Ned O'Sullivan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Dr. Muldoon and Ms Ward and thank them for coming before us. I have studied this report very carefully and, even though I have been around a long time in politics - 35 years in total - I am very shocked by it. I spent 22 years as a county councillor before I became a Seanadóir. I had a reasonable amount of involvement with the Travelling community in Kerry, and especially in my home town, with 99% of it being extremely positive. Clearly, there are serious issues highlighted by Dr. Muldoon in this report that we, as a committee, will address seriously and bring forward. I will not hog the meeting, but I will make a few points and I have one or two questions. Unfortunately, this meeting clashes with the children's committee meeting, which relates to the burials, a very sensitive and important matter, and I will have to leave early to attend that. That meeting starts at 1 p.m. in private session.

What is shocking is the health situation of the whole community in that halting site and, in particular, the health of the children. I need not go over all the details - they are horrific. I will target one health issues that is probably the most overlooked, which is the psychological health of those children and the sense of shame they have when they go to school. When they go out into the wider community, they have a sense of shame about the way they are dressed and their lack of sanitation, because they do not have an opportunity to wash and so on. I was a teacher, as was my wife, in a special school for the Travelling community for many years. We would be familiar with that issue but not to the extent that it is highlighted in the report. I can see that this is clearly something which must be addressed.

Another issue is the that of the tragedies which, naturally, come to mind when one reads this report. I refer to sites where there have been serious fire incidences and terrible tragedies. All the ingredients seem to be here, and it was just by the luck of God that no catastrophe occurred at this site in the context of the electrics. The list of issues includes things like no working smoke detectors, badly fitted stoves, the electrical system being overloaded, etc. It is a complete fire hazard. They are the two issue I would focus on - the psychological health of children in particular and the fire hazard.

On a more critical note, Dr. Muldoon pointed out that this halting site was originally established to house 12 bays. Before long, it seems there were multiples of that number at the site. He does not go into detail as to how that situation arose. I presume it happened incrementally. Was it not being monitored by the council? Were the residents, in any way, culpable of inviting or accepting, perhaps, relatives and friends on to the site? We need to look at that a bit more because it is a critical point - that site was never intended for that number of people. I know the circumstances that pertained to people who came in and probably felt aggrieved by the housing allocation system and the housing priorities of that council, and so on. However, this must be highlighted. Perhaps the council are to blame, or other agencies, for how it developed. I want to know over what length of time this developed.

I refer to the points noted by Dr. Muldoon that council staff and outside contractors were reluctant to go onto the site, that they were, perhaps, even in fear and that gardaí had to be used as moderators or mediators once or twice. That was regrettable but I am sure there were two sides to the story.

Why was that situation allowed to develop? I presume these people were coming in to do good work, to fix the electrics and do the plumbing. Why should there have been resistance to them on-site? Is there something we are not getting there?

I agree with Dr. Muldoon that it is a disgrace that certain local authorities will not even use the ring-fenced budget they get for Traveller accommodation. Under no other heading or programme would a county council be returning money, and they would be screaming for more on every single issue. As a committee, we discussed this in private today. We are awaiting reports from all of the various local authorities to justify their position on that, and we will be working on it ourselves. I engaged with the chief executive officer of Kerry County Council, Moira Morrell, and her senior housing staff in preparation for this meeting, and they presented me with a very comprehensive report, which I will not go into now but which I will be happy to lay before the Chairman and the committee. Not to be parochial, Kerry seems to be doing more than its share, or at least an equal share, and I am proud to be able to say that.

I know Dr. Muldoon and Ms Ward investigated this one issue in great detail, and well done to them both. Do they think this is typical? Is this standard procedure? Can we imply and take forward from this report that this type of thing is going on all over the country, in the cities of Dublin, Galway and Cork, and in our rural towns and communities as well? Perhaps there is a much bigger scandal to be gone into. Again, I welcome both witnesses and I congratulate them. I regret that I have to go to an equally important meeting but I will carefully study their responses.