Clare County Council is to open a €1.4 million emergency Traveller halting site in Ennis within weeks in response to the accommodation crisis.
However, the site may have to be torn down within two years as part of a High Court settlement with local residents. The removal of the site is contingent on the council having a network of sites in place by then.
Work on the site was held up for over a year by residents' objections. Mr Joe Moran, president of Ennis Chamber of Commerce, said in order to solve the crisis the NIMBY attitude among the settled community was no longer acceptable and people have to drop their objections.
He was speaking this week, five years after the High Court ordered the closure of Ennis's only unauthorised halting site. It forced 35 Traveller families into a cat-andmouse game with the authorities as they park illegally at various locations.
These families make up a small proportion of the 6,500 Travellers currently living on the roadside throughout the State. Their conditions contribute towards the chilling statistic that only 1 per cent of them will live beyond the age of 65.
Five-month-old James Mc- Donagh was recently admitted to the Mid Western Regional Hospital after contracting pneumonia. He is now out of danger, and his parents, Tom and Mary McDonagh, are making efforts to find a place for him in care where he will not have to contend with the damp, cold conditions on the roadside, opposite Ennis's Holy Family school.
Father-of-eight Tom Mc- Donagh says: "As you can see, the caravan is like a fridge. We have been on the road for five years now, more or less. That is very bad for the kids because it is very, very cold and, ideally, I would love to have a house for the sake of my children."
Stories similar to the McDonaghs moved the Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, last November to appeal to landowners around Ennis to offer their lands to accommodate Travellers. The bishop offered lands at his Ennis residence to accommodate five Traveller families.
The bishop now accepts his initiative has failed as he received only one response from the public. However, it is understood that planning permission would be needed if Traveller families are to set up camp on his lawn. He is considering applying for planning permission for a temporary halting site on his grounds.
Meanwhile, Clare County Council's emergency halting site is to accommodate only eight families. The situation has led to rising tensions between Travellers and the settled community as Travellers park their caravans in local authority housing areas.
Aware of the social cost the situation is having on the Traveller community, the council's director of services for housing, Mr Tom Coughlan, says: "If there was an easy solution to it, it would have been solved a long time ago, but there is no easy solution."
Pointing out that the council is currently implementing the accommodation programme, Mr Coughlan says: "We have not been able to achieve what we wanted and the reason is that the law changed when we were ready to move with the old Traveller programme; the courts have held us up and residents have held us up, which of course is their right."
The Council identified five other sites and the local authority expects a necklace of sites will be in place before the end of 2004.
