KATHLEEN Connors is seven years old, loves school and is to make her First Communion next month. She's petite, clever and pretty and she lives in west Waterford in conditions more primitive than those in Soweto at the height of apartheid.
After classes at Clashmore primary school, she returns to a roadside home that has no electricity, no running water, no refuse or sanitary facilities. With her brothers and parents, she has been moved numerous times, and she has never heard of the "Rights of the Child" or Constitutional pledges on equal treatment.
Kathleen is, of course, a member of the travelling community, and you would be hard put in Co Waterford to find more than a handful of people who would be happy to have her and her family living next door.
Policy on traveller accommodation in the county is in disarray following the rejection by councillors last week of a draft strategy to address their needs. The policy document was compiled by county manager, Mr Donal Connolly, in the wake of the 1995 report of the national Task Force on the Travelling Community.
But any chance the document had of receiving a fair hearing and constructive debate was scuttled before it reached the full council hearing. Acrimony and anger have been stirred up for weeks after word got out that the council was examining a possible location for a halting site near Lemybrien, east of Dungarvan.
This tentative scheme for a transient halting site led to public meetings and the formation of an action group to prevent it. Residents and councillors raised multiple objections and voiced warnings about the consequences of proceeding with the plan.
Last week's council meeting marked by the biggest public attendance in recent memory - rejected the entire concept of transient sites and dismissed the manager's entire report out of hand.
Transient sites - the council report envisaged one at each end of the county - are designed to cater for travelling families who come from outside the county and temporarily set up camp in Waterford. The report proposed each would accommodate up to 10 families and have water, sewerage, electricity and refuse disposal.
Councillors warned of "open confrontation" if the plan was pursued. The common attitude to the problem of incoming travellers was move them on.
A columnist in the local Dungarvan Observer afterwards noted that the objections seemed all-embracing, leaving no room for compromise. "Uttered in the kind of language reserved for those who shout `Not an inch' or `Brits out', in another part of this island, it leads one to wonder if there was any objectivity employed in their thinking," the writer remarked. "Clearly, it is a case of NIMBY in action - Not In My Back Yard".
Ironically, in this much-vaunted "victory for local democracy", nobody had asked Waterford's indigenous travellers what they thought of these multiple-occupancy halting sites.
If the democratic procedure of involving them had been adopted, it would have become evident immediately that local travellers are even more fearful of these halting sites than the settled population.
One such site - the only one in the entire county - exists outside Dungarvan, where it is operated and managed by Dungarvan Urban Council. It provides "stands" for the mobile homes of 11 families, is supervised by a caretaker and is supplied with electricity and other facilities - but it nonetheless bears an uneasy resemblance to a "concentration camp" solution.
Families there live cheek-by-jowl with each other, there is no land for their animals to graze, and the facilities were wrecked a year ago by transient travellers who stopped there.
Dungarvan-born Thomas Connors, father of Kathleen, found it intolerable: "I gave a week there. I hadn't a dog leaving it; I hadn't a horse leaving it. The animals, inevitably straying from the concrete site to the roadside grass verges, were quickly impounded.
The ownership of horses and dogs is still centrally important to the travellers' traditional way of life, yet this is not taken into consideration in council policy as it could be - by, for example, providing smaller sites with a modest patch of land for each family.
"I'd say, if each family got their own place, they'd be better off," said Thomas Connors. "On that site you have strange, people coming in on top of you."
Thomas and his wife, Margaret, have seven of their 11 children living with them on an off-road site near Clashmore provided by a friendly local farmer. As a local man, whose forebears lived in the area, Thomas Connors is entitled to equal treatment with local settled families in regard to council housing, and indeed his family has been on the housing list for years.
The Connors were housed once - but the house was 14 miles from Dungarvan and the building was so damp that the children were constantly sick. After waiting fruitlessly for two years for effective repairs to be made, they went back on the road.
They have four children going to Clashmore primary school from their present campsite, where they have lived for three months. "I'd like them to stay in school," said Margaret.
Kathleen and Martin (11) will make their First Communion on May 10th. Christopher (12) was confirmed with local children yesterday by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Dr William Lee.
The family was eventually provided with a small mobile home by the council and also has a couple of the traditional wagons, gaily-painted "barrel-tops". Some initial menacing opposition to their presence has faded and they feel reasonably secure there, but they have not been able to obtain a temporary power connection or other services. And their housing application is still pending.
Council chairman, Mr Gary O'Halloran of Fine Gael, and Democratic Left councillor, Mr Tony Wright, have been the only voices on the council to strongly advocate the travellers' case for fair treatment and equal rights.
They have both condemned the council's "boulder policy" whereby traditional roadside campsites have been blocked with huge obstacles once families have been moved on. Some 50 such barriers have been erected in the county in recent years.
Mr O'Halloran describes the attitude to travellers as "racist". He sees this attitude as the primary problem: "We're living in a racist society, and you have to defeat that racism before you start resolving the practical problem."
The travelling community's ethnic right of nomadic behaviour is not accepted or respected, he says. He asserts that the proposal for large transient sites is simply another means of discriminating against travellers - in consequence of a High Court judgment two years ago, if travellers set up camp within five miles of an official halting site they can be forcibly compelled to move into it, or move on.
The scale of the "problem", either locally or nationally, is by no means insuperable, he points out. Waterford, according to a 1996 census, had only 20 families on the roadside in addition to the small number already rehoused and those on the sole halting site in Dungarvan.
Single-family sites are probably the best option, but each family's needs and aspirations are different - some do not want to be housed while more have been seeking housing for years; some want to maintain their nomadic freedom, while others with children of school-going age want to give them a chance of education.
Above all, Mr O'Halloran says, travellers are entitled to involvement and consultation. Putting up halting sites without asking the travellers what they want is a recipe for disaster.