Traveller Accommodation: Just which local authority is the worst when it comes to accommodating Travellers is open to debate - but Co Clare is accused of having a very poor record. Joe Humpheys reports.
Clare County Council last month became the first local authority to ask gardaí to enforce controversial new trespass legislation prohibiting Travellers from residing or moving onto private, local authority, or State-owned lands.
Amid criticism against the move from Travellers' groups, Ennis Town Council's chairman, Mr Peter Considine, defended his local authority's record in housing Travellers. He said 40 families had been accommodated in Ennis in the past 15 years, and claimed this compared favourably with other local authorities.
But is this case?
More to the point, with more than 1,000 Traveller families in the State living on the roadside - of whom three-quarters are without basic services like water, electricity and waste disposal - should the provision of accommodation for five families every two years be a badge of honour?
To answer the first question, the evidence suggests quite the contrary to Mr Considine's claim.
Official figures are compiled at local authority rather than urban council level, and as a result, Ennis's Traveller accommodation provision is included in that for Clare County Council. It, according to the National Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee (NTACC), had the joint highest percentage of Traveller families living on the roadside last year, at 44 per cent.
In addition, while many other local authorities saw a drop in the number of families on the roadside, the numbers increased in Clare to 43 indigenous families (from 39 in 2000), and 20 transient families (from four in 2000).
Damning as these figures are, however, they don't prove Clare County Council has the worst record for accommodating Travellers among local authorities.
That title remains a matter for some debate.
Mr David Joyce, accommodation officer with the Irish Traveller Movement, says a number of factors should be taken into account in compiling a league table of such authorities. These include the extent to which they "harass" or evict Traveller families, the level of consultation they afford, and the mix of accommodation they provide.
"By any measure, Clare would come out quite poorly compared to other counties," says Mr Joyce. "They have been the most pro-active in trying to force Travellers on, and have used various forms of legislation to that end." He adds: "It was not surprising that Clare was the first county to enforce the new trespass legislation. We were kind of expecting it."
He says Clare has been "very slow" in providing permanent accommodation, and claims that, in Ennis alone, "there has not been a house allocated to a Traveller in the past three years".
Evaluating such claims is fraught with difficulty, however, due to discrepancies between "official" statistics. In its last annual report, the NTACC itself highlighted this fact, pointing to differences between the information it obtained from questionnaires sent to local authorities, and information contained in the local authorities' Traveller accommodation programmes.
With Clare County Council, for instance, a spokeswoman told The Irish Times it had accommodated 54 Traveller families by February 2000, when it adopted its Traveller accommodation programme. In contrast, the NTACC said Clare had accommodated between 70 and 76.
The spokeswoman said, moreover, that since the adoption of its programme, the local authority had accommodated 25 Traveller families, eight in a temporary emergency halting site in Ennis, six in a halting site in Shannon, two in a house also in Shannon, and nine through a shared-ownership scheme.
The NTACC, however, said Clare had accommodated just three additional Traveller families last year. At the start of 2002, it was aware of work taking place only on the eight-bay halting site in Ennis.
Mr Joyce says much of the confusion arises over local authorities passing off refurbished or redeveloped halting sites as new ones. In many areas, he says, "it has reached a plateau of provision. The only accommodation is on the basis that if one Traveller moves out they will move another one in".
The Department of the Environment and Local Government has attempted to overcome these statistical problems by introducing a new questionnaire for local authorities this year. The first results will be published shortly, according to the Department. In the meantime, judging the records of local authorities will remain highly subjective.
Mr Joyce says a broad indication of how local authorities are doing could be gauged from the number of families on the roadside compared to those in accommodation. He suggests Meath County Council would emerge quite favourably from such a table (as is the case - see graph), adding: "Meath not only has a low proportion of families living on the roadside but it has provided various forms of accommodation in significant proportions.
"Where Meath falls down, however, is in the provision of accommodation for transient families" - something which, he says, no local authority is willing to do.
A spokesman for the Department points out that almost €81 million has been spent on refurbishing or providing new accommodation for Travellers in the period 1996 to 2001. A further €23 has been allocated in 2002.
"Heretofore, there was practically zero funding," he says, adding "the Government is doing a lot of work in this area which cannot be ignored."
It remains the case, however, that local authorities are a long way off their collective target, set in 2000, of providing in excess of 3,700 units of accommodation for Travellers by the end of 2004.
By the start of this year, according to the NTACC, less than one-tenth had been provided.
"Elected officials and employees within local authorities are not standing up to opposition. They're stepping away from it, and leaving Travellers isolated. Whatever about politicians, the full-time officials have more than a moral responsibility; they have a specific duty to house Travellers. But they're not doing it," says Mr Joyce.
