Ms Cliodhna O'Neill:

Thank you. My apologies. I was slightly overcome but I have recovered now. The Senator raised a number of very important points and we will try to address them sequentially as much as we can. The Senator thanked the local organisations. It is fair for us to say that we believe we have built an excellent relationship with many of those organisations. At the stage we are at in consultations on the Traveller and Roma strategy, we are going to see their voices coming through very strongly in that strategy. They have really informed the thinking and the direction of policy in that respect. I was recently with the Irish delegation in Geneva when we were reporting on our obligations under the economic, social and cultural convention. In my discussions there with members of the Traveller movements and organisations, one of the things they said was that they were happy to see that we were moving more rapidly than previously in that direction. It is important for us to acknowledge that and to note that while the pace was not always perhaps as fast as it might have been, we are very confident in the direction we are taking now.

I will move to some of the specific points raised by the Senator. A number of people referred to homework clubs. We gave some information on homework clubs. We can do that again. One of the things we did not mention is that homework clubs are funded by the Department through the school completion programmes. Schools have a great deal of autonomy in these areas to decide what will work for them, and to pivot and move in that regard. Separate from those, there are other organisations providing homework clubs through the family resource centres and other places which are not funded by or under the remit of this Department. However, they are also an important part of the jigsaw. It might be worth capturing those because there are many of them and they do not fall within our data and information. That probably also answers Deputy Stanton's and Senator O’Reilly’s points.

Senator Flynn talks about the concerns of students experiencing racism, bullying and so on. That is anathema to us in schools. We do not want to see that ever happening in a school. No child should ever experience that, no matter what their background. It is a question of how we intend to address that in the strategy, and it falls under the recommendations from the committee as well. It is a matter of initial teacher education and continuous professional development. Again, under Cineáltas, those are specific actions that we are looking at with regard to how are going to implement and make sure the teachers get the training and support they need, but it is also about building the whole school community awareness within a school, which, again, is part of Cineáltas. What we are looking at currently is the development of those anti-bullying guidelines under Cineáltas. They will be coming out shortly and there will be a training programme for schools in respect of that. Specifically, racist bullying will fall under that and there will have been an input from the Traveller and Roma communities in respect of it.

I will move to retention shortly. The Senator spoke about funding for Traveller education and we mentioned a little about the policy direction. When the Senator speaks about children and their aspirations, for us, in education one of the best ways to ensure that everybody has equality of opportunity is inclusion. Therefore, funding has been put together. There is no longer segregated provision or segregated funding, but the overall funding for education has increased and the overall funding for targeted programmes like DEIS has increased. In the context of the figures we gave earlier, we are seeing that there are many more children who are Travellers now receiving the supports of DEIS schools than there were before because we have expanded the DEIS programme. As Ms Waterhouse said, we have specifically targeted post-primary schools to make retention better and we have put home school community liaison into those schools to try to ensure that we expand that. They were not DEIS schools but there were large numbers of Traveller children attending.