Neglecting society's vulnerable

Over 100 Irish people, including more than 60 children, have been living in a rat-infested car dump beside the M50 motorway at Finglas. There are just two water taps there and two lavatories. Most of these people have been living there for over four years. They are members of the Travelling community.

Across the road from the St Christopher's site is an official halting site, St Mary's, where another 30 families live. This is a concrete dump, utterly featureless, bare and forbidding. The washing and sanitary facilities provided in each of the bays are as basic as the crudest lavatory conditions in the roughest of public houses. There are no shrubs or greenery, no play area for children, no communal facilities. Just crude bare walls and the crude iron boxes that look like huge skips in each of the bay areas.

In some ways the "official halting site" is more depressing than the St Christopher's dump. Someone in the Department of the Environment and someone else in Fingal County Council got together with others and planned to have people live in the conditions that are provided in St Mary's. At least in St Christopher's no one planned it; it happened through simple neglect. But in St Mary's it is calculated - someone thought this was the way to treat Travellers.

I visited these halting sites on Monday of last week. On Monday of this week, I telephoned Fingal County Council and spoke to the official in charge of providing accommodation for Travellers. I will refrain from naming him for now because he may have been taken unawares by my call and may not have intended to say all that he did say.

I asked how Fingal County Council could justify accommodating so many people in such appalling conditions - a rat-infested dump, just two taps and two lavatories for over 100 people. He did not try to justify the conditions, instead he said that there were plans under way to build a halting site there, just like the halting site across the road at St Mary's.

I asked him had he seen the St Mary's halting site. He said he had and that he thought it was fine and said that the people who lived there thought it was fine, too. I said that was not what people there told me. He said I told them to say that because I had gone out there to incite them to create controversy.

I asked how he could consider bare concrete walls and the crude iron washing and lavatory conditions fine. He said that was what the Department of the Environment, Fingal County Council and a Travellers advisory group agreed. I asked him what Travellers advisory group had agreed to this. He did not respond and did not again claim that Travellers had any input into the decision on the planning of this site.

I referred to the primitive tin lavatory facilities, and he said: "Why do you think they are like that?" I said I presumed that it was the consequences of officials regarding Travellers as subspecies. He said that was not so, that it was because Travellers vandalise the facilities and these were designed to withstand any sort of vandalism.

I inquired why, if this was so, facilities of a far superior kind were provided in a halting site nearby in Dunsink Lane (at St Joseph's). He said he was unaware of the facilities in Dunsink Lane for that was within the Dublin Corporation area.

The St Christopher's and St Mary's sites are on the verge of the finest and most expensive motorway in the country. We have spent billions of pounds on provision for cars and have failed to make elementary provision for human beings. These two sites are within shouting distance of the massive sporting arena to which the Taoiseach has committed vast amounts of our money.

And, oh yes, these sites are also immediately adjacent to another well known location, the Dunsink dump.

Is it any wonder that the statistics for Travellers' health are so awful? Life expectancy for Traveller women is 12 years less than for women generally and 10 years less for Traveller men. The incidence of illness among the children at the St Christopher's site is alarmingly high, according to several of the mothers there - the surprise is that several of them have not died.

How is it that our treatment of Travellers is not regarded as the great political scandal, along with our treatment of the poor generally, our treatment of refugees, prisoners and patients in mental institutions? How could the scandals of political corruption (as we understand corruption) be regarded as so much more significant?

Why does it matter so much whether Charles Haughey got £8 million or £10 million or £20 million from benefactors while he was Taoiseach? Why does it matter so much whether Ray Burke got £30,000 or £40,000 or £80,000 at that meeting at his home in June 1989 with James Gogarty and Michael Bailey? Why does it matter so much how much and how often Frank Dunlop gave money to Dublin county councillors? Yes, I know it matters, but why does it matter so much more than the conditions in which thousands of our fellow citizens are housed and treated?

How is it that there are public inquiries, backed up with massive investigatory powers and costing multiples of what a decent halting site would cost, and no public inquiries into why and how so many of our people are degraded by society and the State as Travellers are?

Almost everything that nowadays causes "a political storm" matters nothing - the O'Flaherty appointment, whether Bertie Ahern did or did not know of Charles Haughey's machinations while serving under him, the Eircom flotation - take your pick.

Almost everything that really matters doesn't rate on the political and media agenda - the treatment of Travellers, conditions in mental hospitals, the treatment of refugees, the vast disparities of power and wealth, the neglected suburban ghettoes of poverty, petty crime and drug addition.