Travellers spend night in vans after gardai seize caravans

Travellers "are being moved on like cattle" around Ennis due to Clare County Council's failure to provide accommodation for young Traveller families, a Traveller representative group says.

Mr Martin Collins, of Pavee Point, made his comment as two young Traveller families were set to spend their second night sleeping in their vans after gardaí seized and impounded their illegally-parked caravans on Thursday.

Mr Collins said that the two families found themselves in an appalling situation. "They are being moved on like cattle, and this must be having huge adverse health and psychological impacts," he said.

Mr Collins described the trespass legislation allowing caravans to be seized as "draconian, repressive and anti-Traveller".

He said that the Government should remove the function of accommodating Travellers from local authorities and give it instead to a new centralised independent agency.

"There is an in-built bias against Travellers at local authority level, where Travellers are seen as a nuisance and a problem. People will argue that this will be a blow to local democracy and decentralisation of services, but neither has done anything for Travellers."

One of the Clare families has been living by the roadside for the past five years because of the council's failure to provide accommodation for them.

Their caravan was seized because it was parked illegally opposite Ennis Town Council's headquarters.

A mother of two girls, aged 15 months and four months, Kathleen Mongans said: "It is the second time in a week that the gardaí have taken our caravan. We won't be reclaiming it, because we cannot afford the €100 to take it back.

"My husband slept in the car last night and myself and the two kids slept in the back of the van. It was freezing and one of my kids has a chest infection."

Ms Mongans said that the family was forced to sleep in the back of the van after failing to secure accommodation at a number of B&Bs around Ennis.

"We can't live like this any more. We are from Ennis and want to live in the town."

A spokesman at Ennis Garda station confirmed yesterday that the caravans had been seized under the Housing Miscellaneous Provisions Act in response to a complaint.

He said that a file was to be sent to the DPP in relation to the matter, adding that gardaí had made five separate caravan seizures in Ennis in the past month.

Last month, gardaí successfully prosecuted three Travellers under the Act, and prison terms were imposed for the first time under the trespass legislation. The sentences are currently under appeal to the Circuit Court.

Clare County Council's most recent Traveller census shows that 34 families are currently living on the roadside in Clare.

Last year, in an attempt to address the accommodation crisis, the council spent more than 20 per cent of the national capital budget for Traveller accommodation, with the council drawing down €5.17 million of a national total of €23.7 million.

Currently, it is in the process of spending more than €12 million to accommodate 53 Traveller families, and two further halting sites are expected to be opened next month.

The chairman of the council's policy committee on housing, Cllr Paul Bugler, said yesterday that the council was still awaiting the go-ahead from the Department of the Environment to proceed with an emergency halting site which would address the accommodation needs of the Mongans.

With the proposal having been lodged since last November, Mr Bugler said: "If we got the go-ahead, the council would have a site in place in six to seven months."

He said that the establishment of a national agency to provide accommodation for Travellers "would be a backward step".