Ms Breda O'Donoghue:

I thank the Deputy for those questions. I mentioned the postal service and people not receiving their mail. That is just one example. Travellers live in the present. Sometimes their personal appointments can be put on the back burner, especially in view of what is going on around them at the time.

Regarding accommodation, a member mentioned that there seems to be money around, and there always has been. Fortunately, funding has never been a problem for us. For the past 20-odd years, we, as a Traveller organisation, have made submissions to the five-year Traveller accommodation programmes in our local area. We have always included a needs assessment for the area in those submissions. One of those recommendations has been transient sites, which work very well in other countries. I refer to Traveller needs. Some Travellers are quite happy to be in a standard house, some are happy to be in a halting site while others are happy in a group housing scheme. Approximately 95% of Travellers in Cork are in local authority housing or rented accommodation but that is not by choice. We have argued for years in our submissions that the preferred choice of accommodation of Travellers is halting sites, transient sites or Traveller-specific group housing schemes. Unfortunately, our submissions went to the wind at the best of times. However, I have been delivering Traveller culture awareness training to student architects in University College Cork for the past five or six years, particularly addressing Traveller-specific accommodation. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. There are brilliant and workable Traveller-specific schemes throughout the country. The fact that there are so few of them keeps us in crisis all the time, particularly where accommodation needs are concerned.