Four-year-old Tom Connors came out of hospital with nowhere to live last Wednesday, the day of the funerals of his baby sister, two brothers and parents, and the day after the burial of five more of his relatives who all died together in a fire on a Traveller site.
That he was alive at all was thanks to his 15-year-old uncle John, the only hero to emerge from the unheroic story of the events that followed the fire in a portable cabin at Carrickmines, an area stretching from the prosperous southern suburbs of Dublin into the foothills of the Wicklow mountains.
Tom Connors’s family were asleep when the fire broke out. Visiting them, and staying the night, were his uncle’s family, the Lynches – two young parents and their two daughters – and another Lynch uncle. The fire, the cause of which is still being investigated, quickly destroyed the cabin and damaged a neighbouring one. John Connors, who was staying in another mobile home, rescued young Tom and his five-month-old sister, Mary, but she died shortly afterwards. Fifteen other members of the extended family were in other homes on the site and witnessed the horror.
The immediate aftermath of the fire brought an outpouring of sympathy from political and civic leaders; contributions of food and clothing from local people and businesses; the laying of flowers and toys at the site; and money into a fund for the surviving members of the family who now had nowhere to go. But even while the sympathetic reaction was at its height, another horror story was emerging, an all too familiar tale of how Ireland treats its outcasts.
The survivors, who ranged in age from Tom Connors’s elderly grandparents – elderly, that is, in terms of Travellers’ lower life expectancy – to toddlers, were put up in a hotel for the night after the fire. The local authority, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown county council, then invoked emergency powers to find somewhere for them to live in the short term, somewhere they could grieve with their friends and relatives in the weeks ahead.
The council decided on an acre of its own land not far from the scene of the fire. The land was serviced with water and sewage and needed only a hard standing, a task of a couple of days work, to accommodate mobile homes. A digger was sent in to begin the job – and that’s where the work stopped.
Some local residents of Rockville Drive, the road of detached houses that leads to the site, set up a blockade and prevented access. Negotiations began between them and council officials.
The residents claimed the site was unsuitable, the road too narrow for access, bin lorries had problems with it. They didn’t believe the council’s promises that the site was an emergency, temporary measure. The people who had lived beside the burned-out site – which was also supposed to be temporary, though it had been there for seven years and more – had, they said, put up with a lot of noise and drinking and other antisocial behaviour.
The council promised the new site would indeed be temporary, for six months at the most. But the talks dragged on and on.
Meanwhile, the family was moved from one hotel to another, all unsuitable for the traumatised state in which some of them were. Tom Connors’s grandmother was treated for dangerously high blood pressure. All of them were receiving counselling, not just for bereavement, but also for what they had witnessed.
In the absence of anywhere for their friends and others to congregate, a local Travellers support group opened its centre to them. On the day after the fire, two young Traveller men went from there to a local pub, Ollie’s in Balally, for lunch. They were refused food and told to leave.
As the days passed, the veneer of sympathy slipped away. On some media websites, the visceral venom began to seep out in reader comments on reports. The most appalling (and rarest) were of the gleeful “10 fewer robbers” type, but there was no shortage of general abuse, in effect blaming the dead and bereaved for their fate, complaining that the council was wasting money and putting the survivors ahead of others on housing lists.
On the opposing side, some angry young protesters, none of them Travellers, moved on to Rockville Drive shouting “Nazis” and “bigots” at the residents, not all of whom supported the objections against the temporary site.
Barrister David Joyce, who grew up in a caravan, made a telling point in a heartfelt post on the Facebook page of the Irish Traveller Movement, contrasting the Irish reaction to that over the deaths of six students, mostly from south Dublin, in a balcony collapse in Berkeley, California, during a party last summer. When the New York Times suggested there might be a link between the tragedy and alleged excessive drinking, rowdy partying, and disruption of neighbourhoods by Irish students on summer work visas, Ireland was furious. The newspaper apologised and retracted the report.
“My two eldest children were also born in caravans and spent their formative years living on halt sites and campsites,” Joyce wrote. “One graduated and left Ireland like many of our young for economic reasons. He has found a greater welcome and acceptance teaching in a foreign culture and country halfway around the world than he might ever find in his home country.”
In Ireland, funerals usually take place within two or three days of a death. In this case, the agony of the survivors was dragged out for more than a week by the necessary formalities of autopsies and the difficulties of identifying charred bodies.
After a succession of hotel bedrooms, the family found refuge in an isolated reconciliation centre, originally set up to help narrow Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide, while the talks between the council and the Rockville Drive residents continued. The protesters sought a legal guarantee that the site would be removed within five months – and demanded that the survivors sign a written guarantee not to use their legal rights to thwart any effort to move them on.
In the mild hand-wringing over all this, various scapegoats were sought by those who don’t actually blame the Travellers for their plight. The default response, as usual, was to blame the system, the bureaucracy, the council, the government.
What has been evident, however, is how well the institutions of the state rose to this occasion. The Garda’s community liaison service was especially supportive and sensitive; government departments rowed in with whatever was requested from them; and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council did all in its power short of forcing the issue with court injunctions and a lengthy legal battle. Meanwhile, the survivors were required to leave the reconciliation centre because of a prior booking and were left homeless again.
It’s not unusual to find a few politicians who proudly and publicly parade their successes in keeping Travellers out of their constituencies. Others use it to their advantage more slyly. But the majority of politicians in all parties want to resolve these problems. What prevents them is not a lack of money: €282m earmarked for Traveller accommodation over the last decade has remained unspent.
What prevents them is the Irish people. The residents of Rockville Drive can now celebrate their success in keeping their immediate neighbourhood clear of Travellers. The council threw in the towel last Wednesday night. The survivors will now be housed in the car park of one of its own depots, beside large electricity pylons and without mains sewage. But the protesters are not unique: they fought and won a battle that has been fought and won, year in, year out, for as long as anyone can remember.
We Irish like to see ourselves as a touch more moral than other nationalities, an odd legacy of the popular policy of neutrality during the second world war married to an older belief that we are more spiritual and empathetic than the crass materialists to our west and east.
We tut-tut about American police shootings of poor African-Americans, Israel’s heavy-handed treatment of Palestinians, Hungary’s inhumane attitude towards Serbian refugees, and get misty-eyed about three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body lying on a Turkish holiday beach.
But Tom Connors is not an African-American, a Palestinian, or a Syrian refugee; he’s not someone else’s problem. And we don’t really give enough of a tut about him to face down the visceral hatreds in our midst and treat our own outcasts with decency.
