Ms Anastasia Crickley:

They are some of the small island states of the Pacific in particular where, to be honest, they have about 200 or 300 people and it is a bit difficult for them to manage all of these things.

Ireland ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, ICERD, in 2000 and has reported twice to ICERD in 2005 and 2011. I now understand that the third report - if members can do the mathematics, they can work out that it is well and truly due - is being prepared and will be submitted next year with examination by the committee, probably in 2018. If at a later stage, the committee would like me to come and talk about wider issues associated with these matters, I would be very happy to do so.

CERD actively supports the widely international consensus regarding the rights of people to identify as members of particular ethnic groups and has called on states to acknowledge this self identification. CERD is a small convention with seven articles and is not too difficult to manage. The way we amplify and explain the issues we are dealing with is by general recommendations, of which there are 35. The last one is about hate speech, which I would suggest is also very relevant, as my colleagues have already mentioned, for Travellers in Ireland. Our general recommendation 27 furthermore recognises and seeks remedies for the particular discrimination faced by Roma and Travellers, which the committee felt needed to be directly named and identified, Sometimes in international documentation, the term used is "Roma" but you will normally find a footnote at the bottom of the page, certainly in CERD documentation, that says that the term is used in an overall way to include other groups like Travellers and Sinti. In our view, discrimination can and often does include identity denial and despisal of identity, which, as my colleagues have said, has very particular effects and consequences for members of the community.

The concluding observations of CERD on Ireland, alongside those of a number of other UN treaty bodies and the reports of the working groups on Ireland's two universal periodic reviews of the overall state of human rights in Ireland - my apologies for all these short-cut terminologies - have consistently recognised and recommended that the Irish State should acknowledge Traveller ethnicity. In 2011, building on what Mr. Collins has said, which I will not repeat, and recalling general recommendation 8, we called on Ireland to pay particular attention to self identification as a critical factor in the identification and conceptualisation of Travellers as an ethnic minority group. Building on the previous recommendations we have already spoken to, we recommended that the State should continue to engage with the Traveller community and work concretely towards recognising Travellers as an ethnic group. This was in 2011 and I must be clear that we are now in late 2016. That engagement may have happened but the recognition has not yet been realised. In fact as has already been pointed out including here by Emily Logan of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, there already is de factorecognition of Traveller ethnicity in Irish equality legislation with the definition of Travellers adopted by the Oireachtas for the Equal Status Act largely conforming to understood international definitions of ethnicity, including those used in British legislation. In addition, I would suggest that such recognition is also implied by the focus on discrimination and racism against Travellers in the State's reports to Council of Europe human rights bodies as well as to the UN bodies listed above.

There are no legal barriers to recognising Traveller ethnicity. Acknowledging the right of Travellers to be named as a minority ethnic group and as a full part of Irish society involves two important steps, namely, respect and recognition but these, as has already been pointed out, must be in tandem with the third step, of the State assuming its responsibilities to create the conditions for a level playing field within which Irish Travellers can actively be full citizens in Irish society. This means, as has been pointed out by a variety of international bodies, full engagement and involvement with Travellers and their organisations in the design, organisation, implementation and management of programmes on their behalf. It means addressing the rights gaps that have been very well articulated by my colleagues here this morning that relate to accommodation, education and employment and with due regard to hate speech and due acknowledgement of the rights of Traveller women and children. All of these are well articulated in the recommendations made by various international bodies.

I suggest that there has been some work done in this area. There have been cutbacks but there has been some work that is ongoing. The National Traveller and Roma Integration Strategy could provide a very useful starting point but it needs resourcing and finalisation and it needs to be implemented as a matter of urgency. Acknowledgement of Traveller ethnicity will not directly address the widespread, entrenched and often structural inequalities and discrimination experienced by Traveller women, men and children in Irish society but it could begin to help the contradictions that have been articulated in particular by Mr. Fay and the reluctance to move to a rights-based framework. It could also help to assign the failed assimilation imperative, which my friends have already discussed, and its consequences for Travellers, along with the patently inaccurate conflation of ethnicity and nationality. What it will and can do, as someone who has seen this across a number of countries that have come before the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, is to act as an important gesture of acknowledgement, respect and recognition, which cannot be underestimated for Traveller women, men and children and should not continue to be sidestepped.