Dr. Robbie McVeigh:

There is an element of truth in that. However, one must factor in the cost of not doing these things. There is a terrible cost in keeping people poor and that is not just true of Travellers but of lots of other groups too. It will be interesting to see what happens in the United States in the coming period but not providing health care to people, for example, is incredibly costly. It is generally true that interventions that integrate people in lots of different ways, in terms of accommodation, health provision and so on, give rise to cost savings. I would argue that such savings are probably greater than the cost savings that may have arisen by the cuts to facilities in recent years.

At the end of the day, the core point is that nobody has come up with an argument to support the assertion that Travellers are not an ethnic group in this jurisdiction, whatever the cost implications might be. On that basis, nobody has come up with such an argument and it is quite frustrating. As I said, I have been working on this for a long period of time. In the old days when we were engaging with the British Government and it was resistant, at least it came up with a case and tried to develop an argument against Traveller ethnicity. Ultimately it failed to do that and eventually agreed that Travellers constituted an ethnic group. The British Government played the game in that sense. It is more difficult here where it is just an assertion. The State simply goes to CERD and says that it does not think that Travellers are an ethnic group but does not say why. It is very hard to engage with that, both academically and legally and it is frustrating.