Ms Elizabeth Fanning:

Good morning to the Chair and members of the committee. I am acting director of services for housing at Galway City Council. I am accompanied by my colleague, Ms Helena Martyn, acting senior executive officer in housing, and our senior social worker, Ms Catherine Fahy.

On behalf of Galway City Council, we thank the committee for the opportunity to attend on matters relating to accommodation for Travellers.

This includes the Traveller caravan loan scheme and progress made by Galway City Council in implementing the recommendations featured in the final report of the Joint Committee on Key Issues Affecting the Traveller Community. Quite recently, Galway City Council has been building up its unit and very recently recruited a new Traveller accommodation officer, and a Traveller liaison officer join our dedicated Traveller accommodation unit. This also includes a dedicated executive engineer, an assistant engineer, a clerk of works and a foreman. This unit is dedicated to supporting members of the Traveller community in conjunction with the social work unit, and our tenancy sustainment supports both pre- and post-tenancy and helps to support their transition into the new home as well as providing other well-being supports.

There were 18 recommendations on accommodation in the previous report, so I will give the committee a quick update on No. 67 regarding homelessness. Galway City Council will continue to deliver and accommodate homeless Travellers via Housing First and other housing-led programmes. We recently reduced the percentage of homeless Travellers from in excess of 50% to 37% and will keep working on this. Regarding recommendation No. 68,the audit of living conditions in all Traveller-specific halting sites, and recommendation No. 69, the audit to include all mobile homes and caravans, Galway City Council has gone to market on two occasions to engage a suitable competent surveyor to carry out these audits but has received no market response, so a further audit tender will be published in quarter 1 of 2024 and we hope to get a surveyor in. In the meantime, Galway City Council carries out routine maintenance on all sites and addresses any deficiencies in accommodation, communal facilities and site infrastructure as they arise.

Regarding recommendation No. 70, which involves Traveller-specific accommodation, we are delighted to announce that we are currently on site constructing five culturally appropriate Traveller group housing units on land belonging to Galway City Council on Circular Road. This involves the redevelopment of the existing halting site. We are undertaking this in conjunction with Cena, which has been brilliant. It will replace the existing halting site bays and include three three-bed dwellings, a four-bed dwelling and a two-bed dwelling.

The new Traveller accommodation programme is being drafted. I can confirm that the results of the audit will be included in this current Traveller accommodation programme, as will recommendation No. 72 regarding new family formations. That will be included as part of the consultation on the new Traveller accommodation programme for 2025 to 2029, which we are undertaking.

Recommendation No. 73 concerns planning issues. Galway City Council has a further complexity with planning in that it lies in a special area of conservation and a special protection area, so the majority of its developments are screened in for Part 10 planning, which must go to An Bord Pleanála. We have not been very successful recently. Last year, two major housing developments at Keeraun and Headford Road were refused by An Bord Pleanála after 16 months of waiting for the decision. This included 12 Traveller-specific units across those developments. These blockages to the delivery of the Traveller accommodation programme not only negatively affect delivering houses but also affected the trust and confidence we have built, so it is a blow.

Galway City Council welcomes recommendation No. 74, which recommends that a national Traveller accommodation authority be established, and sees merit in it. Regarding recommendations Nos. 75 and 76, I am happy to confirm that the Traveller identifier was implemented by Galway City Council in 2023 and that choice of accommodation is recorded as part of the housing application process. Accommodation choice can be amended if households submit a change in preference areas.

We welcome recommendation No. 77, that determining the number of Travellers in a local authority be standardised across all local authorities, but we do capture some of it under the annual summary of social housing assessment. We welcome the recommendation to remove the "local requirement" because it is a difficulty across the boundary between Galway city and county, as many of our Traveller families have a preference for the county council jurisdiction.

Regarding recommendation No. 79 on research on the design of culturally appropriate accommodation for Travellers, we carried out this research as part of the Circular Road project. It involved extensive communication with all stakeholders and was facilitated by Cena. It was essential and has helped the success of the project. This consultation is continuing to take place during the construction phase and will continue during the handover to Cena for it to run the site. We feel this is a prototype and that we can use this research for further similar projects like the Cena project in Circular Road and bring it to other sites in the city. We therefore hope it is a start for us when it comes to supplying Traveller-appropriate and Traveller-specific accommodation.

Recommendation No. 80 relates to transient sites, and Galway City Council has provided a transient site.

On funding, working with Cena has been extremely successful for Galway City Council and we would welcome more Traveller-specific approved housing bodies, AHBs, in the sector.

In respect of recommendation No. 82 and the trespass legislation, we feel it is outside the control of Galway City Council.

Recommendation No. 83 refers to the European Typology on Homelessness, ETHOS, and the definition of "homelessness". Galway City Council agrees that we need to capture the figures for Travellers in homelessness. They are skewed and we need a new way of defining them so we can capture the situation more exactly.

We feel the matter raised in recommendation No. 84 would be outside our control.

I will move on to the caravan loan scheme, which we have welcomed. We have worked with the scheme and it has been successful. We have had 34 applications, ten of which were deemed ineligible. Eight applications have been successful over the past two years. Four of those caravans are now in situand four are in transit or being delivered and installed as we speak. We are on track for a successful conclusion of the scheme for 2022 to 2023. We agree with Dublin City Council that the maximum limit of €40,000 is not enough because the ancillary costs could be as high as €10,000 per caravan. We would welcome a review of this funding for future schemes. That would be beneficial.

We in Galway City Council have examples of initiatives to support the needs of Travellers, particularly welfare and well-being initiatives. We have a fully functioning local Traveller accommodation consultative committee, LTACC, which has an agreed communication protocol that serves, in part, as an equality statement. It is underpinned by the equality and human rights value statement. We are also undertaking a pilot halting site estate management strategy, which is very near completion. It will be the first Traveller-specific estate management strategy nationally.

We have also undertaken an assessment of human rights and equality issues as part of the mid-term review of the current Traveller accommodation programme, TAP, in line with the recommendations of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC. We are implementing the actions from the 2021 IHREC equality review.

In an effort to make Traveller sites more child friendly, which is important, we installed in 2023 two brand new playgrounds on two halting sites with funding from the Dormant Accounts Fund. We have also housed six Traveller families and prevented homelessness via the tenant in situscheme and we have helped one family to purchase a home via the tenant purchase scheme.

It is important that, via the LTACC, we received equality and diversity training in December 2019, January 2020, June 2023 and as recently as yesterday. This has been facilitated by our independent chair, Mr. Niall Crowley, and has been invaluable. It has been so good that we hope to roll it out across the wider organisation.

In our unit in Galway City Council, we are passionate, driven and energetic. We will continue to prioritise the implementation of the recommendations of the final report, to deliver the range of accommodation that is required for Travelling families, and to cater to their needs. We will continue to proactively engage with the local Traveller communities and all representatives and stakeholders to understand the accommodation preferences and needs and to plan for the future of Traveller-specific accommodation in all areas.

It is important we update regularly. We propose to provide updates on our progress via the Galway housing task force as well as our strategic policy committees, SPCs. We will also provide quarterly updates to the LTACC and an annual report to the national Traveller accommodation consultative committee, NTACC. We have had four meetings per year with the LTACCs since they were established in 2020. We had a successful meeting as recently as yesterday. The system is fully functioning. It has taken a while but we now feel it is at the point of functioning fully. All of the members and stakeholders are engaged and we hope to build on this and help to deliver more in the future.