Republican News · Thursday 13 February 1997
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Tralee Council abandons Travellers
By Donal Cusack
The plight of travelling families living in horrendous conditions was the subject of a meeting in St. John's Pastoral Centre, Tralee, on Saturday 25 January. The meeting, organised by the Kerry Travellers Development Project, was attended by Traveller representatives from all over Ireland, including Pavee Point in Dublin.
The Traveller families (including 24 children) are living on an unofficial halting site at Basin Lane, Tralee.
Previously council property, this site is now owned by a local builder and property developer who intends to proceed with a major new development in the area (including a large hotel) in the near future. Tralee Council no longer has any direct responsibility for this site, and claims that it has no suitable areas in which to re-locate the families and their caravans. The fact that many residents in various parts of Tralee, Kerry, and countrywide would object to the setting-up of a halting site in their areas is undoubtedly a contributory factor in attempts to resolve this and other similar problems.
Conditions on this unofficial halting site have to be seen to be believed. Situated near an old canal basin which was once an amenity for the people of Tralee, the site has been used as an illegal dumping ground over the years. And it also borders the remains of an old slaughterhouse. Heaps of rubbish are scattered indiscriminately over the area, it is infested by rats, and the Traveller families have absolutely no sanitation facilities, and one water tap.
Several children have become infected with the Hepatitis `A' virus, and one child who became seriously ill had to be taken away to live temporarily with relatives in Killarney.
The area has been condemned as unfit for human habitation by the Southern Health Board: most reasonable people would regard it as unacceptable to keep animals in such conditions, let alone human beings. The scale of the rat infestation is such that, as one Traveller put it, ``If you fell on the ground outside your caravan at night, and couldn't get back up, all they'd find in the morning would be your clothes''.
Tralee Council in paticular, and the authorities in general appear to have washed their hands of this problem: the level of political ``concern'' is such that, of all the parties and individuals represented on Tralee UDC, only Councillor Conor Fitzgerald of the Green Party and Martin Ferris (representing Sinn Féin Councillor Billy Leen) attended the meeting at St. John's Pastoral Centre.
Amidst the political euphoria over the country's booming economy and the recent giveaway budget, important human issues such as this don't seem to matter very much to those with the power to act on them: as with the heroin crisis devastating parts of Dublin we have empty promises instead of seeing positive action. It seems that the marginalised and the dispossessed in our society are as poorly served as ever in the ``Celtic Tiger'' Ireland of 1997.
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