repair of our sensory room after been vandalised

Nicole O'Reilly

It is with utter disbelief anger sadness whatever emotions you are supposed to have when something you have worked so hard for is torn apart in minutes. The new sensory room designed for children with special needs was completely vandalised by young children last night.

These children it appears range between 8 and 10 years of age. They somehow gained entry to the centre and broke into the room which basically had 2 latches keeping it locked.

We certainly did not at any time envisage vandalism.

They were all captured by our CCTV system and the Garda are now involved.

This new sensory room would have been possibly the only one of it's kind around the Swords area and was/is such a much needed facility

Manager Nicole is devastated as she led the project with centre manager Michael from the start. Heart breaking for them and all the child care staff and the children who would have gotten so much benefit from the facility.

The sensory room was to be officially opened next Wednesday by our sponsors and to be viewed at our open day Monday 28th.

The cost of repair is unknown at the moment but the devastation is heart breaking.

I have no more wordsFurther to our post of this morning regarding the vandalism of the new sensory room in rivervalley community centre. The video shows the room before installation and nearing completion. The cost was circa €15.000 a huge amount of money, the result of the vandalism is in the 2nd posting we've included it's absolutely gut wrenching. There were 6 children involved 2 girls 4 boys. Incident happened at approximately 7pm until approximately 8pm. One of them wrote on his hand with a marker?? You may know him or them.

Not sure what to say except someone knows who they are , and it's best for them, for their future that they are apprehended and acknowledge the terrible deed they have done.

The more we look at the carnage the more we cannot comprehend how children whatever their age actually thought it was OK to vandalise anything.

We live in crazy times.

unfortunately at this time it is only an estimate going off out previous invoice and work we got carried out