TOWERS OF CLOTH FOR BALLYMUN

WILL you be watching when they pull the flats down?" Amy Ni Thuathai covers her face with her hands. The voice filters out from between the fingers. "No way it'll be so sad."

Only a few of the children at Scoil an tSeachtar Laoch in Ballymun have ever lived in the towers but to all of them they're an integral part of the landscape. The towers, which went from being part of "Ireland's greatest housing scheme" to part of "the state's biggest housing disaster" will soon be demolished, replaced by over 2,500 new homes in a £179 million redevelopment plan announced earlier this year. "Ballymun won't be famous anymore," explains another small local resident, his classmates all agreeing. "Ballymun will be like everywhere else."

Between endless cement blocks and dull early summer weather, grey seemed the most predominant colour in Ballymun the other day. For an outsider it's hard to imagine that any other colour exists. But on the first weekend in July, the towers will be decked out in every colour of the rainbow when 100 foot banners, painted by local children from seven different primary schools, are dropped from the tops of each of the seven tall blocks.

It was Sean Cooke, new Arts Development Officer of the Ballymun Partnership, who came up with the idea which will take place as part of the Ballymun Arts Weekend, a fourday event which has evolved out of the Ballymun Festival and will feature everything from local dance groups and marching bands to film making and street theatre.

The aim of the weekend is to put paid to the notion that Ballymun stands for just one thing - deprivation. "The initial motivation was to deconstruct the image of poverty," he explains, "to turn it around and project it in a more positive light, both for the people living in Ballymun and for people outside. Then I thought, I'd love to drop a drape from the tower." That was how the towers of cloth project came about.

BUILDINGS have been covered in cloth before. The Romanian artists Christo and Kean Claude are famous for wrapping buildings. They wrapped the Reichstag in paper. These artists take buildings which are symbols of power and opulence and shroud them in secrecy and mystique. The draping of the Ballymun towers is very different.

The children were told that the towers were to be demolished and asked what they would like to see there instead. The banners which will be dropped over the grey facades of the tower blocks illustrate these children's dreams of the future. "It's about empowering people," explains Sean Cooke, and there's no reason why you can't start empowering people at the age of 11.

John Duffy, a young local artist working with the children from Scoil an tSeachtar Laoch, stresses that the crucial thing was that the ideas came from the children themselves. They started with a brainstorm, with each child suggesting symbols and images he or she would like to see on a banner. Then they voted. "Just like in the election," one boy explains.

The symbols the children came up with are simple nature, a cinema, bulldozers, horses, slides and hurling pitches. And, at the top, Superman stands triumphant in the middle of a blazing yellow sun. Proof perhaps that, as Derek Fitzpatrick of the Ballymun Partnership says, "when you talk about Ballymun, you're not just talking about concrete but about the spirit of the people. That's what we want to show."