Ennis has highest Traveller figures

CLARE has a higher population of Irish Travellers than the national average, with Ennis being the town with the largest population of Travellers in Munster.

This is according to the latest figures released by the Central Statistics Office from the 2011 census. According to the census figures, the total number of Irish Travellers enumerated in County Clare in April 2011 was 855, accounting for 0.7% of the population. This is compared to 0.6% for the State as a whole. Of these, 417 were male and 438 were female.
Ennis, under the category of legal town and its environs, had an Irish Traveller population of 533. Under electoral area divisions, there were 325 Travellers in the Ennis Rural Area, 45 in Ennis Urban 1, 62 in Ennis Urban 2, 1 in Ennis Urban 3 and 2 in Ennis Urban 4.
Shannon had an Irish Traveller population of 93 according to the census, 42 of those male and 51 female. Sixmilebridge’s was 15, 7 male and 8 female.  More than half of all Travellers (58.4%) in the county were aged under 20, compared to 52.2% for the State as a whole.
There are a total of 203 Traveller households in the county, made up of 146 households of solely Irish Travellers and 57 households with both Irish Travellers and others.
Of the total of households, there are a total of 192 in permanent private accommodation; five in temporary private housing and six that have not stated. The population of Irish Travellers in Munster was 6,665 at the time of the census, 0.5% of the population. Of that, 3,266 were male and 3,399 were female.
The total number of Irish Travellers enumerated in April 2011 was 29,573, with Galway County having the highest number of Travellers of all administrative counties, with 2,476 persons.
Nationally, among 15-29-year-olds, 33% of Travellers were married compared with just 8.2% of the general population while 27% of Irish Traveller women had had five or more children compared with just 2.6% of women overall. Just over an eighth (13%) of Irish Traveller women had had seven or more children, compared with 0.4% of women generally.
In 2011, 26.4% of Irish Traveller households had six or more persons compared with only 4.4% of all households in the State.
The family composition of Irish Traveller households was different to those of the general population.
There were proportionally more lone-parent households (20.5% compared with 11.9%), fewer cohabiting couples without children (2.1% compared with 5%) and more households with more than one family (2.5% compared with 1.1%).
Overall unemployment in the Irish Traveller community was 84.3% in 2011, up from 74.9 per cent five years earlier. Irish Travellers had higher rates of disability than the general population.