Call for a new Traveller accommodation body to hold councils to account

Martin Collins from Pavee Point said there are Spring Lane sites in every county across the country. Photo: Denis Scannell

A new national authority for Traveller accommodation could hold local authorities to account and also implement recent expert review recommendations.

Groups representing the Traveller community have told an Oireachtas committee that thousands of men, women and children are living in dire conditions, as recently evidenced in the Children’s Ombudsman’s report on the Spring Lane halting site in Cork.

More than 2,800 Traveller families have a housing need but local authorities failed, without sanction, to spend €72 million in allocated funding between 2008 and 2019, the meeting heard.

Local authority accommodation programmes are “not fit for purpose”, RoseMarie Maughan from the Irish Traveller Movement said. 

“The sad reality is, regardless of the budget set aside for Traveller specific accommodation, year after year it goes unspent and that has to change.”

Travellers, she added, are disproportionately represented in official homeless figures, with figures as high as 50% in some counties.

Many children wake up to leaking roofs, rats, chronic damp and mould on their blankets and some are forced to share one portaloo with 15 other people. 

"This is their normal. This is their forced state of living."

A new independent national authority, however, could implement the 32 recommendations of the recent expert group on Traveller accommodation and hold local authorities to account, the groups said. They also called for a moratorium on evictions, for trespass legislation to be repealed, and for changes to planning regulations.

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Fianna Fáil senator Ned O’Sullivan suggested a league table could monitor the delivery of Traveller accommodation and that councils should be “outed” if they are not playing their part.

Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis said it is “unacceptable” that a Dublin-based Traveller family of 15 are still living without running water despite the issue being repeatedly raised with the council.

Martin Collins from Pavee Point said there are Spring Lane sites in every county across the country and that, despite promises, “significant change” did not follow the 2015 Carrickmines tragedy.

There is a lack of political will - we need sanctions and we need the 32 recommendations of Expert Group to the @peterburkefg to be implemented to get #TravellerAccommodation over the line - Bridget Kelly @NTWFIRL pic.twitter.com/cRRtUoplVa

— Pavee Point (@PaveePoint) June 1, 2021

A new authority could be the "new approach to an old problem”, Mr Collins said, adding: “This power needs to be taken away from local authorities. They have failed and failed miserably. We need to establish a new approach and a new structure."

Council CEOs are “completely distant” and “desensitised” and should see for themselves the conditions Travellers are living with every day, he added. 

“These people need to come out of their ivory towers and come onto the sites and see the reality.”