It is unacceptable Traveller children are abandoned by State and left to feel like 'garbage'

A damning report into human rights violations inflicted by our State on Traveller children, published on Monday, is a magnificent read.

Finally, we have an unflinching exposition of “failure” after “failure” by a local authority to frankly give a damn about the Traveller families in their area. It pulls no punches.

No End in Site – An investigation into the living conditions of children living on a local authority halting site is the strongest report on children’s human rights abuses in Ireland I have read in over two decades in journalism.

Published by the Ombudsman for Children’s Office (OCO), it calls out as “unacceptable” excuses, which I have seen peddled by local authorities over years, as to why they “cannot” provide adequate accommodation for Traveller families.

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Neither the Spring Lane halting site in Cork city, nor Cork City Council, is named by the OCO but, after over 30 years’ bringing up children in a filthy, overcrowded, unsafe, rat-infested and squalid site, the families living there want it named and their landlord shamed.

The report documents “failure” after “failure” by the council to improve living conditions; “failure” to consider the interests of the children living here; its “persistent” failure to address illegal dumping; its “passivity” in addressing overcrowding; and its “carelessness” in housing application record-keeping.

Up and down this country I have met parents of beautiful, bright, sparkling-with-potential children, doing their level best in the most crushing of circumstances

Spring Lane, a 10-bay site open since 1989, is now home to 38 families including 66 children, as households with nowhere else to go have moved in over the intervening 32 years. Approximately 140 people share toilets and washing facilities designed for 40.

Makeshift beds

The office’s investigators observed children sharing makeshift beds in cramped living areas; damp on the walls and ceilings; cracks in walls, ceilings and windows; and children playing amid rubbish. Parents detailed lack of hot water and unreliable heating, while the Health Service Executive (HSE) public health nurse said Spring Lane’s children “suffer skin conditions and respiratory problems at a much higher rate than the general population”.

“She told us that in her opinion these health conditions were a direct result of the conditions of the halting site... the children had to live with.”

Children told investigators: “Walking up to school you see all the rats” (girl, 12); “People ask why I’m dirty, but I’d be ashamed to say. I don’t want to say it was from walking out of the site”(girl, 14); “It takes two or three hours to heat up a bath and we’re all using the one water” (girl, 13); “We only play in puddles” (boy, 7); and “When you put your hands out of the bed in the mornings, the blankets are all wet” (girl, 16). A 12-year-old girl told them: “It’s like an abandoned place that people forgot about. It’s like we’re forgotten. We feel like garbage.”

While Cork City Council told investigators intimidation by residents, illegal dumping and residents refusing housing offers hampered their efforts to improve things, the OCO found these explanations either untrue or inadequate.

The Department of Housing’s response? It said on Monday it was “in ongoing communication with the relevant [Cork City Council] to provide the necessary supports so as to ensure that the recommendations contained in the report are implemented in a timely manner”.

Blame

So, while the council tried to blame Spring Lane residents for their living conditions, the Department is now trying to blame Cork City Council – the subtext being that Spring Lane is an outlier in the shameful, national neglect of Traveller children.

For the record, Spring Lane is not the worst Traveller site. Up and down this country I have met parents of beautiful, bright, sparkling-with-potential children, doing their level best in the most crushing of circumstances.

I have seen the bed four children share in a room pungent with damp and mould in Kilbarry, Waterford city. In Labre Park, Ballyfermot, Dublin city the caravans are so tightly packed as to be life-threatening in a fire, on potholed, puddle-filled uneven ground.

Research repeatedly finds anti-Traveller racism remains the most widespread and acceptable form of hate in Ireland

In counties Tipperary, Wexford, Offaly and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, in the last 12 months I met families with very young children with neither secure electricity nor hot water and who had been provided with portaloos only because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the Hollyhill area of Cork city a family of 11 was sharing a three-bed caravan while a young widow (29) with four young children had no running water.

Among the worst conditions I’ve seen were in Co Clare in 2017 where almost 40 children, some with disabilities, were living by roadsides without secure electricity, running water or toilets.

Implications

The mental and physical health implications of this statutory neglect are obvious, which in turn impact devastatingly on Traveller children’s experiences of the education system and later their employment prospects.

The squalor inevitably feeds the racism – being called “dirty”, “thick”, “poor” – that most will have to endure through their lives. Research repeatedly finds anti-Traveller racism remains the most widespread and acceptable form of hate in Ireland. It makes more difficult local authorities’ efforts to provide new Traveller accommodation.

It cannot be allowed to prevent it, however. And it is unacceptable that children living in existing sites should be so abandoned as to feel like “garbage” in their homes.

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman recently published a White Paper on ending direct provision. It will do much to help address the exclusion experienced by the children of asylum seekers. How wonderful would it be to see Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien publish plans to end the squalor and exclusion experienced by our Traveller children?