New draft plan for Traveller housing in city

The public has been invited to air their views on the city’s plans to accommodate Travellers over the next five years.

Galway City Council’s, Draft Traveller Accommodation Plan, covering the period 2014-2018, was prepared over the past few months and went on public display last week.

The plan includes the most recent assessment of accommodation needs of Travellers, a statement of the policy of Galway City Council for securing the implementation of the Traveller accommodation programme and an outline of the strategy of Galway City Council for securing the implementation of the Traveller accommodation programme.

The  Council is planning to build three new Traveller halting sites to meet the projected increases in the Traveller population in the city between now and 2018.

The number of Traveller families living in Galway City has more than doubled in the past ten years, and new estimates by the local authority project that there will be around 100 more Traveller family formations in the city by 2018, who will need to be housed.

The draft plan showed that there are 277 Traveller families assessed as being in need of housing in the city. That includes Travellers who are on the transient halting site in Carrowbrowne, and families who have been approved of a transfer to a standard house.

“This highlights the differing levels of need – those without any local authority provision and reliant on private rented accommodation, those whose need is being temporarily met such as those in Carrowbrowne transient site, and those whose need had been met by Galway City Council but has changed over time either due to change in family size or accommodation preference,” the report said.

The Council wrote to all 277 Traveller families to assess their housing need – 137 have a preference for standard housing, four of them would prefer group housing and 45 would prefer permanent residential caravan parks.

The plan noted that the number of Travellers living within the city boundary increased from 278 families in 2004 to 571 in 2012.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.