Campaign on attitudes to Travellers fails to make impression

There has been no improvement in negative public attitudes to Travellers despite almost two years of Government-funded campaigning, a new report has found.

The results of the National Attitudes to Travellers and Minority Groups survey, carried out on behalf of the Citizen Traveller campaign, are being announced to coincide with what is described as a hard-hitting advertising campaign focusing on accommodation issues.

Among the issues to be raised at the report's publication today will be the lack of progress Citizen Traveller says local authorities have made on implementing their Traveller accommodation programmes.

If progress is not forthcoming over the next number of months, said one source, the campaign is expected to call on the Department of the Environment to take responsibility for the provision of Traveller accommodation away from local authorities and to establish a Traveller unit at Government level, "to push accommodation through".

Under the Traveller Accommodation Act, 1998, every local authority was mandated to submit a plan for accommodation. The results of the survey revisit the same issues in an unpublished survey in 1999. Many of the issues were covered in last year's Attitudes to Travellers and Minority Groups. Asked if there was any change, a spokesperson for the campaign said: "No, none really."

Some 42 per cent of those surveyed last year described themselves as "unfavourably disposed" to Travellers with one in six admitting they hold a very unfavourable view of them. The south-west and rural areas were found to be most unfavourably disposed.

People with more favourable attitudes were found to have been more likely to have socialised or worked with Travellers. Some 40 per cent said they would be annoyed at the prospect of a Traveller halting site being established within two miles of their home while 3 per cent said they had at some time made active attempts to have Travellers moved on.

"Although small in relative terms," said the report, "this nevertheless represents somewhere in the region of 80,000 adults." Some 93 per cent of respondents said a Traveller would not be welcome in their family with the majority of these (53 per cent) giving the Traveller way of life as their reason.

Just 27 per cent said they would be happy to have a Traveller in their circle of friends.

Some 73 per cent said they had little or no contact with Travellers with just one in six saying they had ever visited a Traveller halting site.

This was despite the fact that almost 45 per cent said there were Travellers living near them. Ms Jacinta Brack, spokeswoman for the Citizen Traveller Campaign, said the most important issue facing Travellers remained accommodation. Until it was solved all other issues would be almost impossible to resolve, she said.

Studies have shown that while Travellers continue to live on sites which are not serviced tension between them and the settled community is exacerbated. According to the last report from the Task Force on the Travelling Community, published in April, the number of families living on the side of the road has risen from 1,148 in 1998 to 1,207 in 1999.

During the same period the number of permanent halting sites throughout the State has fallen from 824 to 802.

Citizen Traveller is a Government-funded campaign. It was established two years ago to generate a better understanding between the 22,000-strong Travel ling community and the settled community.