The lessons of the peace process needed to be learnt in finding a solution to the Traveller accommodation crisis, the Bishop of Killaloe has said.
Dr Willie Walsh, who last week offered himself as a mediator in resolving the issue in Co Clare, said he was expressing a willingness to help in any way he could. He had been talking to settled people and he expected to be talking to Traveller representatives this week. "But I think at the moment that I would be asking for patience on all sides," he said.
Dr Walsh came to national prominence in 1997 when he allowed Travellers stay on his grounds at Ennis. He was criticised by some members of the UDC, who claimed he might be breaking planning laws. In 1998 he allowed a family which had been evicted twice at sites in the town to spend Christmas on the grounds of the house.
He said there was a tendency for the parties involved to blame each other for the lack of serviced halting sites. The first step in coming to a satisfactory solution was to stop blaming. "There is no point in continuing to harp back at what happened or what didn't happen in the past.
"I think that perhaps what we have learnt from the issue of Northern Ireland and so on in recent years, is that going back and always harping on the past does not help to solve issues," he said.
Nationally, only 67 units of Traveller accommodation have been built since last March when local authorities adopted a five-year Traveller accommodation plan under the new Act.
In Ennis, there has been no serviced halting site since February 1997, when Drumcliffe closed by High Court order after residents complained of disturbances there.
Dr Walsh, who has been a chairman of an advisory committee on Traveller accommodation in Ennis in the wake of the Drumcliffe closure, said the immediate solution appeared to be the provision of temporary emergency sites.
In the programme adopted under the Traveller Accommodation Act, Ennis is due to have six permanent halting sites and one transient site. A further four halting sites are due to be built at Ennistymon.
Dr Walsh said a properly constructed halting site with small numbers, which provided the necessary facilities and gave privacy to both Travellers and privacy to those who lived close by, worked. He could understand settled people's impatience with the issue, that they could feel anger and resentment if an unserviced site was built beside them.
"Equally, I think I can understand the feelings of the Travelling community from talking to them. I think one of the big difficulties is that if I'm constantly being reminded that in some way I'm a nuisance, in some way that people would prefer me to be out of their sight, I think that undermines my respect for those people.
"It undermines, perhaps, my respect for myself and my own self-confidence and, very often then, I will hit back in different ways and I certainly won't tend to co-operate with people as I might if they treated me with respect."
He said Father Peter McVerry had recently made the same point about homeless people, that homelessness was not about not having a roof over one's head, or being hungry, "that the biggest burden of homelessness is the feeling that you don't count, that you are not important, that you are not valued by other people".
He was worried about the predominance of large boulders on every piece of free land on roadsides. "The result is that we have the situation today where Travellers are being moved on from one spot but have nowhere to go, because very many of the traditional halting places which Travellers used in the past have now been blocked."
There was now a feeling, he said, that a more constructive approach had to be taken and that the longer society failed to tackle the issue, the more entrenched positions would become.