Sir, - I am writing in response to two letters recently published from Cllr. Richard Green (June 17th) and Michael P Flynn (June 23rd). Both letters reject, and would deny, travellers' right to freely choose to live on halting sites. The assimilationist views that they propose have already been voiced in the past and have already been shown to be misguided and inadequate.
The reality of travellers' lives, and the experience of the Irish Traveller Movement, show that each individual traveller or traveller family chooses to opt for different forms of accommodation. These choices include private ownership, standard local authority housing, group housing, and both permanent and transient halting sites. Indeed, over a lifetime, a traveller is likely to experience living in a number of these situations.
The belief of the Irish Traveller Movement, and indeed, the recommendation of the Report of the Task Force on the Travelling Community (1995), is that local authority representatives and officials must consult with travellers and traveller organisations in order to produce a traveller accommodation programme for their area. All the accommodation possibilities outlined above must be taken into account in these consultations. It is the conviction of the Irish Traveller Movement that travellers are the people who can best decide the most appropriate accommodation for themselves. It is important that some settled people's conviction that a house is the only valid form of accommodation is not allowed to deny travellers their right to self-determination, or to prevent them from having a genuine choice. - Yours, etc., Fintan Farrell, Coordinator,
Irish Traveller Movement, Eustace Street, Dublin 2.