A portion of land in each local authority should be made exempt from planning regulations for a period of time each year and used as a transient Traveller halting site, a new report will recommend.
The report by the National Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee will make 25 recommendations to the Minister of State for Housing, Mr Noel Ahern, later this month.
The recommendations of the review committee have been seen by The Irish Times, and will be published in September.
Under the heading "Planning Issues", the committee says the use of land as transient halting sites "for a specified number of weeks per year should be prescribed as exempted development under section 4 of the Planning and Development Act". If acted upon, it could go some way to ending illegal Traveller encampments seen earlier in the year in Co Wexford and along the banks of the River Dodder in south Dublin in 2001.
Transient halting sites are used by Travellers to stop off for a number of nights before moving on. Though every local authority was mandated to provide such sites in the 1998 Act, they have been provided in just Donegal and Kerry.
Traveller groups have long criticised this situation, saying there was an implicit refusal on the part of the authorities to recognise or accommodate Travellers' nomadic way of life. An estimated 1,200 Travellers are described as "transient" though this figure rises to about 2,000 during the summer.
Looking at the impact of the anti-trespass legislation, introduced in the wake of the Dodder situation in 2001, the committee calls on local authorities to ask gardaí not to evict families from their land if those families are causing no trouble and are on the housing waiting list.
It also says the use of this legislation against a Traveller family should "not result in a family losing its position on the housing list or being removed from it". The recommendations imply criticism of local authorities' level of consultation with Travellers groups, and of inclusion of their needs in housing planning generally.
The committee says that when local authorities review their Traveller Accommodation Programmes (TAPs), "they should be required as a minimum to include local Traveller accommodation committees and parties who contributed to the original programme" and should "notify Traveller support groups of intention to prepare programmes".
Planners should ensure their zoning objectives are "co-ordinated with [the local authority's] Traveller Accommodation Programmes", and that there should be "greater linkage" between the requirements for social and affordable housing and TAPs.
Made up of representatives of Traveller organisations, local authority and Department of the Environment representatives as well as settled residents' representatives, the committee has been carrying out a review of the Housing (Traveller Accommodation) Act 1998. That Act mandated every local authority to draw up a five-year Traveller Accommodation Plan by 2000, and to deliver it by the end of this year.
However, while local authorities calculated 3,785 units of Traveller accommodation were needed, just 1,369 units have been built.
