`Extreme concern' at lack of progress on halting sites

The Irish Traveller Movement is "extremely concerned" at the lack of progress in providing Traveller accommodation. Mr David Joyce, ITM accommodation officer, said the commitment of many local authorities to accommodation was questionable.

Since March, when every local authority was obliged by the Department of Environment and Local Government to adopt a five-year plan for Traveller accommodation, just 67 units have been completed.

Though a lack of clarity in some of last year's programmes makes it difficult to work out how many units were recommended throughout the State, the 1995 Report of the Task Force of the Travelling Community recommended 3,100.

Just 18 units of halting site accommodation were completed last year: six in Co Clare, six in Co Kildare, four in Tipperary NR and two by Templemore Urban District Council.

Some 49 units were completed in group housing schemes in Cos Clare, Galway, Laois, Mayo, Tipperary NR, as well as in the areas operated by Dublin Corporation, Fingal County Council, Waterford Corporation and Bray UDC.

Mr Joyce said "it would seem some authorities have adopted plans and are just letting them sit there".

Speaking last year, the Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal, Mr Robert Molloy, said he hoped there would be an accelerated construction programme of Traveller accommodation up to 2004. Funds, within reason, would not be an obstacle.

Mr Joyce said it was "a serious weakness" that there was no provision in the Traveller Accommodation Act 1998 to penalise local authorities which failed to implement its five-year plan. "The only obligation on them is to take `reasonable steps'. Many programmes do not name locations or specify time-frames."

The plan adopted by South Dublin County Council, for example, which estimates an average of 50 units completed in each of the five years (none has been so far), gives no timeframe, so as to allow "flexibility".

Recognising opposition in many instances from settled residents to halting sites, Mr Joyce says local authorities "just have to face up to that opposition".

"There are some issues on which you just aren't ever going to get consensus," he said, adding that where opposition was faced there could be success.

Citing Navan as an example, he said a Traveller group housing scheme planned there in 1997 "faced huge opposition".

"In the end Meath County Council had to go and build it under a court order and take out injunctions against protesting residents. And now you wouldn't even know it had been built."

Of the estimated 25,000 Travellers in the State, 24 per cent are living on unofficial sites. Most have no electricity, refuse collection or water supply.