Mr Pat Mongan (57) and his family were promised "emergency facilities" more than a year ago.
South Dublin County Council repeated its promise in November, saying the facilities would be in place at a site about half a mile from the family's current location, Balgaddy Road in Clondalkin, "by Christmas".
An "emergency facilities" site would have a stone base, a concrete wall between caravans, running water and toilets. Following demands from the South Western Area Health Authority, the council provided a portable toilet but the Mongan family of 18 continues to live between four caravans on a bank of mud.
They collect water in cans outside the vans and run an erratic generator to light their homes.
Yesterday, after a brief spell of rain, the mud around the vans was churned soft and strewn with plastic bags, plastic bottles, broken glass, animal bones, rotting vegetables, cigarette butts and dog excrement. Some carpet matting has been put down outside the vans to ease walking. Children and various pets run excitedly around us.
"The place is packed with rats, hundreds of them," says Mr Mongan. Asked how big they are, he holds his hands some 18 inches apart. "Some about that big, about the size of pups. The dogs used to kill them, but they don't bother any more, and there's a bad problem with them coming into the vans.
"We asked the council to come and take the rubbish but they won't. We can't burn it because there are houses just across there," he says, pointing across the field to a housing estate. "There are children, and it would be poisonous. We asked for skips and we didn't get any."
A derelict caravan is upturned nearby, and wrecked cars, which Mr Mongan said were dumped there by people he didn't know, are strewn along the road. He is worried that the abandoned caravan may be a fire hazard, particularly with his 10 grandchildren, aged between 18 months and 14, on the site.
The van Mr Mongan shares with his wife is warm, though dark, and would benefit from a cleaner location. They cannot leave the oil heater on at night because "the chest is very bad with the fumes". The couple have no fridge because there is no electricity.
He and his family have lived in the Clondalkin area for more than 30 years and, having been repeatedly evicted from other unofficial sites, parked by Balgaddy Road about four years ago.
Last March, when the county council, like each in the State, adopted a five-year Traveller accommodation programme, Mr Mongan was told again that his family would be moved to an emergency site on the Fonthill Road while a permanent site was being built.
Mr Michael Fagan, director of the Traveller Accommodation Unit at the council, said the family had been offered other sites but had refused them. However, Mr Mongan said the sites offered were unsuitable as his family would have come into conflict with others already on them.
In its Traveller Accommodation Programme, 2000-2004, the council says it plans to provide 209 units of Traveller accommodation in five years. This, according to Ms Anne Costello, of the Clondalkin Travellers Development Group, should mean that about 50 units would have been built by now. None has been built so far.
Mr Fagan acknowledges that "not a stick" of accommodation has been built yet but says the planning process takes time.
Some 28 units have completed the planning process and will be built this year, while 112 are in the pre-planning stage.
On Mr Mongan's situation he "holds [his] hands up", saying he knows the family was promised emergency facilities by Christmas, but they will get them "within months".
Meanwhile, Mr Mongan says life is worse now than it ever was. "They're taking everything from us, trying to push us into extinction," he says. Looking out over the field of mud and rubbish behind his home, he adds: "That's the situation. That's what we're living in."
