"The county dump is in Inagh, a few miles away."
It seems a little discriminatory to extend rubbish clearing facilities to one group in our community and not the other.
"the site on the Kilfenora road has been vacated and vandalised for ages"
As has the site on the Miltown road going into Ennis, but I have heard that it was local people did that one to make it unliveable for Travellers. This site is a typical council 'planned' ghetto built on a roundabout intersection of four roads, making it impossible for children to leave the site without endangering their lives
Rubbish and Travellers is a complex question.
Last year Irish TV presented a documentary on Borris Fair - I think the County Carlow one, which is one of the few remainin Traveller fairs in Ireland.
Locals have been campaigning for some time to have Travellers excluded "because of the mess".
The film team filmed the fair, before and after, and sure enough, a mess, despite the fact that Travellers had undertaken to clean up their act.
Two council officials claimed that most of the rubbish had been left by locals, some to get rid of unwanted stuff of their own, others, it was claimed, to give the impression that the Travellers were still making a mess, and so, should be excluded from their fair.
Similarly, back in the 70s we were in contact with a Traveller activist on the Garrett Lane site in Wandsworth, Roy Wells (a Gorgie married to a Traveller). The site was then the longest established in London, frequented by George Borrow.
Locals protested at rubbish and dumped cars in the area, so Wells set out to trace the owners of the cars and, with a little help from a sympathetic policeman, traced them all to settled people living within three miles of the site.
Wells and I later co-operated in preventing the fire-bombing of a temporary site in West London that I had learned about accidentally from a work collegue who was the brother-in-law of one of the would-be fire bombers. Had it gone ahead it would have undoubtedly led to serious injury at least - there were 2 dozen children on the site at the time.
The myth that Travellers would be welcome if they didn't leave a mess was exploded for me some years ago.
Less than a mile from here, a Traveller family used to spend the summer by the sea on a grass verge, stopping in a tourer caravan. They carefully stored all their rubbish in plastic bags and took it away with them when they left. Despite this, two years ago the local council moved in with a digger and churned up the site, making it both unusable and an eyesore.
One more go and I'm off to watch tele.
One night a couple of years ago I wandered into town for a pint, to find that every pub (around ten then) closed and shuttered.
As I turned away from my local the landlady opened the door and invited me in, telling me that the police had been around all the pubs 'warning' publicans that Travellers were in the area and that they should only let in people they knew, otherwise, the police would not attend any calls for assistance - not exactly a cross burning on the front lawn, but....
I'm not in any way excusing mess, but I am pointing out that it isn't always straightforward.
Must go - 'The Promise' calls.
Jim Carroll