Martin and Margaret Mongan are used to flouting the law. For the past few years, almost every time the Traveller couple and their 12 children pull off the road, they camp illegally.
Their latest unauthorised stop-over is a council-owned playing field in the Firhouse area of south Co Dublin.
Earlier this week, about 50 caravans were camped in the field, which is next to a permanent caravan park run by South Dublin County Council. It is also close to other fields which the Mongans had been forced to leave on two separate occasions last month. Since then, they have drifted around the greater Dublin and Co Kildare area, spending a few days in each new place before being moved on.
In the next chapter in this game of cat-and-mouse with local authorities, several families, including the Mongans, are due to take South Dublin County Council to court next Monday to block its effort to evict them from the playing field.
Travellers and their support groups point to the deplorable lack of progress countrywide in providing accommodation for the State's indigenous ethnic group, 1,093 of whom were living on the roadside last year with no facilities (more than one in four of all 4,898 Traveller families in State). They want local authorities to stop forcing families from unauthorised sites until they have somewhere else to go.
Damien Peelo, from the Tallaght Travellers Community Development Project, says the families in the Firhouse field have mixed needs; some have nowhere else to live, while others simply want short-term "pull-in pull-out" stops.
"We want the court to order the four regional local authorities in Dublin to take action, otherwise no one else will do it. It's unfair to ask families to keep moving until they get a foothold," he says.
Such tensions over illegal encampments surface every summer, when hundreds of Travellers, including traders who move for seasonal business, hitch up their caravans and take to the road.
Local authorities protest that large rubbish-strewn unauthorised encampments tie up their staff in costly legal disputes, distract them from their ongoing Traveller Accommodation Programmes, waste resources on clean-up operations and cause frictions with the settled community.
South Dublin County Council says it spent £60,000 last summer on clearing 200 tonnes of rubbish and commercial rubble from an unauthorised site at Lealand, Clonkdalkin, and building a low perimeter wall to prevent further encroachments.
Martin Mongan (37), who hasn't lived in a house for 21 years, acknowledges that the mess and tensions created by illegal encampments do little to further Travellers' genuine case for accommodation. But, he says, people gather in large numbers in fields because they have little choice, as the traditional roadside sites of his youth have been systematically blocked off over the years. "This Travelling game is finished, that's the bottom line," he says, leaning against the red transit van he uses for market trading, while his wife Margaret sits with other women in the larger of their two caravans.
"They are blocking up the old lay-bys in the area, and the old camps are gone. There's court orders, and when they come, they bring the guards with them." Martin gestures to the other caravans in the Firhouse playing field. "If there were camps around the country, they wouldn't be here. The majority of those would be in small camps elsewhere in the country," he says.
Martin's family is awaiting a house, but he says he would still want to travel during the summer to ensure his children - aged between 19 years and several months - experience Traveller lifestyle.
All 41 local authorities in the State last year for the first time published Traveller Accommodation Programmes aimed at providing some 3,700 units by 2004. These will include standard council houses, group houses and permanent, emergency and temporary or transient halting site facilities.
The Irish Traveller Movement recently criticised most of these programmes for failing to meet their statutory obligations.
"One is left with real concern about the political will to implement such programmes in a hostile environment of public and political resistance, opposition from settled communities, evictions, planning difficulties and racism," it said in a report released earlier this month. The movement is calling for sanctions and incentives for local authorities to enforce their programmes.
The Minister of State for the Environment, Bobby Molloy, says it is premature to talk of sanctions before the programmes are evaluated next year.
He stresses, however, that the development of transient sites is essential to the programmes' success and must be given equal priority.
"The Government approach is to require all local authorities to act at the same time in providing accommodation, and if that network was put in place it would overcome the other problems where the progressive local authorities were attracting extra families into their areas and others were doing nothing at all," he says.
South Dublin County Council has 295 Traveller families accommodated in its area, among the highest of all local authorities. It plans to provide 240 new units by the end of 2004 under its Traveller Accommodation Programme, with work starting on 58 units this year.
The head of the council's Traveller Unit, Mick Fagan, says its staff are earnest about delivering their programme, but that the summer "influx" of Travellers - which peaked last year at 210 families - makes it impossible to do so.
He says evictions are regrettable, but points out that a provision allowing local authorities to move Travellers camped illegally within a one-mile radius of an authorised halting site is intended as an incentive to settled communities to accept official sites in their areas.
He says: "The one-mile rule was deliberately included in the law as a carrot for the settled community. If you accept proper Traveller sites in your midst, you will not have to endure the negatives of unauthorised encampments. Unless we are seen to use the evictions, we won't be able to implement the Traveller Accommodation Programme because the settled community won't take it." South Dublin County Council is involved in a recent initiative to bring county Dublin's four local authorities together with those in counties Kildare, Meath and Wicklow to agree a complementary network of transient sites.
If each of these authorities had between 20 and 40 units of transient accommodation, people turned away from one site which was full could then be directed to another one, says Fagan.
"We have prioritised providing accommodation for those genuinely in need and indigenous to this county who are living in abject poverty, not people who decide to come here for the summertime to do business. I make no apology for that," he adds.
Talk of nomadism and cultural heritage is fine, says Fagan, but he is concerned with "putting bums on seats".
He says: "It's hard to think about your culture and ethnicity when you are living in a ditch with no water or toilets."
Peelo challenges the distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous Travellers. Travellers who leave accommodation behind to pursue their traditional summer trade are entitled to transient provision, for which they could pay a fee, he says.
"The bums-on-seats approach is flawed because we will get more physical sites, but we won't meet the cultural needs of Travellers. If your basic premise is that you only need accommodation to get Travellers out of the poverty trap, you are not meeting their wide-ranging cultural needs, including their tradition of trading. You are forcing all Travellers into a one-size-fits-all lifestyle, which will not work," he adds.
Peelo says it is wrong to blame "nomadic" Travellers for disrupting Traveller Accommodation Programmes and points out that Government policy states that the nomadic way of life must be catered for.
"Transient and permanent sites should be built hand-in-hand. We are not talking about massive spending, but about opening up some traditional areas. I have identified four or five in the Tallaght area," he says.
"You can't ask Travellers not to travel. There's a very strong view within local authorities from elected representatives down to officials that Travellers have to take responsibility and stop moving while the programmes are being implemented. That's unrealistic and it shows a lack of understanding of Traveller culture."
