Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 12 October 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Traveller Accommodation: Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage

Photo of Richard O'DonoghueRichard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Vice Chairman and the Minister of State. Like other speakers, I know that the Minister of State is very passionate about this issue. He said there that money is not the issue. Deputy Ó Cuív and others said there has been 20 years of this but that nothing has changed. The Minister of State said then that many inroads have been made in the past 12 months.

I will talk about Limerick. We have large numbers of Traveller communities within Limerick and I know members of many of them. There are some, however, that I do not know. The reason for this is that they are from different Traveller communities. They could be from the UK and have moved here. People with different cultures and from different societies within the Traveller community have moved here and are not from Ireland at all. The problem I find is that when officials are searching for a location for a Traveller community, these communities will state if they have an issue with another Traveller community. They seem to tell the local authorities and everybody that there is an issue within a family of feuding.

Recently in a town in Limerick, and committee members may have seen this, four different Traveller families had a feud. If money is not the issue, why have we not got people who can liaise with those who have a different cultural background? If there is a difference within their cultures, can we not try to work with them rather than having a feud happening where people from all different sides are brought into a community and it causes complete mayhem?

I grew up with members of the Traveller community coming into our home. These were the most skilful people, the tinsmiths, going back to my father’s time in 1911 when my father was able to tell me the stories of the tradespeople who were coming. We now have a different era and culture and there are so many different types of culture within the Traveller community. We must work with the different cultures to ensure that things like this do not happen.

There can be feuds within every community but when four different Traveller communities are coming together to feud in a place, it is not good. There is no issue in our area between the residents and the Traveller community. They all integrate, get on fine and work together. The issue we are finding at the moment relates to the different cultures within the Traveller communities. This issue had been identified before these Traveller community members were housed and were put on a caravan site. We now have an issue, however, where the councils are not prepared and do not have the staff to go out to do the liaison to help these people to get on. We all want to get on, no matter what culture one is, but we cannot have things like this happening in the future where other people’s lives are being put at risk.a

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