Reduced housing plan for Travellers criticised

ONLY 172 Traveller accommodation places will be built next year — around half the number provided last year. Just 15 local authorities will provide some sort of Traveller accommodation in 2003, while some of the largest county councils will build nothing at all.

Cork Co Council, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Co Council and Donegal Co Council are among those with no plans to construct any places next year. The figures from the Department of the Environment show how the Government is failing miserably to deliver on its halting site plans.

All local authorities are legally required to have a five-year Traveller accommodation programme under the 1998 Housing Act.

But halfway through the plan to provide almost 4,000 Traveller accommodation places by 2003, less than one fifth of these units have been provided. Yet the figures for 2003, the penultimate year of the programme, are lower than any of the previous years, as local authorities have no hope of delivering on their legal obligations to provide adequate accommodation.

The figures were contained in a parliamentary question response to Sinn Féin’s Social and Family Affairs spokesman Seán Crowe. According to Deputy Crowe, the Government’s Traveller housing policy is in tatters.

Less than 100 more families have been accommodated in halting sites since the start of the Traveller Accommodation Programme, just 100 in group housing and under 300 in standard housing, figures from the department also reveal.

Earlier this year, gardaí and local councils began to enforce new trespass laws, confiscating caravans and prosecuting their owners, raising tensions among the country’s 5,000 Travelling families.

Yet last week the Government surrendered policy development to the developers with the removal of the 20% social housing provision, he said.

“T his Government can do no more but look after the interests of its friends in the building industry instead of the 48,000 households on the waiting lists, the 6,000 homeless and the almost 4,000 households on the Traveller accommodation list,” Mr Crowe said.

Environment Minister Martin Cullen has the power to reduce or hold back State grants to local councils failing to live up to their statutory obligations but has indicated he will not do that. Traveller representatives say sanctions are the only way councils will confront the contentious Traveller accommodation issue.