Colette Kelleher (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Leader for arranging this debate and the Minister for taking time to come to the House for this debate. I extend a warm welcome to the visitors in the Gallery who have travelled especially to be present. Some of them live with the daily reality of what we are discussing. On 27 September, on the Order of Business, I read out the names of the ten people who tragically died in the Carrickmines fire and called on the Government, as a matter of urgency, to prioritise the issue of overcrowding on halting sites and respond to mounting international and moral pressure for action. I am glad that the Minister has come before the House to respond to these matters of life and death. Will the measures outlined in the report by the National Directorate for Fire and Emergency Management prevent more unnecessary and tragic deaths?

Local groups have acknowledged that work has been done, as the Minister outlined here this afternoon. The consensus is that Travellers are still not safe in their homes. The response to Carrickmines needs to go much further and beyond fire alarms and fire blankets. We must tackle the underlying causes like chronic overcrowding. Until such time as that is addressed many halting sites are unsafe places for men, women and children.

The national directorate's Report on Programme to Review and Enhance Fire Safety in Local Authority Provided Traveller Accommodation noted that "protecting people from the dangers of fire is particularly challenging in the confined and cramped conditions that families living in caravans or non-standard accommodation may find themselves". This challenge is compounded by overcrowding. In the report separation distances were identified as an issue of concern in 57% of sites. The number of families forced to share accommodation has increased from 663 in 2013 to 862 in 2015 and 534 families live on unauthorised sites. That translates into more than 4,000 men, women and children. Such overcrowding is a direct result of policy failures and neglect. The State has a duty of care to Travellers and that duty has not been fulfilled. Successive Governments have failed to provide and continue to fail to provide adequate housing and accommodation for Travellers. It is not just me who says so, it is not just Irish Travellers who say so and it is not just the Traveller groups that say so. The eyes of the world are on us and on the way we treat Travellers. The eyes of the world are not going away.

In the past year we have had two landmark judgments. One came from the European Commission of Social Rights, a body of the Council of Europe, and the other from the European Commission. Last May, a collective complaint, that is a form of class action, was taken against Ireland by the European Roma Rights Centre, supported by the Irish Traveller Movement, to the European Committee of Social Rights. The landmark judgment found that the Government has violated Travellers' rights in five respects under the social chapter. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted the findings on 5 October. How does the Minister plan to put into effect changes in policy and practice in the light of those findings? Some key grounds were cited - the insufficient provision of accommodation for Travellers; that many sites are in inadequate condition; and, that there are inadequate safeguards for Travellers threatened with eviction. The committee noted that of the 1,000 transient bays identified as needed in a 1995 taskforce report there are only 54 in existence and not all function as proper transient sites.

The second judgment came in recent weeks from the European Commission Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers, and gender equality, and threatened infringement proceedings against Ireland for its treatment of Travellers. Officials from the Commission are here this week in respect of this matter. I am interested in hearing the Minister's response to the European Commission's inquiries. The damning remarks from the European bodies have been echoed by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Is the Government listening now? I fear not when we examine the actions of recent Governments.

The budget for Traveller accommodation will be a welcome €9 million next year but it was €40 million in 2008. That means there has been a 92% cut between 2008 and 2014. I ask the Minister to name another group that has suffered a 92% cut in funding support during the financial crisis. Let us remember that there was no Traveller in the Cabinet when the country went bust. There was no Traveller on the boards of our banks when they went bust. For those who might accuse me of going off topic, I am not. Recent Governments have used the cry of the crisis to disproportionately and unfairly cut funding for Traveller accommodation and supports. As a result we have halting sites that are death traps. No-one deserves to live in such circumstances and no-one deserves to die like the people who died at the Carrickmines site. At the same time the Government cut funding some local authorities, as mentioned by other Senators, underspent their Traveller accommodation budgets to the tune of 36%. That was at a time when thousands of Travellers were in need of support. This amounts to a damning dis-investment by the State in the Traveller community that has had a devastating effect.

Minister, in our home city of Cork, there is a halting site in Blackpool called Spring Lane that was built for ten families but now houses 30. Many families remain without water or toilets, some families continue to live in old damp mobile homes and all of the families live with overcrowding on a daily basis. Even though almost 100 children live on the site they have nowhere to play. We know that there is a direct relationship between the quality of housing and health and safety. Traveller infants are 3.6 times more likely to die than infants in the general population. The suicide rate among male Travellers is 6.6 times higher than in the general population.

Last week I spoke to a friend who works in Traveller health and she told me that there have been three deaths from suicide in Cork in the past few weeks. In 2008, the life expectancy for Traveller men was 15 years shorter than for settled men and a decade shorter for women. As we all know, ten people died in the fire that triggered this report. We are shaving decades off people's lives by not providing them with adequate and safe homes.

Every day Travellers experience marginalisation, discrimination and racism due to their ethnicity. It is time to respect this distinctive culture that can be traced back to at least Tudor times. A core part of the Traveller culture is expressed through housing. Living in a caravan and moving about is an integral part of Travellers' ethnic identity that was superbly explored in the recent RTE television series called "John Connors: The Travellers". We must recognise and provide for their identity. As the European Commission noted, Travellers are the most marginalised community in Ireland yet two weeks ago in the Dáil a criminal justice Bill was supported and moved to Committee Stage without a distinct reference being made to their ethnic minority status. Their status is not recognised by the State and, therefore, will not benefit from automatic inclusion in the proposed Bill. For me, this is a matter of conscience and rights. The current situation is intolerable and shameful. Urgent meaningful action is required to remedy the situation for Travellers in Ireland.

The Action Plan on Housing and Homelessness - Rebuilding Ireland is a commendable and ambitious plan but it is short on specifics in respect of Traveller accommodation. The plan commits to having an expert independent review by the Housing Agency, which is needed, but it does not reference or recognise the scale of the issue that needs to be addressed. Travellers need to know when overcrowding will end, how much will be spent on Traveller accommodation, when, by whom and where. Can the Minister confirm that the promised review mentioned in the Rebuilding Ireland action plan will, at a minimum, reinstate Traveller accommodation funding to the 2008 level of €40 million? A budget of €9 million is going in the right direction but it is not enough. I ask the Minister to increase the provision of appropriate resourcing of accessible, suitable and culturally appropriate accommodation, to support Traveller nomadism with well managed and serviced transient sites and to introduce a moratorium on evictions. Given that there have been successive failures of leadership and political will at local level, I ask him to consider creating new independent national Traveller accommodation.

We must never again lose ten Irish citizens to fire like we did in Carrickmines. We must respect Irish Travellers in words and deeds. We can and must end the marginalisation of Travellers. We must end the causes of early death and ill health whether it is mental or physical. We must end overcrowding through properly resourced housing. We owe this to the ten people who died in Carrickmines last year. We owe this to the thousands of Irish Travellers desperate for a decent home and life. We owe this to ourselves to make Ireland a country that cherishes us all equally and we owe it as an explanation to a world that is watching.

I thank the Minister for listening and look forward to his response.