Mary (21) and her husband John and four children all live in one small room.Pregnant with her fifth baby, she and the family eat, play and bathe in the 100 sq ft room. They all sleep on one double mattress which is stored during the day in an adjacent shed.
The one room they have called home for the past eight months is a "tighín" - or a small out-house - on a caravan bay in the only halting site in the Drogheda area.Just two other families live on the site, partly because five of the bays have been blocked with boulders by the borough council.
According to Department of the Environment figures, Drogheda Borough Council has provided no Traveller accommodation since it was mandated to do so under the 1998 Traveller Accommodation Act. Nor have Louth County Council and Limerick County Council.
Drogheda Council disputes these figures, however, saying they have provided standard housing and the halting site.
Every local authority in the State was, in 1999, mandated to provide sufficient Traveller accommodation by the end of next year.
Though most councils have made some headway, Drogheda's approach exemplifies "a continuation of a settlement policy", says Mr David Joyce, accommodation officer with the Irish Traveller Movement.
"There has been reasonable provision of standard housing accommodation," he said.
However, while the 1995 Task Force on the Travelling Community recommended the provision of 1,200 halting site bays, just 120 have been provided.
"The provision of halting sites and group housing has been dismal," he says. "Obviously some families want standard housing but the local authorities seem to be making it so that if they are by the side of the road, they get fed up waiting for group housing or a halting site and the conditions are so bad that they'll take housing even if it isn't their first choice. They want to force Travellers into a 'settled' model."
The bouldered bays in Drogheda are indicative of this, he says, though the council say the bays are bouldered "because of vandalism". There are no immediate plans for repairs.
Mary is from Tallaght but her husband is from Drogheda so they decided to move back to the area last year. "First we were living on the side of the road at Baltray [about 6km outside Drogheda], but it was very mucky and dangerous with the children. There was no shower, and no water and no toilet. I was pregnant and we were getting hassle."
They moved to the site on the outskirts of the town, but the day after they moved in an official from the council arrived with the Garda and told them they would have to go, according to Mary.
"It was February and freezing cold. All I could do was stand there and cry I was so down with the babies and everything."
Her husband, she says, went to a solicitor in the town and "had to pay €500 to fight them and make them let us stay".
Ms Ellen O'Hanlon, housing officer with Drogheda Borough Council, said she "could not confirm or deny an individual case".
Mary and her husband have cleaned up the tighín themselves: "We had to scrub it and scrub it with bottles of bleach, and we got two pots of paints and fixed it."
There is a small shower-room, though no bath, so she bathes the children in a basin in the room. It is cosy, with a tiled floor, kitchenette and framed photographs of her children - two girls and two boys aged between three years and five months.
Her eldest children, Yvonne (3) and Anthony (2), clamber over their mother as she tells how she asked the council to put a gate across the bay. "They said we'd have to get it ourselves for €700. So I can't leave the children out to play because I'm terrified a car would come skidding in."
Her family has been offered a local authority house but they do not want it, she says. She would like the council to build a larger house in the large bay but it has refused. So the couple are buying a large caravan, to be paid off over a number of years.
"I want my children to grow up up in the Traveller life," says Mary. "I'll send them to school and I want them to get good jobs, of course. But I think it's a disgrace the council making people do what they don't want to do, making them move into houses."
Like all the Travellers The Irish Times spoke to in the Drogheda area over a three-day period, Mary did not want her full name used. None would be photographed.
This, according to Ms Bernie McCann, a Traveller advocate working with the Drogheda Partnership, is due to fear created by "serious communication problems between Travellers in Drogheda and the council".
Ms O'Hanlon strongly rejects this. "We spend a lot of time working with the Travellers, consulting with them about their needs."
A survey of of 48 Traveller families in the area by the Drogheda Partnership, to be published in January, found 65.6 per cent had not been consulted about their accommodation needs, while most wanted group housing or halting site accommodation.