Cork Traveller Accommodation Crisis - Traveller Visibility Group Submission to Cork City Council

cork | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Thursday August 26, 2004 19:33 by David McCarthy - Traveller Visibility Group tvg at indigo dot ie 021 4503786

Many thanks to Indymedia for allowing space on your web site to raise awareness about this ongoing crisis.
Two days from now, August 27th, is Cork City Council's deadline for receiving submissions on the accommodation needs of Travellers over the next 4 years. Was it naivety or a calculated move to advertise seeking submissions at the one time of the year when Travellers (and Traveller organisations) are not around?
The following was submitted today by the Traveller Visibility Group.
If anybody else is in a position to make a submission, the person to write to is Jim Beecher, Housing Section, Cork City Council.
The e-mail address to use is [email protected] and please copy your submissions to [email protected]

Traveller Visibility Group
Submission to Cork City Council
Regarding the four-year Traveller Accommodation Programme 2005 – 2008


Definitions
In this submission, the following terms are used.

Roadside families: Travellers who live for any period anywhere in Cork city in caravans, trailers or motor homes other than as an official tenant of Cork City Council on an official halting site.
Eviction: (A) Forced removal from a roadside site using the Anti-Trespass legislation under the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994 as inserted by the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2002. (B) Threat, fear or anticipation of forced removal as above.

Introduction
It appears from observing the progress presently being made by Cork City Council with regard to accommodating Travellers in standard housing, that the local authority is investing considerable energy and commitment in this area. For this reason, in making this submission, we are concentrating on the issue of lack of provision of accommodation for roadside families, where we see the greatest need arising over the next four years 2005 to 2008.


Roadside families
Regardless of the reason why Cork City Council believes a Traveller family is living on the roadside in Cork, we submit that with the exception of categories (2) and (3) below, the families have nowhere they can go to live. These families are, by definition, in an extremely vulnerable situation. They are generally without a political voice, they are frequently ignorant of their rights, and suffer from the indignity of living without sanitation and other basic living requirements.

Experiences of roadside families
On top of that, in the period 2000 to 2004 (the duration of the last Traveller accommodation programme) the Traveller Visibility Group has recorded the following experiences of roadside families.
 Harassment by a minority of members of An Garda Síochána who issued tickets for parking offences, apparently as a means to get the families to move on. Thankfully, other members of the Garda force recognised this as nothing more than bullying, and curtailed this activity.
 Dumping loads of soil and rubble around Traveller families in an attempt to intimidate them into vacating a roadside site. In one case, where the Traveller Visibility Group photographed the people who were doing this, and gave this evidence to the Gardaí, with details of registration plates, the Gardaí’s effort to prosecute the men (under the Littering Acts) was frustrated by Cork City Council who refused to co-operate with Gardaí by allowing themselves to be named as the injured party. This led to speculation among Travellers that Cork City Council itself had permitted the dumping to take place. Whatever the truth of the matter, this matter remains unresolved and the Gardaí are still unable to bring prosecutions against those involved.
 Local authority election candidates citing the removal or planned removal of roadside families as a campaign promise.
 Accidental damage to a caravan and its contents when a passing car went out of control. Luckily, on that occasion, which happened in Blackpool, there was nobody injured although there was substantial damage to property.
 One family who were evicted seven times in 18 months. In spite of this, they managed to maintain close to a 100% school attendance record for their children.

Responsibility of Cork City Council
No just society would tolerate this treatment of its citizens. It is shameful that emergency accommodation provision is not already in place to prevent further occurrences of incidents such as these. There is no agency other than Cork City Council who could be identified as being the appropriate provider of this emergency accommodation. Indeed, it is relatively unchallenging to do so. All that is required is fairly flat land, even in small plots of a few dozen square metres, and the basic living requirements such as sanitation, a water supply, washing facilities, waste water disposal, and refuse collection.

Remarkably, not only has the local authority not provided any emergency accommodation, it has actually requested that the Gardaí carry out numerous evictions of these families. 138 such evictions took place in the 12 months July 2002 to June 2003 alone, the first year of the operation of the anti-trespass legislation.

Information about evictions
The evictions over the last five years included, infamously:
 The eviction of a gravely ill woman in need of a kidney transplant twice in 24 hours (from Blackrock and Monahan Road)
 The eviction of 94 people in two hours from a roadside in Churchfield, in pouring rain, including an elderly couple who had been there for just two hours;
 -An early morning eviction (7.00am) of 6 families from Mahon halting site, including a number of infants and very young children. This resulted in the confiscation of a caravan which left a family in such pitiful conditions that the Irish Times reported that the teenage children had to go to school each morning having slept in a car boot the night before.
 -Large fines and a suspended sentence passed on two Travellers for living on the roadside. One of the Travellers (a man in his fifties) who had never before been in trouble with Gardaí, now has a criminal record because of this.
On occasions when the Traveller Visibility Group complained to Cork City Council about the callousness of the evictions, the response that it was out of the local authority’s hands was far from satisfactory.


Understanding differences between categories of roadside family
In the media, and sometimes even in discussions within the Local Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee, it appears that all Traveller families living on the roadside form one homogenous group. That is not the case. A simple examination of the different categories of roadside family suggests appropriate policy responses.

Category (1)
Homeless Travellers
The following sub-categories are all recognisable to the reasonable observer:
 Families who are waiting for an offer of permanent accommodation from Cork City Council. If they stay in Cork while waiting for an offer, they are at constant risk of eviction which is a cause of long term stress, as the waiting period runs to years in many instances. If they leave Cork, they risk losing their place on the waiting list for accommodation.
 Families who live on the roadside, but who are unaware that they have to sign an application form to go on the waiting list for accommodation. In one case. the Traveller Visibility Group discovered a family who waited for 22 years for an offer of accommodation, in the belief that they were on the waiting list, as they were in regular contact throughout that time with the Cork City Council housing section. In that time, they had been regular visitors to Cork for several months of the year, and had been living in Cork permanently for at least the previous four years.
 Families who were official tenants of Cork City Council or of another local authority in Ireland or the UK, and who left that accommodation apparently of their own free will. This is a contentious area, because local authority housing officials can only make decisions based on what they know. We have first hand knowledge of several cases where the family has not given full details to local authority staff, due to the shame of something that happened within their families. The examples which we have are related to marriage break up, internal family conflicts, certain illnesses, and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. The desire to protect the reputation of their families leaves local authority officials with inadequate knowledge of why certain families choose to leave permanent accommodation. Then there are reasons not connected with internal family matters. We know of families who accepted offers of standard accommodation against their better judgement, in areas where levels of crime, drugs use and intimidation were excessive. In some of these cases, local authority staff made promises that the families would be re-housed within a specified time. When families leave accommodation in circumstances like these, it is usually to protect the welfare of their younger children. If families arrive in Cork having left another local authority area in circumstances such as this, there appears to be an attitude that they are not “our families”, to quote one Cork City Council official. This thinking suggests that Cork City Council is not obliged to provide accommodation for the family in question. On the contrary, there is always a certain amount of movement between cities and counties of Traveller families who have been displaced by events not of their own making. If one local authority can justify ignoring their needs, they all can, adding to the misery of the families.

Category (2)
Travellers who visit Cork to trade
This category of Traveller family has maintained a highly nomadic lifestyle despite the fact that a growing number of them own permanent homes in Ireland and the UK.
Some of these families have been described in the media as having substantial wealth, and this has contributed to an assumption by a majority of the public that they are all comparatively wealthy.
This in turn, we believe, influences local authority officials and councillors to conclude that the families in this category are a lower priority than other categories of roadside family, and therefore provides a legitimate reason for doing nothing for these families.
In the period of the last Traveller accommodation programme, these families accounted for approximately 50% of all roadside evictions.


Category (3)
Travellers who visit Cork on holidays
We submit that the only roadside families, for whom the local authority need make no direct provision of facilities, is those who visit Cork on holiday. However, even in this case, the local authority may have a role in liaison with tourism interests to address the absence of facilities for motor homes and caravan holiday makers. UK and continental tourists who choose this type of holiday are excluded from Cork by this absence of facilities.

Specific actions by Cork City Council
1. Based on the foregoing, the Traveller Visibility Group submits that the Traveller accommodation programme 2005 to 2008 needs to include clear policies regarding the treatment of roadside Travellers. Even if there is disagreement about what accommodation provision is to be put in place, if any, for specific roadside families, we submit that there is a strong moral imperative on Cork City Council not to evict them. If Cork City Council does not take the necessary action required to accommodate them, at least let their inaction be balanced in the interest of fairness, by desisting from making any further requests to Gardaí to evict families.
2. When homeless Traveller families live by the roadside, it is obviously not the most ideal situation, and one which the families would prefer not to be in. If the only response by the Cork City Council is to evict those families, as it has been, it represents a shockingly uncaring attitude by the local authority officials whose decision it is to do that. We submit that the local authority identify a number of micro-sites ready for occupation at short notice, from within its own stock of property, and if necessary, rent additional property from other sources, including the private business sector, other state-funded bodies, voluntary bodies, and church authorities.
3. If Cork City Council persists in its practice of evicting roadside families, we submit that the local authority should first notify the Homeless Unit of the Southern Health Board in advance, to allow them the opportunity to make the necessary arrangements for their emergency accommodation. This is normally the practice for people being evicted from houses and flats. Why should Travellers be treated any differently?
4. When Traveller families come to trade in Cork, their status is not much different to that of travelling circuses. We submit that they be afforded opportunities to live without the fear of eviction by renting commercial space to them at the going rate.


David McCarthy
Outreach Worker
Traveller Visibility Group
25 August 2004