Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 26 March 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Traveller Education: Discussion

Photo of Lynn RuaneLynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. A few people have mentioned the reinstatement and resourcing of what was there before, as if that was adequate, which does not acknowledge the damage done to the Travelling community since the early 1960s. We also need to acknowledge that when austerity budgets destroyed aspects of the education system it was a disaster for the Travelling community. If we are recommending the reinstatement of a visiting teacher the question is whether that was enough. Are we just saying that is what we had before and we will do the same again, or are we saying Travellers deserve a lot more than this and need a much more targeted approach than was there because it was not working? It might have been an extra bit of help, an extra resource and that might have been positive but was it achieving the goals the Travelling community needed to achieve? We should not herald the initiatives that existed before austerity as a golden chalice that was moving the Traveller community through the education system and into third level because I do not think they were. They were not enough.

Funding is given to universities if they increase access for minorities and working class students. Apart from the Yellow Flag programme and initiatives, what would it be like if there was funding attached to how good a school was at meeting the needs of minority groups such as Travellers or Roma or other ethnicities? If 50% of those children are not in delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, schools should the funding for special category groups in educational deficit, to follow the children, rather than the schools, from primary to third level education? Should it focus on families rather than try to recreate something in schools that was not really working in the first place? Anyone can answer that question.

People have got used to the word racism and do not understand what is behind it and the impact it has on people. People in schools are so afraid of racist attacks that they change their identity. I have said in the Seanad that my consciousness of this was raised when I went into the home of my friend William, who unfortunately is now dead, and he spoke like a Traveller. I had been friends with him for 12 years and said I had never heard him speak like that. It was as if I heard a new person, a side of him that I had been deprived of.

I had been missing out on his culture and identity. A person tries to go through a system suppressing their identity and then we ask why so many Traveller people die by suicide. We have completely denied their identity since the 1960s. There has to be some sort of redress due to them for that.

A person does not have to be inside four walls to be institutionalised. The State has institutionalised the Travelling community for far too long. What was there was not good enough even though it might have been a positive resource at the time. What would the witnesses prefer to do and should the funding follow the child?

I speak to women in my community, not necessarily in the Travelling community, who are really struggling to get their children to go to school past junior certificate level and then the State takes their children's allowance away. There are groups already living in poverty and this is something that was never supposed to be attached to the educational journey but the State refuses to give them the children's allowance if the child is not in school. What impact does that have on the poverty of women in the Travelling community? Are they losing the children's allowance at second level if they cannot get a form stamped in the school to say their children are still attending? I know that is happening to other groups which increases the levels of poverty in some households.

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