Ms Elizabeth Fanning:

On what we can do, we acknowledge what has happened. There have been improvements but more needs to be done. We need to be more innovative. One of the things we are doing in Galway City Council is our Traveller-specific estate management strategy that we are finalising at the moment. It is the first in the country, so it is work in progress. It will have to be tried and tested. It may not even be successful but it is a really good thing we are doing. It is based on tenant participation, trust, pride of place, community development and most importantly, on relationship building. Improvements will be made if we can all work together, respect each other more and have more interaction between the Traveller community and the settled community. We are working to bring about these improvements. The LTACC has really helped with this. It is being driven through it. This will not be the answer to everything and it may have to be tweaked, but it is a start. It is something new and different and I hope it will be successful.

Regarding the maintenance, we have a pretty good record on reactive maintenance. Even yesterday, at our LTACC, we had two of our six halting sites represented at the meeting. They did note improvements in reaction times to maintenance issues. That notwithstanding, we still have issues. Along with our reactive maintenance we also have planned programmes across all of our sites. This includes things like window and door replacement, heating system upgrades, roof repairs, damp remediation and kitchen upgrades. We inspect our smoke and heat alarms, fire blankets, sewers and storm drains annually and do road repairs. We are trying to improve both our planned and our reactive maintenance on all our halting sites. It is very resource-dependent. We are gaining resources, but sometimes as soon as we gain resources internally, we lose them just as quickly. We hope to improve on that.

We also maintain all the welfare units on the halting sites. I agree that we need to make improvements and we need to perhaps think about things differently and bring about innovation. With the likes of the GTM and all the other stakeholders and the Traveller families themselves who are represented on the committees, I think we can do so. We acknowledge there is a lot of work ahead but there is a lot of positivity coming down the line as well.