Children at a Cork City Council run halting site say they're living in rat-infested, damp and cold caravans.
A new report from the Children's Ombudsman looked into the conditions at the overcrowded site.
It claims that 'careless and undesirable' work has resulted in 'serious risks' for the youngest members of the community.
A 12 year old girl told the researchers:
“walking up to school you see all the rats...”
“they would be running up and down the walls of the trailer”
Meanwhile another girl, aged 12 says:
“it’s like an abandoned place that people forgot about, it’s like we’re forgotten, we feel like garbage”
The kids describe sleeping in wet, damp conditions and say the electricity goes out, "and then it's black."
Also, a girl says it takes hours to heat up a bath, because everyone's using the same water system.
One child also told the Ombudsman that she is ashamed of being dirty in public, because the walk out of the site is littered with "difficult terrain" - as an advocates group put it.
Cork City Council is violating the human rights of Traveller children at the Spring Lane halting site by leaving them in filthy, overcrowded, rat-infested, damp and unsafe living conditions a report published today has found.
— Barry Whyte (@BarryWhyte85) May 24, 2021
Breda O'Donoghue is the Director for Advocacy with the Traveller Visibility Group.
She says these conditions are impacting on the children's health:
"A number of the children on that site do present quite often with respiratory problems."
"They're living in homes that are designed for summer use, maybe two or three weeks in the summer."
"But they're living in these mobile homes year round, with little or no heating in the caravans."
You can read the Ombudsman's report here.
Thanking the team at @itmtrav for continued solidarity here. In their statement ITM call for Minister for Local Government and Planning @peterburkefg to oversee the delivery of reccommendations from @OCO_ireland's report on extremely poor conditions in a Cork halting site. https://t.co/W6culLImCW
— Traveller Visibility Group Cork (@tvgcorkclg) May 24, 2021
