This article is from page 10 of the 2013-05-14 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 10 JPG
CLARE County Council will formally ask Clare’s six Oireachtas members to jointly propose a motion that would strengthen the local authority’s powers to move on illegal encampments.
The motion, which was put forward by Cllr Richard Nagle (FF) was aimed specifically at rural seaside towns during the summer months. According to Cllr Nagle, members of the Travelling community are consistently taking up residence in public areas in seaside towns – even though they have already been provided with accommodation elsewhere.
“We are now is a situation where we are not talking about just transient visitors, we are talking about people who have accommodation and choose to park in public areas,” said Cllr Nagle (FF).
“We were told that when we provided accommodation in these [local authority Traveller accommodation] sites that this chaos would come to an end. The people were given guarantees, promises were made and they have not been kept.
“It is difficult to wind down about this issue; we are being told that we are essentially helpless. There don’t seem to be any regulations that will help us deal with this properly. I don’t know how we can be so proactive with some people, who will face the full rigour of the law for their indiscretions, but it doesn’t seem to apply to everyone.
“There seems to be no law at all in connection to this. It is a pity when the Traveller accommodation scheme was being discussed that people were not told that this would be the situation. I find this situation totally frustrating. I think we need to write to other councils about this, we need to put pressure on our Oireachtas members to put in a private members motion. This is putting an intolerable strain on local communities and it cannot be continue. This is very very frustrating.”
According to the council’s director of services, Bernadette Kinsella, Clare County Council have previ- ously made attempts to strengthen the legislation, but without success.
“In 2010 we made a submission [on this subject] to the department asking for a review of the provisions and strengthen the legislation. We do take action as soon as we hear about these illegal encampments but it does take time. We can only do that in regard to the existing provisions,” she said.
“After the submission this was also raised with Oireachtas members but we haven’t as yet been given any indication that this legislation will be strengthened.”