empty playground for them,” Deputy Principal Clair O’Brien, told The Echo.

“We always hoped to get a nice playground for them and when Mark got the ball rolling and started fundraiser we thought ‘great, we can get it in a few years maybe’, but then in lockdown other parents got involved and started a walking challenge.”

In addition to the €5,000 raised by Mark, pupils Zain, Lennon, Alfie and their families fundraised through walking challenges as well as generous donations from Amazon, Glanmore Foods, Cresent Infrastructure and Iarnród Éireann, bringing the total raised to almost €25,000.

“This is a project we thought would take years, but it was built and installed over the summer and is now ready to use,” said Clair.

“It is really working and the children just love being there. The children in the ASD unit get feedback from all of the sensory stimulus that we have there, and the mainstream children also get to use the playground as well.”