Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 12 October 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Expert Group Review of Traveller Accommodation: Discussion

Photo of Eoin Ó BroinEoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

It is Eugene Cummins from the CCMA. I think Mr. Cummins threw out a list of issues there as part of the reason Traveller accommodation can be very difficult. I have 11 very large Traveller-specific sites in my constituency and I deal with these issues every day. The one issue he did not mention, which is part of the problem, is prejudice. We have to get real about this. We have talked about this on a cross-party basis for a long time. We all worked with the last Minister of State, Deputy Damien English, who did a wonderful job to get the expert group report to where it was, but either we fully implement all of that report as a matter of urgency or we just stop wasting our time, saying we do not want children to live in these appalling conditions but that we are not willing to implement the recommendations of the report that is in front of us.

I have two questions. Can Mr. Joyce give us a little more information about his concern that the 32 recommendations of the working group are not going to be implemented? He mentioned the 18 but there are also the others.

Can Mr. Cummins give us an indication of what percentage of the Traveller accommodation programme in each of the local authorities that are composite are actually being implemented? Yes, more money was spent last year but a lot of it was not spent on the delivery of new accommodation or refurbishment of existing accommodation, and it was spent on Covid emergency measures. We are now a year or two into the Traveller accommodation programmes, TAPs. How well are we doing from Mr. Cummins’s assessment in the CCMA?