Children are afraid to go outside at night to go the toilet for fear of being bitten by a rat at the Carrowbrowne Halting Site.

That was one of the more chilling pictures painted at a meeting held on Monday with local and national stakeholders to discuss the crisis in Traveller housing in Galway City that was attended by 80 people.

Angela Delaney, a community health worker and mother of five who has been at the “temporary” halting site for 13 years since she got married, revealed that while the smell of the nearby dump is always bad, it has been particularly bad in the recent heatwave.

“With this heat, the living conditions are unbearable. The flies are on everything and the rats run everywhere, coming in from the waste facility. The children are afraid to go outside at night in case they get bitten by a rat.

“My children have grown up thinking that living in a halting site like Carrowbrowne is normal. They have got used to not having a green space to play soccer, or a playground that other children take for granted. Our children have been denied that privilege of a safe space to play.

“Our children can only dream of living in suitable accommodation, where they don’t have to get up at night, in the depts of winter, sometimes in sub-zero conditions to use the bathroom, in a welfare unit supplied by Galway City Council that can be as cold as a freezer.

“Their education suffers, as it can be very difficult to find a quiet place to study, when we all live on top of each other.”

Angela was one of half-a-dozen speakers who gave first-hand accounts of “a community left behind” at the event organised by the Galway Traveller Movement.

It was attended by Carol Baxter from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; Patrick O’Sullivan of the Traveller Accommodation Support Unit in the Department of Housing; Áine Jackson from the Office of the Children’s Ombudsman; Catherine Fahy and Helena Martyn from Galway City Council; and Nuala Heffernan from Galway County Council’s Housing Section.

The Galway Traveller Movement called for an immediate coordinated “whole of Government approach” to ending discrimination and dealing with the Traveller accommodation crisis.

For more, read this week’s Galway City  Tribune.

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