Ms Anastasia Crickley:

I thank the Chairman and the committee. I am chairperson of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, CERD, and for more than 30 years I have been engaged in solidarity work with Travellers and Roma organisations in Ireland, Europe and beyond. I am an academic at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and am proud to have taught more than 20 Traveller graduates. I suggest that quite a few of the 1% who were spoken of are actually our NUI graduates. They are graduates because key to that sort of positive engagement was an explicit recognition of Traveller identity and ethnicity and a very welcoming atmosphere to Traveller identity and ethnicity.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to engage with it today. I apologise if some of what I say repeats what my friends have already said. It is, however, important that perhaps the members hear some of it from us as part of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. I thank the members for their ongoing interest in this urgent and important matter for Travellers and for Irish society as a whole.

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, ICERD, which in 2015 marked 50 years since its adoption, is the first UN human rights treaty. In effect it came in during 1965 and was ratified in 1969. If we look to that period, we remember the terrible things that were happening with regard to apartheid in South Africa. That created the catalyst for this treaty. The 177 countries of the 192 member states globally of the United Nations have ratified the convention. The others countries that have not ratified it, there are one or two that I will not name, are some of the small island states------