Dr. Robbie McVeigh:

Legislation was introduced. It is interesting because it was pre-peace process legislation. Later on, some of it was swept up in broader human rights and equality legislation but the specific legislation, the Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997, still stands. The order was made by the Conservative British Government at the time. That Government had engaged with the issue in a similar way as legislators and civil servants in the South. There was quite a lot of reluctance and it was not taken as a given.

The work that I and many others did around the support for the position of the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights, the main Government human rights body at that time, played a key part in them recognising that there was going to be an ongoing equivocation around this issue and on that basis it was just easier to name Travellers in the legislation so that all of that ambiguity was resolved. They did not take that without engaging with it over a number of years. There was quite a long discussion around that, not just in the Traveller support community but also in the broader human rights and equality community. Eventually, a Conservative British Government, not particularly noted for its support for progressive interventions on race and ethnicity, supported that position and integrated it into legislation. There are two lessons we can draw from that. First, it ended at that point and there is nobody walking around Northern Ireland saying that it is mad that Travellers are recognised as an ethnic group. Everybody accepts, within the paradigm of broader race discrimination, that anti-race discrimination interventions would include Travellers and that is just the way it is. The other point, which I do not want to make too negatively, is that the notion that there would be some terrible cost implication proved to be untrue. It did not happen.

The situation is much better. It was defined very clearly in the legislation so the ambiguity disappeared overnight. There are other ways to do it, as I have said already. The Scottish Government has done it in a different way and has not made its position quite so clear.