The right to culturally appropriate accommodation for travellers in Ireland: towards a hybrid approach

Despite the existence of a robust international human rights legal framework, Traveller accommodation continues to be a complex and controversial area of human rights in Ireland. Among the many challenges are a lack of delivery of existing legislative obligations, the criminalisation of nomadism, political volatility and an enduring and institutionalised racism. Collectively, these difficulties have resulted in a form of assimilation in practice among Irish Travellers. In order to unpack this complexity and explore routes to improved delivery of accommodation, this thesis moves past doctrinal and policy accounts of Traveller accommodation rights to an empirically-informed analysis of what takes place in practice. This thesis is centrally concerned with the question of how the international human right to culturally appropriate housing is operationalised in Ireland in the case of Traveller accommodation and how that operationalisation might be improved upon. I argue that, to the extent that it is operationalised, this is done through hybrid structures that are often informal or, at least, not formally constituted. This implicates the sub-question: would a formal recognition of hybridity result in improved operationalisation of this right? I argue that it would