Clare stops building homes for Travellers

Clare County Council is set to stop building accommodation units for Travellers.

This follows a report showing 25% of its 10 group housing schemes — built at a cost of €20m to accommodate Travellers — is currently vacant.

The report by the Council’s Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee admits that the results of the Traveller accommodation programme is disappointing, after pointing out five of the units built have been lost through arson, while 27% of tenancies have lodged transfer requests for other housing.

Arising from the results, the Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee has agreed that further building not take place and the committee’s recommendation is to go before the full council. The council says three group schemes were constructed as part of the 2009–2013 programme, two in Ennistymon at Ballymacraven and at Glen North and one in Ennis at Knockanean.

The council’s group housing construction programme over successive Traveller accommodation programmes, including the current one, resulted in the provision of 63 units of permanent accommodation in total, 50 houses and 13 bays.

However, the Irish Traveller Movement has warned the council if it discontinues constructing specific housing for Travellers, it “would be in breach of the Housing Traveller Accommodation Act 1998, specifically in relation to Travellers’ human rights. It could lead to opening a legal challenge”.

Chairman of the Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee, Cllr Brian Meaney (Green), defended the committee’s recommendation. He said: “There is no interest in constructing the Traveller-specific accommodation units the plan envisages.

“In the current economic climate it would be madness to construct further expensive housing while currently there are 16 units, that is a quarter of the current Traveller accommodation that are unoccupied.

“There are a lot of transfer requests and also the analysis of Traveller housing applicants also shows that the Travellers themselves do not want to be housed in group schemes.

Cllr Meaney said: “The experience thus far in Clare with Traveller accommodation has been disappointing,

“I want to stress this is not the fault of Clare County Council. There is a certain element of dysfunction in Traveller-specific housing that Clare County Council will have to work to remedy before Traveller-specific housing can continue if the need occurs again.”