After wave of opposition to Traveller housing, council drops plans for three sites in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown

More than 1,040 people wrote in to the public consultation on Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council’s next five-year plan for Traveller accommodation in the county.

Mostly, to oppose some of the 48 new homes, total, that had been proposed in the draft plan, scattered across different sites.

The level of submissions is not far off the 1,260 who weighed in on the city’s development plan, a major document which sets a binding blueprint, vision, and zonings, for the county.

After the consultation, council managers removed three of four proposed new sites, in Sandyford, in Rathfarnham, and in Booterstown.

“They just blamed biodiversity,” says Geraldine Dunne, director of Southside Traveller Action Group, of the council managers’ decision. “They didn’t even try to challenge the discrimination and racism.”

There were 11 homes removed across the three sites that were dropped.

At a full council meeting on Monday, the council agreed to defer a vote on the new Traveller Accommodation Programme, at the request of Independent Councillor Hugh Lewis.

“People who have the objective to provide Traveller accommodation are very disappointed by this,” said Lewis, who chairs the Local Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee.

He intends to table eight motions at the December meeting, calling on the council to reinstate all the sites it removed from the programme, he said – including another controversial site at Mount Anville that it removed in 2019.

Lewis is also calling on the council to include completion dates for all planned Traveller accommodation. “This is our opportunity to make it a future-proofed, serious, unprecedented plan.”

A spokesperson for Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council said it won’t comment until after the vote at the next full council meeting.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said the national budget for Traveller accommodation for next year, across all 30 local authorities, is €23 million.

Replacing sites, then removing them

In its first draft of the Traveller Accommodation Programme 2025–2029, Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council had removed three sites that had long been in previous plans.

The land was privately owned so it was unlikely the council could develop it, said the council, in its justification.

But, instead, the council was swapping in four new council-owned sites that would provide 21 new homes, according to that first draft programme, as well as extending a couple of existing sites.

“They came with that proposal, with all the great ambition in the world,” says Dunne, of Southside Traveller Action Group.

Council managers said they knew that there would be objections, she says, but they committed to follow through.

Then came the public consultation, and the flurry of submissions from 1,045 respondents, mostly against the proposed developments.

The council then removed three of the four new sites from the new programme.

Each site was for just a handful of homes: three at Bearna Park in Sandyford, three at Dodder Road Lower in Rathfarnham and five at Greygates in Booterstown.

But, meanwhile, there are 13 Traveller families in homeless accommodation, 14 in overcrowded situations, five families in temporary sites and four families in unofficial sites, says the draft programme.

Dunne says young Traveller families are desperate for accommodation. Some are living in small caravans with young children, she says, with no access to electricity or running water.

The opposition

Many of the submissions to the consultation targeted particular proposed sites.

Of the responses, 363 were from people regarding the five proposed homes at a site in Booterstown, a triangle of land between the Stillorgan Road and Greygates.

The submissions to the consultation included complaints of “no local consultation”, concerns for a “historic wall”,  and fear of “anti-social behaviour”, dumping, the loss of biodiversity, and the impact on property values.

Dun-Laoghaire Rathdown has the highest property values in the country.

In its summary report, the council said that there are trees growing on the site at the moment. So, given the issue of that biodiversity loss, it would remove it from the programme, the report said.

The council also rescinded its plans for three Traveller homes at Dodder Road Lower, citing biodiversity concerns. For that site, it had received 359 responses, raising many of the same issues as above.

Some respondents also said that the process was unconstitutional and that there was an unequal distribution of Traveller accommodation across the county.

Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council did not respond to queries about whether this means that they will not develop these sites for any purpose, to protect biodiversity, or if they consider that the purpose of Traveller accommodation is particularly incompatible with biodiversity.

The council also received 133 submissions about its plans for three homes at Bearna Park, which it then dropped citing issues with site access.

The plan to build 10 homes for Travellers at a site in Carrickmines, close to the M50, is the only proposed new development that survived the public consultation.

The council plans to extend two sites with nine homes total, and has also carried over plans from the last programme to build five new homes for Travellers at Rathmichael, five at Pottery Road, three at Cloragh and five at Lehaunstown.

None of the planned new developments in the outgoing programme, which ran from 2019 to 2024, have been built, says Dunne. “It’s very frustrating. It’s an ongoing vicious circle.”

Bringing back Mount Anville

Opposition to new Traveller homes has a storied history in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown.

In 2019, after much back and forth, Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council formally abandoned plans to build Traveller accommodation on a now infamous plot of land at Mount Anville.

In 2014, Fine Gael TD Josepha Madigan, then a local election candidate, distributed a leaflet saying that to use that site for Traveller accommodation would be “a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money”.

Lewis says that half of that site was sold to the Department of Education for a gaelscoil, but the other half of the site is earmarked for social and affordable housing.

He wants that put back on the accommodation programme, he says.

The level of opposition to new Traveller housing, and the response of the council, reignites a question around who should be responsible for delivering the homes.

In 2019, an expert review group recommended that responsibility for the delivery of Traveller accommodation should in the long-term be removed from councils.

While meanwhile, given the lack of delivery on successive plans, the expert group called for council chief executives to use their emergency powers to get Traveller accommodation built quickly.

It called for the national government to suspend councillors’ control over the council’s internal planning permission process and the sale of land for Traveller accommodation. And, it recommended the establishment of a new National Traveller Accommodation Authority.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing says that progress is being made on implementing the group’s recommendations, with almost half done to date.