81 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
81 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
TRAVELLERS NO TO SHANTY SITES AND BULLY-
|
|
BOY COUNCILS
|
|
|
|
Travellers and their supporters held a protest on
|
|
December 10th last year. The march was against the
|
|
Dublin local authorities' policy of herding Travellers
|
|
into primitive temporary sites and forced removal of
|
|
Travellers into these officially constructed shanty
|
|
towns. Temporary sites have no electricity, no showers
|
|
or baths, no fire precautions or public phones and are
|
|
all situated in isolated areas or beside motorways,
|
|
surrounded by high walls or mounds of earth. The
|
|
following report was issued by the Dublin
|
|
Accommodation Coalition with Travellers:
|
|
|
|
"Local Authorities are responsible for bringing many
|
|
Travellers to an early grave by forcing them into
|
|
"temporary sites" that lack the most basic facilities.
|
|
These officially planned and sanctioned shanty towns
|
|
contribute to the third world nature of Travellers'
|
|
health profile. Only two out of every hundred
|
|
Travellers live to see 65 years of age. The infant
|
|
mortality rate is three times the national average.
|
|
|
|
Local authorities are charged with the provision of
|
|
decent healthy accommodation and they have failed
|
|
miserably, and not only have they failed to provide it,
|
|
they are deliberately sanctioning these "temporary" site
|
|
death traps and then herding, bullying, intimidating
|
|
and evicting Travellers to force them into them. In the
|
|
most heavy handed way, they are reneging on the spirit
|
|
if not the letter of many court judgements using tactics
|
|
that the Ku Klux Klan would be proud of, arriving at
|
|
dawn to bulldoze Traveller men, women and children
|
|
out of camps."
|
|
|
|
Thus spoke Thomas McCann at the protest march
|
|
which was organised by the Dublin Accommodation
|
|
Coalition for Travellers in Dublin city centre to mark
|
|
the U.N. International Day for Human Rights. The
|
|
march culminated outside the Dail with Santa
|
|
delivering ten small white coffins, representing the
|
|
temporary sites in the Dublin area, to the seat of power
|
|
and responsibility.
|
|
|
|
"In 1986 the ESRI said that 'the living circumstances of
|
|
Irish travellers are intolerable. No humane and decent
|
|
society, once made aware of these circumstances, would
|
|
allow them to persist.' It's 1995 and not only do they
|
|
persist, they're getting worse," said Gearoid O Riain.
|
|
"What does this tell us about Irish society? John Bruton
|
|
and his government colleagues were all stressing
|
|
recently, in another debate, the need to respect
|
|
minorities in Ireland and the need to provide for
|
|
minorities. We couldn't have said it better ourselves,
|
|
John. Now let's start seeing some of this respect for
|
|
Travellers."
|
|
|
|
"Christmas is a time for peace and solidarity, a time for
|
|
children and families, a time for reunions and
|
|
celebrations. And it's time to focus on the living
|
|
circumstances of one of Ireland's most excluded groups
|
|
- Travellers. For many Travellers it's a miserable time,
|
|
a time when the sense of not being wanted is most
|
|
obvious. 1,200 Traveller families are living in
|
|
appalling conditions, lacking basic facilities such as
|
|
clean water and toilets.
|
|
|
|
It's time to stop evictions. It's time for residents'
|
|
associations to live and let live. It's time for the
|
|
government to set about achieving its own target of
|
|
providing enough sites by the year 2000. It's time to
|
|
speed up implementation of the recommendations in
|
|
the Task Force report. It's time to stop herding
|
|
Travellers into large "temporary" sites which are unfit
|
|
for human living. It's time for all decent citizens to
|
|
show solidarity and support for Travellers' rights," said
|
|
John O'Connell.
|
|
|
|
|