A Traveller family which has been living for more than three months next to a busy Dublin dual carriageway has had a request for the provision of facilities at the site turned down.
Mr Liam Byrne, assistant manager at the Dun Laoghaire/ Rathdown County Council's housing department, confirmed that a request to provide a skip and toilet for the Greene family had been rejected. "We will not provide facilities effectively creating a temporary site at the side of the road," he said.
The family moved to the location, beside the Stillorgan Road on the N11 last August, from a halting site in Monkstown. Mrs Margaret Greene said they had been asked to move to make way for another family.
However, Mr Byrne said the family had walked out. "We offered them an alternative site and they turned it down as well."
He said that neither offer was still available as the places had been taken by other families. At present, about 40 traveller families in the county council area are without accommodation.
"Our options are limited but we are looking into the possibility of moving them on from their current location," he said. "They should not be there, beside a main road, with a huge volume of traffic passing by." Mrs Greene said the family would like to move into a halting site but, in the meantime, wanted the council to provide basic facilities to help reduce the risk of disease.
"The rubbish building up is beginning to attract the rats," she said. Two of her four children have recently suffered from diarrhoea and kidney infections.
"I'm sick of being moved on," she added. "I just want to settle down now and find a site somewhere in the area where the kids can get the bus into school."
She said local people and businesses have been supportive, providing drinking and cooking water for the family. "We have got no hassle from anyone. No one has complained to us."
Mr Byrne said that before being moved to Monkstown, the family had been living on an open space off the Blackrock Road "where a number of people requested they should be moved on".
A proposal to build a halting site at a location in Mount Merrion was turned down by the county council last June.
