"But I think akenaton's point is that their itinerant lifestyle is not conducive to this, "
As things stanbd at the present time this is true - their lifestyle has been destroyed by the fact that they have been deliberately forced off the road and onto permanent sites,
The Major Government ended the legal obligation to provide permanent sites (which were never adequate anyway) and the situation is that the majority of Travellers simply have nowhere to stop - nowhere.
Some ghettoiesed Traveller housing has been built here - a pinprick compared to the overall problem, a few crude halting sites exist - usually miles from the towns, with a standpipe, portable toilets and a single light - but by and large there are only unofficial sites with no facilities whatever.
Settled people refuse to have them living in houses near to them.
The winter we moved here, a caravan fire left a family homeless.
The council, in a rare display of charity, agreed to house the family until after Christmas and found them an empty house on a small estate.
THe residents formed a mob for a few nights, stood in the roadway chanting "Travelers out, residents in".
The family persevered for a time but finally, when the mother and her kids were stopped on the main street and told, "If you hang around you'll be needing the services of the fire department again",
thay left and spent Christmas in a borrowed tourer holiday caravan in a car park next to the Atlantic   
A local meeting was organised by the Bishop of Kilaloe, to try and reconcile the situation - he was more or less told to mind his own business.
Travellers are not trying to maintain their itinerant lifestyle - they are fighting to stay alive.
No idea what your solution is Tyler, but I sense the same old hostility and total misunderstanding we encountered for over the thirty years in our work with Travellers from Ake.
I opened this thread to explain what has happened recently here - it is one of many examples and it stands to accelerate.
I really would appreciate some human feedback rather than having Travellers being presented as "problems" rather than human beings.
The last time I heard Travellers described as "a sector of society without a purpose" was by Councillor and JP, Harry Watton who recommended that those who would not change "the impossibles" be exterminated - that was in 1963.
Things have got unbelievably worse since then.
Jim Carroll