Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

The Government talks a great deal about equality and slaps itself on the back about the same-sex marriage vote, but its claims of being champions of equality ring hollow when one looks at the situation facing Travellers. We correctly cry when they die in horrendous fires in halting sites, yet its children are put on the PULSE machine in racial profiling. We put them into accommodation the budgets for which have been decimated over the past number of years.

The reality is that Travellers are not a priority. In the case of Traveller women, they might as well not exist. In America, where racial profiling is an established fact, black women are three to four times more likely to end up in prison than white women. In Ireland, Traveller women are 22 times more likely to end up in prison than settled women. Most of them on meeting the justice system for the first time do not get probation, community service or anything else but go straight to incarceration. These are women who have a life expectancy that is 11.5 years shorter than the life expectancy of women in the rest of the population. It is a life expectancy that is akin to that of the 1960s.

We let them have an all-Ireland Traveller health study, but the conclusions of it were not implemented in the five year term of this Government. If we are to give any credibility to the claim that we support rights for Travellers, recognise their differences and respect them as equal citizens, we must recognise them as an independent ethnic group. It is not a panacea and it will not solve all the issues they face, but it is a starting point. I think particularly of Traveller women who are the most marginalised, with 81.2% without work and who cannot escape domestic violence situations. They need this motion to be passed.

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