Ms Mary Heavey:

We are delighted to be here today alongside our friends in FLAC. I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak. I am the housing solicitor at Community Law and Mediation, and I am joined by my colleague Ms Jane O’Sullivan, who is the managing solicitor and who specialises in equality and employment law.

Community Law and Mediation, CLM, is an independent community law centre and charity working since 1975 with communities impacted by disadvantage and inequality. We provide free legal, mediation and education services and work in partnership with other organisations to provide targeted outreach services. We operates out of two locations: Coolock in Dublin and Limerick, but our services are available nationwide.

In our work as an independent law centre, we see a huge unmet legal need for advice and representation for members of the Traveller community, particularly in the area of accommodation. Last year we established a dedicated free legal advice clinic for members of the Traveller community who are experiencing accommodation problems. The objective of this legal advice clinic is to promote advice, advocacy and representation of people experiencing social housing issues, homelessness or risk of homelessness within the Traveller community. More broadly, this legal advice clinic aims to affect greater and more meaningful access to justice for Travellers around accommodation issues and to attempt to reduce impediments to that access. We also work with and assist Travellers in a broad range of areas where they are disproportionately affected, including access to education and services and employment.

We thought it would be useful to briefly outline some of the issues that have presented to our services lately, particularly as they reflect so much of what was highlighted in the final report of the joint committee. Many of those issues also feature in the Traveller Accommodation Expert Review, published in July 2019, which reviewed the effectiveness of the Housing Traveller Accommodation Act 1998 and other legislation regarding the provision and delivery of Traveller accommodation. We will then set out key barriers and opportunities for change in the legal and policy landscape.

Looking to the key issues presenting to our outreach legal advice clinic, the first is the failure of local authorities to provide access to emergency accommodation. This has left clients sleeping in cars, in tents or in dangerously overcrowded or grossly unsuitable living conditions. Second, we see the failure of local authorities to provide Traveller-specific accommodation and inadequate standards of Traveller-specific accommodation. Many of our clients have been on housing lists for many years and in the interim they are living in inadequate and substandard accommodation, sometimes without running water, heating and with poor sanitation. Finally, we see a lack of transparency and consistency in decision making of local authorities. For example, some local authorities incorrectly apply social housing support eligibility criteria to accessing emergency accommodation. Another consistent theme in our work is the lack of fair procedures in how certain local authorities carry out Garda vetting of social housing applicants. Discrimination under section 19 of the Intoxicating Liquor Act and issues relating to education have also presented to our clinics. We have provided detailed case studies of these issues in the note appended to our opening statement and I invite members to take a look at those later.

Turning now to the legal and policy landscape, first, we will briefly talk about access to justice. The above described issues are often of an acute, complex and very urgent nature and generally require access to expert legal assistance. While the right of access to justice is accepted as a constitutional principle and a right under European convention on human rights, the reality is that the current legal and policy landscape in Ireland makes it very challenging for people to realise these rights. Without effective access to justice, people are unable to have their voices heard, exercise their rights, challenge discrimination or hold decision-makers accountable. This is particularly true for marginalised groups or at a vulnerable time in a person's life, such as in a housing crisis. As noted by the UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, "access to justice for the right to housing is inseparable from the right itself."

The severely outdated civil legal aid scheme is currently under review by the Department of Justice. A year on we are still awaiting its report. In our submission as part of the review, we highlighted the barriers that prevent marginalised groups, including Travellers, from accessing justice and we advocated for an expanded system of legal aid. For example, under the current civil legal aid scheme, it is very difficult to access legal aid in housing and homeless cases. Legal aid is generally unavailable in housing disputes, subject to a limited exception. In our experience, there is a fundamental lack of clarity as to the availability of civil legal aid in housing law matters, such as access to social housing supports or emergency accommodation. This has resulted in a huge unmet legal need in the area of housing, which is felt most acutely by vulnerable and socially excluded communities in Ireland.

Travellers are disproportionately impacted by the absence of legal aid in disputes concerning land. They can find themselves involved in complex legal proceedings against well-funded, legally represented opponents, without any legal assistance. While we welcome the introduction by the Legal Aid Board of the Traveller Legal Support Service, its scope is unfortunately limited by the current restrictions of the civil legal aid scheme. With a general election approaching, we are particularly concerned that if reform of the scheme is not prioritised as a matter of urgency, it will once again fall through the cracks and public money will continue to fund a wholly inadequate system.

On a separate note, in relation to the review of the equality legislation, as members will be aware, membership of the Traveller community is a protected ground under the Employment Equality and Equal Status Acts. However, significant reform is required to improve the effectiveness of the Acts in combatting discrimination. The Acts are currently being reviewed and we have made a series of recommendations focusing on access to justice and on the return of section 19 of the Intoxicating Liquor Act to the remit of the Workplace Relations Commission. We also recommend that the Equal Status Act be amended to remove the effective exemption from the Equal Status Act for public bodies administering legislation in key areas such as housing. This can ultimately limit the recourse of claimants who have been discriminated against in accessing accommodation from local authorities, for example. We understand that a Bill to reform the Acts, the equality (amendment) Bill, will be published during this legislative term.

Second, we will briefly discuss the trailer loan scheme. In 2020, funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, we published research into the legal implications and lived experiences of the caravan loan scheme. Our report examined the Traveller accommodation experience through the lens of the trailer loan scheme and was based on consultations with relevant Traveller organisations and focus groups, as well as with primary healthcare providers for the Traveller community. A number of specific issues are identified in our report, including first that the loan amounts were not sufficient to cover the cost of a quality caravan that provides for a warm, safe and secure home and are more often holiday or starter trailers, meant for temporary and not long-term use. Second, substandard trailers lead to increased utility costs, with poorly maintained trailers being significantly less energy efficient and using a substantial amount of resources such as water, fuel and electricity. Third, there was a lack of awareness among Travellers of the existence of the scheme, caused by its sporadic and inconsistent implementation across local authorities. We understand that since the publication of our report, a preferential and affordable trailer loan scheme was extended across all local authorities with a view to introducing a national scheme.

Finally, I will go through our recommendations. As a general comment, we endorse the recommendations of the expert review group and the joint Oireachtas committee and believe that they should be implemented in full. We also make the following specific recommendations: we recommend that the report on the review of the civil legal aid scheme is published as a matter of urgency and that the civil legal aid scheme be expanded to include all areas of law which are currently excluded, such as including housing-related matters and employment and equality matters. We recommend also that the scheme be restructured in line with the community law centre model to include a public legal education and law reform function. In parallel with this, we recommend that the review of the equality legislation address the barriers that prevent Travellers from challenging discrimination and that the equality (amendment) Bill is published as a matter of urgency. We recommend that a referendum on housing be held to insert a right to adequate housing into the Constitution and that the upcoming review of the pilot trailer loan scheme include a robust and effective consultation with the Traveller community and that it incorporates the numerous recommendations included in our report. Finally, we recommend that public sector duty training, and a cultural awareness workshop be put in place for local authorities and other stakeholders to educate officials on their obligations under the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014, and on Traveller ethnicity and culture.

I would like to conclude with a quote from one of our clients, Maria. That is not her real name but she was referred to our Traveller accommodation outreach clinic by a local Traveller group. Maria and her husband had been sleeping in their car for a number of months, after encountering significant difficulties in getting assessed as homeless by a local authority.

After CLM’s legal intervention, they were eventually provided with emergency accommodation. Maria said the following:

I felt like I was stuck in the middle, until I got the advice that I needed ... It felt like a dark and miserable road that was never going to end – and then the sun came out ... Throughout the process, I learned to not hold back, and to speak up for my rights ... A lot has changed since then: I have a roof over my head, and I can come and go as I please. I feel like I can be my own person.