Travellers fight for rights in Dublin

By MIKE DOHERTY

News reporter

HUNDREDS of Travellers and supporters have joined a demonstration to highlight the Traveller accommodation “crisis” that leaves more than one in ten Traveller families in the Republic of Ireland homeless.

Waving banners saying “Traveller rights are human rights”, people from west Cork, Cork city, Kilkenny, Laois, Limerick and Offaly, as well as from Ballyfermot, Blanchardstown, Clondalkin and Fingal demonstrated outside the Fingal County Council offices in Blanchardstown, Dublin to draw attention to the “total failure” of the 15-year-old Traveller accommodation strategy.

To date none of the 34 local authorities in Ireland has fulfilled their statutory duties that require them to draw up four-yearly Traveller Accommodation Programme. According to the the National Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee, there are more than 1,200 families effectively homeless, which is more than in 1999 when Traveller Accommodation Programmes where introduced.

As there are 9,911 Traveller families living in Ireland, these figures mean more than one in ten have nowhere secure to live, with many on unauthorized sites or unofficially crowded onto authorized sites.

Brigid Quilligan, director of the Irish Traveller Movement, said that as the national Traveller accommodation budget had been cut from E70 million to less than E4 million next year, “we can expect there will be no new units built next year, no refurbishments”.

Speaking at the Traveller Movement conference in the UK, just a few days before the demonstration, Brigid Quilligan said: “In the past, up to €70 million was spent on providing Traveller accommodation, but that “still didn’t deliver” because “of a lack of implementation, lack of goodwill and racism.

"Now our budget has been cut to nearly €4 million. We have been told that there are now no new units of accommodation being built for the next few years. All that will be done is repair and refurbishment.”

“We are changing our approach in that we are becoming more radical. I feel we are being true to Travellers. If something bad happens to them we are not sitting down and having tea and biscuits with the people that are inflicting that pain on them,” she said.

Martin Collins, director of Pavee Point, said he was at the protest in Dublin in solidarity with “all Traveller families living in overcrowded, Third World conditions”.

“The local authorities, the Department of the Environment and successive governments have failed the Travelling people,” he said. “Government has failed to impose any sanctions on local authorities who have shown they have no will to provide housing for Travellers.”