By Lesley Walsh
APPEALS have been made to landowners in the Loughries area, on the outskirts of Newtownards, to provide play areas for local children who currently have no safe place to play.
The call was made at a recent committee meeting of Ards and North Down Council when a councillor said the children of the hamlet are missing out.
Under the council’s 10-year play strategy fixed play areas will only be provided for settlements of 100 houses or more, but according to DUP councillor Robert Adair, Loughries has 98 homes so doesn’t quite meet the threshold figure.
The Ards peninsula Alderman has now called on council officers to review potential play provision in the expectation that more houses will be built. He also urged officers to appeal to local landowners who may be able to provide a kickabout area in the meantime which had previously existed for the hamlet.
Highlighting that Loughries, located between Carrowdore and Newtownards, has ‘no safe place for children to play’, Mr Adair said children had to travel seven miles to reach the nearest playpark.
“Children are playing on a busy road which is unsafe,” he pointed out.
“Every child should have a safe place to play and the old legacy Ards Borough Council used to have a kickabout area from a landowner.”
Mr Adair said that arrangement had worked ‘very successfully until recently’ and said he believed there was ‘scope to do that again’.
Calling on council officers to ‘liaise with landowners to open a public space to play again’, he pointed to an example at the Ballystockart area outside Comber where a similar arrangement existed.
Party colleague, alderman Trevor Cummings, who represents the Comber area, agreed that the Ballystockart play area ‘was used very extensively by residents’.
Alliance councillor Vicky Moore said her party colleague, councillor Lorna McAlpine, who doesn’t sit on the Community and Wellbeing Committee but represented the Loughries area, passed on her support for Mr Adair’s motion.
She said Loughries was ‘on the cusp’ of meeting the play strategy criteria and said ‘that threshold is within our grasp’.
“Councillor McAlpine is very much in support of this,” said Ms Moore.
The committee backed Mr Adair’s call which the alderman said would ‘mean a lot to the people of Loughries’.
