A MAJOR halting site planned for Sandyford in South Co Dublin will be a ghetto for travellers and an environmental disaster for residents, opponents have claimed.
Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council intends to put 20 families in up to 40 caravans at the site on Blackglen Road, and has invoked the county manager's emergency powers to override objections from councillors, residents and travellers.
The council says the site is vital to its plans to tackle the problem of traveller families living on the side of the road in "atrocious conditions". But residents opposed to the proposal claim the local authority has repeatedly refused permission to them to open entrances on to Blackglen Road, on the grounds that it is too narrow and dangerous.
"The road is 16 feet wide, with no footpaths, but it has the same level of usage as the Tallaght bypass, a residents' spokesman, Mr Gerry Collins, said. "For years, the council has been telling local people that it's too dangerous for them to have private house entrances opening on the road. But now they turn around themselves and say it's OK to put in a 40 foot frontage with as many as 200 people coming in and out.
Those opposed to the halting site include the former rally driver, Ms Rosemary Smith, who has been trying unsuccessfully to sell her house - a short distance from the planned halting site - for the past year. "They tell us that sites like these don't devalue property, but my house has been devalued to the extent that I can't sell it," Ms Smith said.
"We're surrounded by gorse here," she added. "And as it is, we have fires every summer. That's going to be another problem."
Residents have already lost a High Court challenge to the legality of the council's decision on the site, for which funding has been approved. The case is being appealed to the Supreme Court and the objectors say they will go to the European Court if necessary.
Among the objections put forward by opponents to the plan is that the site would be a "ghetto" for the travellers themselves.
Mr Martin Collins, a spokesman for the travellers' organisation Pavee Point said "In general, we are opposed to large scale temporary sites. They're usually primitive and they tend to last for 10 to 15 years, so they're not temporary by any means. It's a traditional reaction to a crisis - to put as many people as you can into a big field."
But he was sure "there'd still be objections from residents" to a permanent site for 10 or 15 families. "We have a state of the art permanent site here in Finglas with 28 families and it's working very well, which shows what you can do with proper consultation and proper facilities," he said.
The council says all the residents' objections have been rejected by the High Court and it dismisses suggestions that the site's size could lead to problems among "incompatible" traveller families.
"There are successful small sites and there are successful big sites," said Mr Liam Byrne, assistant county manager. "The proposal here is for a 20 bay site and we have made it clear that we wilt have only one family per bay, with up to two caravans each. As far as we know, less than half the traveller families in our area have two caravans. We will not be housing different families, or extended families, in the same bay."
Mr Byrne said the council has "run into problems with our traveller resettlement programme, because of opposition from residents in every shape and form". The decision on the Blackglen site was made because of the need to vacate another temporary site.
"Blackglen Road was a site which could be developed rapidly to take travellers out of the atrocious conditions they were living in on the side of the road. At the time we invoked the emergency powers, we had 30 families on the road. Now we have 50. So the emergency can't be said to have subsided," Mr Byrne said.
