Government introduces strategy on Travellers' health needs

Travellers' health needs will never be addressed until their accommodation needs are resolved, one of the consultants to a new Government report on Travellers' health has said.

Another consultant to the Department of Health's Traveller Health Strategy 2002-2005, published in Dublin yesterday, said she remained to be convinced that the strategy would be fully implemented.

The strategy, which has taken eight years to complete, aims to improve the health status of the estimated 25,000 Travellers in the State.

Ms Ronnie Fay, of Pavee Point, said that 11,000 Travellers still lived in squalor by the roadside, without fresh water, electricity or adequate toilet facilities. "That is absolutely the key issue to improving Travellers' health," she said, "and it is the settled community which continues to obstruct the building of new halting sites."

Ms Catherine Joyce, of the Irish Traveller Movement, welcomed the new strategy. However, she expressed concern that its publication came just ahead of the election of a new government. Referring to the 1995 report from the Task Force on the Travelling Community, she said its recommendations were not implemented when a new government was elected.

Although the most recent statistics on Travellers' health prospects are over 10 years old, there has probably been little improvement in the health of the community, Ms Fay said. Those figures showed Travellers had the same life expectancy which had been achieved by the settled community in the 1940s, with just 1 per cent living past 65.Infant mortality among Travellers was found to be almost three times as high - at 18.1 per 1,000 births - as among the settled community, where the rate was 7.4 per 1,000.

There are more up-to-date statistics for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or cot deaths. The rate was found in 1999 to be 12 times as high for Travellers (8.8 per 1,000 live births) as for the settled community (0.7 per 1,000).

At yesterday's publication, the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said his Department was committed to implementing the report in the period up to the end of 2005.