Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will start by thanking Senator Flynn and all of the members on the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Key Issues affecting the Traveller Community for both their hard work and for this very important report. I would also like to acknowledge the fact the Government gave time to Senator Flynn to speak with us today. I hope this is not the last time that she speaks on this issue on behalf of the Government. If she got to speak on its behalf more often, Traveller public policy would be in a much better place.

I acknowledge the hard work of all of the organisations: Traveller, equality and anti-racist groups in the Gallery because if it were not for their work, many of the issues that we are talking about today would not be in the public arena at all. I hope the Government acknowledges and continues to fund them and to increase their funding.

As my party’s housing spokesperson, I want to clearly say that I put my name to every single one of the 18 recommendations specifically relating to accommodation in the report, and in doing so I put the name of our party. They are eminently sensible, most of them are not new and they should be implemented as a matter of urgency.

There is a problem, however, because many years ago the Government commissioned a report on Traveller accommodation. Professor Michelle Norris undertook the study on behalf of the Housing Agency and it was published in 2017. That led to the formation of another group, the expert group on Traveller accommodation in 2018, and almost three years ago it made 32 separate recommendations to Government to tackle the very issues that this report, which we are discussing today, identifies. The overwhelming majority of those recommendations have not been implemented. There is no point in us sitting here today calling for the implementation of the recommendations of the new report when the outstanding recommendations in its predecessor remain on the shelf. In fact, some of the most substantive recommendations of that report are not even in the pipeline. We have to deal with Part 8 planning applications and with section 183 land transfers and ensure that Traveller accommodation programmes have a statutory binding implementation plan. We need an agency above the local authorities and independent of Government to ensure that where local authorities and Government are in dereliction of their plans, then responsibility for implementation of those plans is transferred to that agency to ensure their full implementation.

In the few seconds I have left I want to speak briefly about the spending on Traveller accommodation. I acknowledge that under the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, for two years in a row the Traveller accommodation budget has been spent in full. That is new, is welcome and deserves credit. The problem is that the budget is too small and the money that is being spent is not tackling the core issues. If one looks at the most recent figures of the Department, a tiny number of new units of Traveller-specific accommodation have been delivered while a large number of local authorities are still spending nothing on either upgrading existing facilities or on providing new facilities. We do not, therefore, just need the legislative policy changes but we need a commitment from Government to dramatically increase the funding for the direct provision of culturally appropriate Traveller accommodation. If the Government does that, it will have willing partners and supporters on these sides of the benches.

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