A FACIST ACTION IN LOUTH

On the day that Ireland defended its actions on the rights of children before UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. The barbaric Louth County Council took the opposite point of view and created unnecessary pain and suffering to Traveller Children.

Pavee Point calls on Environment Minister, Alan Kelly TD, to intervene as a matter of urgency to compel Louth County Council to provide alternative accommodation for 17 Traveller families evicted from a halting site in Dundalk today (15th January 2016)

The families were evicted from a Traveller local authority halting site that had been decommissioned by Louth County Council.

Pavee Point condemns these evictions as unnecessary and unwarranted. “This is one of coldest nights of the year and these people have no where to go,” said Martin Collins, Co Director of Pavee Point. “It is clear that Louth County Council has absolutely no concern for the health and safety of these families”

“Louth County Council has totally failed in its duty here. It has a policy of not providing Traveller Specific accommodation such as halting sites or group housing schemes,” said Martin Collins, “They are trying to force Travellers into social or private housing and this is in total breach of the 1998 Traveller Accommodation Act.”

“There is a demand for Traveller specific accommodation in Dundalk and these families are the living proof.

“These families have children at school in the town. Think how these children will be affected by this !

Pavee Point urges the Environment Minister to intervene to find a solution and make good undertakings that there would be no mass evictions of Traveller families as a result of fire safety audits on halting sites in the wake of the Carrickmines fire tragedy.

These evictions are confirming fears that Pavee Point had that local authorities would use the fire audits in a cynical way to evict Travellers.  It is important at this stage that Travellers engaging with the Environment Dept in its safety audit can have trust in this process.

Minister Kelly put a Community Initiative in place at his Department to deal with any issues around fire safety on Traveller halting sites and it is through this Initiative that any fire safety issues on sites should be dealt with.

January 15, 2016 at 7:45 pm

To my blog readers:
Just imagine how you would feel if your local authority were to rescind the planning permission on the house that you had lived in for years. Then arrived at your home, along with the police, on a very cold day in January to evict you.

Can you imagine how these people must feel?

Additional Information:-

Today, Eleanor Kelly, solicitor for six of the evicted families said the youngest family member is eight days old.
Four of the families stayed in B&B accommodation this weekend, while two others stayed with their families and friends.
“The youngest is eight days old, there are 17 families in total,”
“The difficulty is that they were given 48 hours to find alternative accommodation.”
She said she had been in contact with Louth County Council about the site at Woodland Park last August, but did not hear back from the council until last week when the families were being delivered 48 hours’ notice to be evicted.


A fire officer visited the site in October and deemed it to be a hazard.
“If there’s work to be done, there’s work to be done.” But she added: “I was in contact with the council last August”
“The ideal situation is to allow them to go to a halting site but there’s no other halting site in Dundalk.”
“These are Dundalk families, they want to be in Dundalk, but I’m aware the halting site in Drogheda is full anyway.”
The council met with Traveller representatives on Saturday to agree on temporary accommodation for the 17 families involved.


FOR LATEST INFORMATION PLEASE READ COMMENT NUMBER 22

Links:http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CRC/Pages/CRCIndex.aspx
http://www.paveepoint.ie
http://www.childrensrights.ie
http://www.louthcoco.ie/en/Louth_County_Council

Prevalent Attitudes

I do not call myself a Christian, a humanist is as close as I can get. 

Recently I have found my self feeling absolutely disgusted with the very shameful attitude of the settled community of the Rockville Drive residents in Carrickmines who opposed the emergency halting site; this towards their fellow citizens namely The Travellers.  

So I was glad to read the following on the RTE web site because it needed to be voiced. 

reference : http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/1021/736557-carrickmines-fire/
                  http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/1015/734924-carrickmines/

"A priest has criticised many settled people for failing to empathise with what he called their Traveller brothers and sisters following a fatal fire at a halting site.

Father Dermot Lane was speaking after the remains of five of the people who lost their lives in the fire in Carrickmines were brought to the Church of the Ascension of the Lord in Balally, Co Dublin this evening.

Fr Lane, who is the parish priest of Balally, not far from Carrickmines, urged everybody to become involved in a new consultation process embracing local authorities and the settled and Traveller communities.

He prayed that what he called the national tragedy which struck eleven days ago may become a turning point in the difficult tasks of healing, reconciliation and mutual trust that lie ahead.

Fr Lane greeted the Connors family and hundreds of other mourners at the church after five hearses bearing the coffins of Thomas and Sylvia Connors and their children Jim, Christy, and baby Mary arrived for their removal service.

Fr Lane said the grief of the Connors family is also the grief of Balally Parish because they were, and are, an important part of the local community.

Describing them as well-known and respected in the parish, he said they worshipped in its church where Thomas and Sylvia, conscientiously as parents, presented their five children for baptism over the past seven years. 

He recalled having the privilege of baptising Michael and Thomas Connors, the family's only survivors.

He said important lessons are to be learned from the national tragedy that claimed ten lives 11 days ago and which "has disturbed the consciences of us all".

Unaware of the resolution of the impasse over the local authority allocating the grieving families accommodation, which coincided with the church service, he urged that they be offered an appropriate place to live as soon as possible. 

He told the congregation: "We must learn, above all, to walk in the shoes of the other if we are to develop genuinely inclusive and pluralistic societies."

And he observed that many settled people had "failed to walk with empathy in the shoes of our brothers and sisters in the Traveller community".

Dismissing blame-games about the tragedy as unhelpful, Fr Lane urged everybody to move beyond mis-understanding, standard stereotypes and caricatures.

"If we are to move forward," he said, "all must be involved in a new consultation and a new conversation, and that means bringing together local authorities, local communities and the Traveller Communities."

Fr Lane prayed that the tragedy - which he repeated was national in character - may become a turning point in what he called "the difficult tasks of healing, reconciliation and mutual trust that lie ahead".

He said  the tragedy has raised serious questions about our priorities as a society, and searching questions about the responses or lack of responses by successive governments to a variety of reports going back 50 years, to the mid-1960s.

He said these questions touch on a number of very serious issues for all of us about the provision of adequate sites and housing for the Traveller community; about the persistent reality of social inequalities between the Traveller community and the settled community; and about deeply ingrained cultural prejudices.

In the meantime, he said, the Connors family must be allowed to grieve and to mourn the death of their loved ones.

The funeral Mass for the Connors will be celebrated in Balally at 11.30am tomorrow and they will be buried together on Friday in Wexford."

An article worth reading can be found here
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/apartheid-hasnt-gone-away-when-it-comes-to-travellers-34137234.html