Where Travellers and settled people live side by side the relationship is uneasy at best. Negotiating between the two is difficult in the extreme. Kathy Sheridan reports in part two of our series marking the Citizen Traveller campaign
"By and large, the settled and the Traveller communities hold one another in mutual fear and loathing" - Mick Fagan, South Dublin Co Council.
"You came, you consulted, now f**k off" - local resident to an official, minutes into a meeting to discuss a halting site for an area.
"I worked in Angola for two years and I get more upset by the way Travellers are treated here than anything I saw there..." - Anne Costello, Clondalkin Travellers Development Group.
The residents for whom the term "traveller culture" is the (metaphorical) signal to reach for a gun, will not speak on the record. "You're joking, aren't you?" says one.
Mick Fagan's job in the Traveller Accommodation Unit of South Dublin County Council, is to try to steer a middle course.
"The problem we have is NIMBYism among local residents, fed by the irresponsible activities of a minority of Travellers with their 10 dogs and two ponies."
Caught between the two, his job is a nightmare.
"There are people out there who think all Travellers are like the Little Match Girl, and that includes The Irish Times. There is a huge chasm of mistrust in both directions and until that is acknowledged and the reasons behind it addressed, it will be very difficult to implement solutions to the Traveller accommodation problem, i.e. until you can mention the war. But politically correct language has made that all but impossible."
The politically correct language Fagan refers to is around ethnicity. He views his task as a poverty issue; the vital drive for decent living conditions is merely complicated, in his view, by considerations of "cultural appropriateness".
Take what is known as "compatibility". The need to keep long-feuding factions apart is a major consideration when allocating accommodation. Support groups, says Fagan, see this as providing for Travellers in a "culturally appropriate" way; he sees it as a cover for the "real" problem: violence.
"And we, the local authorities, are required to cater for that. But by doing that, are we not pandering to violence, rather than a culture? As a result of one row, we now have five families who are scattered all over the area."
Several families on the Dodder last summer had left permanent accommodation in the midlands as a result of violence on the site.
Meanwhile, traveller women who are learning how to stand up to domestic violence are getting the courage to move, to the side of the road in some cases, in search of peace and safety.
"As a local authority, how are we supposed to cater for that kind of open-ended movement?" asks Mick Fagan.
There are no simple answers. Alan McWeeney, who presented the powerful and moving RTÉ documentary, Traveller, on Sunday, based on a two-year photographic project he undertook among Travellers 35 years ago, noted sadly that the major change was that there seemed to be no Traveller family now that was unaffected by violence.
Many south Dubliners are familiar with the "home" of Traveller Mary O'Rourke. Hers is the caravan still by the Dodder, preventing the completion of the stub wall being erected by SDCC to hinder further summer incursions. The simple version is that Mary, her three boys, her daughter and three-year-old grandchild with a heart problem, moved back from England about 18 months ago and are in dire need of an alternative to their current rat-infested site.
The complex version, which they are happy to talk about, is that they have refused two offers from SDCC; her daughter is in terror - with good reason - of individuals who dominate the first small site on offer, and Mary's husband is in serious conflict with some occupants on the second.
Her daughter in particular, is desperately in need of a place of safety.
Mary O'Rourke moved to the Dodder because her family's lives were threatened - not by locals, she stresses, who were "always very nice" - at their last stop in Mount Merrion. She is making no demands for "culturally appropriate" anything. A house would be nice: "it's what the children were used to in England".
Meanwhile, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, the authority responsible for the family, is able to wash its hands of her because she happens to be inside the SDCC region for now.
So, the lack of joined-up official thinking aside, is violence the overarching issue here? Community workers like Damien Peelo in Tallaght, freely acknowledge that violence is a "huge" problem in the Travelling community, which desperately needs to be challenged. But he sees it as a chicken and egg situation.
"Brutality is there, absolutely. But if you are vilified, seen as pariahs, on the edge of society, is it a surprise - and believe me, I'm not excusing it - if the response is alcohol-related violence? . . .
"We're trying to create spaces in which women can build their confidence and challenge this. But if some of them doing this make the decision to move out, maybe to the side of the road, who do they turn to when their backs are to the wall and they're meeting discrimination at the other end? Who else but back to their own . . ."
Time and again Travellers and their representatives say that accommodation is the key, the kind of accommodation where they will not feel stifled and where there is some concession to their traditions. If people are shoe-horned into accommodation that feels alien and subsequently abandoned, then the exercise is futile.
This, says Peelo, is not about being PC but about being honest and realistic. The breadth of difference emerges over an attractive little group of Traveller bungalows in the des res location of Kimmage Manor Way.
To Mick Fagan, this development is "state of the art, what we should be aspiring to for all Travellers " - and so it is for some Travellers, agrees Peelo. But to many, it is a sterile denial of their needs and traditions, with no space for a visiting caravan, no area for economic activity. The result, according to Damien Peelo, is there has been "quite a turnover of people" there.
The solution, say the Travellers groups, is to listen to Travellers - which to settled people sounds suspiciously like handing them an open cheque, with big house and room for a pony and three-month holidays on local authority-provided transient sites down the country. But there are women living on intolerable authorised sites around Dublin city, for whom the very attempt to present an orderly face to the world is a triumph, who would sacrifice a limb just for a decent house in a family group scheme.
It bears repeating that Travellers are not a homogeneous group and the fact is, as David Joyce of the Irish Traveller Movement concedes, there have been successes. " I can think of five group housing schemes of four to 12 houses each and two halting sites which are all working well."
But many suspect that the private ambition of many local authorities is to see off the Traveller tradition. Says one official of caravan-living : "Look, we don't live in Florida and as long as families subject themselves and their children to the damp and condensation of living in caravans in an Irish climate, their health will never improve."
"The problems are more linked to where caravans are placed and the level of health and sanitation provision," says David Joyce. "You could say the same about poor housing 40 years ago but basic standards of housing have been resourced and improved. Why not the same for caravans?"
Yet, all the statistics show that only a tiny percentage of Travellers travel nowadays. There are 2,300 Traveller families living in standard local authority accommodation throughout the State. Is there a point to all this? The stock answer is that many more would travel if they could, if the old haunts had not been closed off, if the settled community didn't harry them wherever they parked.
"The reality, like it or not, is that Travellers travelled," says David Joyce. "They existed. There is a history of moving. But moving has been seen as a poverty-stricken throw-back to the Famine, and came with that stigma. So the attempt always has been to control it. If a Traveller breaks the law, he should be prosecuted. I do have a different attitude to those who out of necessity park in unauthorised areas." But attitudes are hardening.
Ironically, finance is not a problem. David Joyce and Mick Fagan talk like men of good will. The question is whether they share the same language.
More tomorrow