`A city dump is no place for humans to live'

Here's a postcard picture: mid-winter on a caravan site with a magnificent view of a seaside bay. It's basic enough, but it's already on the map as home of an internationally-renowned boxer. Next thing, small children are screaming as a security firm arrives to try to move some of the caravans away.

There are scuffles, missiles are thrown. Thirty police arrive with an eviction order. Some are dressed in riot gear.

Rio de Janeiro, or Sao Paulo perhaps? No, just the suburbs of Galway city.

Eddie McDonagh is unapologetic about his reaction to the events of November 27th in Hillside halting site. On November 26th, three traveller families received notice from Galway Corporation to leave within 24 hours. The only alternative was a transient site at Carrowbrowne to the north of the city, where there are rats, no proper running water or toilet facilities, and a magnificent view of. . . the city dump.

During the melee, when one caravan was towed onto the road by the security firm with children still inside, Eddie was arrested. He was sentenced to spend a month in Mountjoy, which was reduced to a week on appeal. Due to a shortage of space in the prison, he was released after 1 1/2 days.

Conditions in the Joy are well known. "But I'd go back there rather than spend one day in Carrowbrowne," Eddie says. "A city dump is no place for humans to live."

Eddie was speaking last week on international human rights day, when journalists were invited by the Galway Travellers' Support Group (GTSG) to visit several of the city's halting sites.

While acknowledging that Galway Corporation has been working over the past few years to try to improve traveller accommodation, the GTSG has condemned its eviction policy. It has criticised the behaviour of corporation staff and paid security personnel at Hillside last month. Galway Corporation has called on the support group to withdraw such the criticism, but it has refused.

The tension and fear was reflected last week on the faces of some of the women involved. Ellen had taken her sick child to hospital with chest problems on the morning in question.

She arrived back at Hillside to find her caravan trailer had been moved and her husband had been arrested. An official notice was delivered, she says, but she cannot read.

The idea of moving to Carrowbrowne, just over four miles north of the city on the Headford road, fills her with dread. It is easy to understand why on a brief visit. The low-lying land is surrounded by drainage ditches, and bounded by the main Galway-Castlebar road and the dump.

Apart from the squalor, there is nowhere nearby for children to play. A report conducted just over a year ago for the GTSG by Environmental Management Services condemned it as inadequate on health and safety grounds.

Since Kathleen Corcoran arrived in Carrowbrowne five months ago from London with seven children, she has tried to keep her bay habitable. But most mornings, she wakes to find rubbish outside. Where does it come from? No one will say. But some people have been caught dumping refuse at the halting site at night to avoid paying the fee at the dump.

Most travellers would pay a minimal sum if they felt that sites could be maintained, according to Patsy Sweeney, a traveller from Ballifoile and member of the GTSG, who has just started studying in Maynooth. Another member, Bridget Barrett, 17-year-old sister of the Irish Olympic boxer, Francie Barrett, believes that no one should have to grow up in a place like Carrowbrowne.

Bridget was born at Hillside and left school at 15. "People have to recognise that we have our own culture," she says, as she talks enthusiastically about the media course she is doing with the GTSG and her plans to take the Junior Cert next year.

The GTSG, which hosted a protest march with a giant model rat in Galway city on Saturday, is seeking a cessation of Galway Corporation's eviction policy until all legal avenues have been explored; an immediate full health and safety assessment of the Carrowbrowne site made; establishment of a traveller accommodation committee, as recommended in the 1995 task force report on the Travelling Community; and a commitment from the corporation to work in partnership with travellers in the city.

Galway's City Manager, Mr Joe Gavin, says the support group has, by its methods, undermined the work of his staff and the relationship that the local authority and Western Health Board had been developing with the traveller population of some 2,500.

To date, he says, the corporation has provided conventional housing for 114 traveller families, group housing for 24 families, four halting sites in the city on which 24 families are accommodated, and one transient site at Carrowbrowne for 20 families. A temporary site at Hillside has accommodated 17 families, at a cost of £260,000.

The new halting site by the bishop's gates in Salthill is regarded as second to none, with even a basketball court, and there are no travellers living on the roadside in the city area. This record hasn't been equalled by any other local authority in the State, he says.

MR Gavin's views are echoed by Ms Ellen Mongan, Tuam town commissioner and member of the Tuam Travellers' Education and Development Association. She questions the silence of the GTSG in not condemning the violence at Hillside, and believes that confrontation is not the answer.

The fact that many of the national task force's recommendations, such as formation of accommodation committees, have not been put in place does not help the situation, Ms Mongan acknowledges.

The GTSG's emphasis is on partnership, according to Nollaig O Fionghaile and Rachel Doyle, who organised the briefing trip to the sites. With them were up to 20 travellers who are members of the group. It is not just a local issue, but has national implications in their view, and one that still has not been faced in the dying weeks of the European Year Against Racism.