Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. Muldoon and Ms Ward. I sat on a local authority in Galway for a very short period. One of the most shocking things to me was the treatment of Traveller communities by local authorities. Some of the things in this report do not come as a surprise to most people who have been active in their communities or have been councillors. It is one of the greatest shames in some ways. Galway City Council routinely returns funding year after year. The local Traveller consultative committee did not sit for a number of years either. Even if Traveller accommodation plans are put in place, to what extent are they really consultative if one fails to bring everybody together? At private meetings we have discussed the various things that might be part of Traveller culture, such as horses. If we are really looking at accommodating the Traveller community we must also look at accommodating the lifestyles of Travellers. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is not only about provision of housing, as the witnesses rightly point out is the bedrock of Maslow's hierarchy of needs but it is also about the provision of adequate housing. I would argue that means it has to be a home and that it has to be something that reflects the culture of that particular section of society. In all those things local authorities across the country are failing. Hearing the words of children is what really brings it home to adults. There is no excuse for not going into a site and addressing issues on the basis of one or two adults who are difficult because children have rights in our Constitution quite apart from adults. One can be quite sure that they were not the ones creating the difficulty for the Garda or the local authority to come in and sort out the problems. On the one hand, I do not want to be too hard on local authorities but I do think it is important. As a public representative, we have a huge challenge that unelected people are making decisions a lot of the time. We have one of the weakest local governments in Europe and that also has to be addressed. There are problems around councillors voting against accommodation and an awful lot of political parties are involved in doing that before anyone puts up their hand and says it is the Government, it is not. Everyone has to take responsibility for that, particularly the largest parties who wield a lot of power in those local authorities. I do not want to be overly political in that sense but everyone needs to step up.

First, is enough done to change the behaviour of the local authorities or is it valuable to do this kind of reporting on other sites across the country? I know of places in Galway, for instance, where there are rats. It is not the fault of the local population. They have been crying out for housing.

Second, do the witnesses believe that prioritisation of vulnerable children is happening when social housing is being allocated? Third, transitory sites do not seem to be happening around the country. The sites that are supposedly there for transient families moving from place to place become permanent sites without all the facilities there for the children to get to school and so on. There is an opportunity now. There are a couple of Ministers who deal with this area. There is the children's Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and also the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O'Brien, who is in the Department of Social Protection. They have been stepping up to the plate but this is a failure over decades and it continues to be a failure because of the operations of local authorities.

Ms Ward explained well how somewhere that has ten bays moves to 40 bays. We cannot go shutting things down. Where do the families move on to? There must be somewhere for families to move on. One cannot simply come in with the strong arm of the law and leave children with nothing if there is no provision of social housing.