This article is from page 7 of the 2012-10-23 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 7 JPG
MORE Travellers live in Ennis than any other town in Munster, while the county capital ranks as third nationally among towns when it comes to being home to members of the Travelling community.
These are just two statistics in the seventh bulletin report from the 2011 National Census of Population entitled ‘Religion, Ethnicity and Irish Travellers – Ethnic and Cultural Background in Ireland’ that presents a profile of the various religions in Ireland along with more detailed results on ethnicity and Irish Travellers.
The report, which was published on Thursday last, shows that there are now 533 Travellers living in Ennis – the highest number of any town in the province and third in Ireland behind Tuam which is home to 669 Travellers and Navan which has a Traveller population of 625.
Irish Traveller households have a significantly lower home ownership rate than the general population with one in five (20.2 per cent) households owning their home compared with 69.7 per cent for the gen- eral population.
The average number of rooms in Irish Traveller households was 4.3, compared with an average of 5.5 rooms for all private households in 2011.
Almost one in three Traveller households (30.3 per cent) with a total of 886 persons who were living in mobile or temporary accommodation had no sewerage facilities in 2011.
As a whole, the county has a Traveller population of 855. A breakdown of these census returns show that there are 203 private households among the county’s Traveller population, while there are 789 permanent housing units and 23 temporary housing units in the county.
The census returns show that there are many ethnic groups living in the county, which is evidence of the way a multicultural society has developed in Clare over the past number of decades.
There are 1, 332 people in the county that the Central Statistics Office have classified as being of an African/Black background, 1, 267 of a Chinese/Asian background, 1,025 of a mixed background and 9, 574 of a non-Irish white background.