Travellers to unveil plan to resolve housing row

Travellers living in one of Ireland’s worst halting sites have drafted their own plans to resolve what’s been branded a "humanitarian crisis".

Residents of the Spring Lane site on Cork’s northside will launch their ‘Spring Lane Manifesto’ at the Glen Community Resource Centre this Wednesday.

It will chart in stark detail the appalling conditions they face living on the overcrowded site, and will outline several proposed solutions they say would address the accommodation crisis quickly.

The document will be launched as part of Traveller Pride Week, and two days ahead of a visit to the site by Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald.

It comes as work continues on a new process to resolve the halting site crisis, which was first highlighted by the Irish Examiner earlier this year.

Following years of stalemate, a failed consultative forum process which was disbanded in 2012, and an inter-agency group process which also broke down, Minister of State Kathleen Lynch, who has responsibility for disability and equality, intervened in a bid to break the deadlock.

She invited former South County Dublin Manager, Joe Horan, to examine all the issues linked to the site and draft solutions.

He visited the site in March and is working on a document which will be presented to City Hall, gardaí, HSE, the Cork Education and Training Board and representatives from the Department of Social Protection.

It is understood the council is also considering an application to government for emergency funding to carry out some of the work. But Travellers say they are frustrated with the time it is taking to address their concerns.

Deputy Lord Mayor Cllr Ken O’Flynn welcomed the impending publication of the Travellers’ proposals.

“I hope it is a balanced document, with realistic and sensible proposals that are also sensitive to the needs of the settled residents of Ballyvolane,” he said.

“I will read it and I will work to benefit the residents of the halting site, and those living around the site.”

The halting site, which was developed 25 years ago for 10 families, is now home to 33 families.

The most recent figures, from November, showed that there were 56 adults and 89 children living on site.

Many are living in an “unauthorised, subsidiary site” which has developed around the original halting site.

City council plans to extend the halting site into nearby Ellis’s Yard were voted down in 2011.

Several Traveller families are taking legal action against the council. The site is also the subject of a formal complaint to the European Council for Social Rights.