Ms Breda O'Donoghue:

Deputy Stanton asked how many submissions were submitted to the local authority. The issue is very close to my heart in the sense that both Mr. O'Sullivan and I were sitting in the council chamber watching the local councillors in that area vote for that particular TAP. At the time there was a lot of very negative media coverage around the Traveller accommodation on Spring Lane. I am not sure if everybody is familiar with Spring Lane. It is probably one of the oldest, most traditional campsites for Travellers in the Cork area. I lived on the site when it opened originally and I lived adjacent to the site on what was called an unofficial site at the time. My parents reared all my family on that site and my grandparents lived on the site. Some of the most popular objections to Traveller accommodation on that site came from the community that was built up around the Spring Lane area. The word on the ground is that people there feel there should not be a caravan site there in the first place. It was originally Spring Lane. Some people now like to call it Ballyvolane, so there is a bit of social status around the site.

There have been some objections to the site concerning antisocial behaviour. We accept that but it is a Garda issue. One thing has nothing to do with the other. There are over 100 children on the site who have no bedrooms, no access to a shower and, in some cases, no access to electricity. We welcome the allocation of funds to progress the accommodation issue.

To look at the bigger picture, the issue for us is that there has been no addition to the Traveller accommodation in over 30 years. We have a large surplus of families who have never been housed. Some have been forced into social housing simply because they had nowhere else to go. Even if we do resolve Spring Lane, and I hope we do and that the work is done this year, we will still be dealing with a very large number of families who have seen no improvement in the dilapidated sites they are living in right now. We also have a huge number of homeless Traveller families who are not even included in the TAP. It is a very big picture.

While we welcome the additional accommodation on Spring Lane, it is not an addition to Traveller accommodation but another replacement site, as were the two previous sites. We are still dealing with a huge number of people who have nowhere to go, are not included in the current TAP and probably will not be included in the next one either.