Sir, - In furtherance of Government policy, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has recently announced plans to set up 16 permanent halting sites between Dalkey and Rathfarnham, and has appointed an assistant county manager to process the matter.
This policy is fundamentally flawed. It fails to recognise that the original lifestyle has died out, and has been replaced by a culture that has little to offer. The policy confers few benefits on the travellers and is unfair on the settled community.
Where travellers are concerned, the policy helps to perpetuate a lifestyle that ensures that they remain an underclass. In such a situation, there is little incentive to self-advancement. It also helps to maintain a patriarchy, to the dis-benefit of women, and particularly of children. Readers will appreciate the difficulties of educating children in a settled environment. Where moving around is involved, children stand greatly disadvantaged in terms of progress in education, or in subsequent career advancement. The State, through the actions of local authorities, is participating in denying these children their rights to equal opportunity under the Constitution. Where women are concerned, the majority are believed to prefer settled housing.
The settled community, for their part, are entitled to live in peace, and to expect that their neighbours should comply with the same laws as govern their own conduct.
It is an undue imposition on the settled community to have to accept nomadic structures in close proximity. I would suggest that it is not unreasonable to ask that travellers who wish to be settled in such areas should accept houses, perhaps in groups, and that those who want halting sites should accept them at locations that do not impact on settled residential areas.
Up to the present, planning approval to halting sites bypasses much of the normal planning procedures. Indeed, were they within the system, few would be approved, so much at odds would most applications be with the objectives of proper town planning. In a new Bill currently before the Dail, the Government has introduced a partial planning process, involving a formal consultation procedure with local residents. However, the system remains undemocratic, as ultimate power still rests with the County Manager, and there is still no appeal to An Bord Pleanala.
I now call on the Government to apply some lateral thinking to this matter, and to reverse the current thrust to its mistaken policy, before the framework for further disadvantaged and imposition is set in place. - Yours, etc., Cllr Richard Greene,
Roebuck Rd., Dublin 14.