Mr. Bernard Joyce:

I thank Senators and the Minister of State. I welcome the members of our community who are in the Visitors Gallery. As director of the Irish Travellers Movement, a national membership based, Traveller-led organisation, I welcome the opportunity to present on Traveller affairs after the recognition of their ethnicity in 2017. Our submission covers all themes and includes a range of recommendations.

From here, I will focus on specific challenges to Traveller equality and opportunities in public decision-making. Many reasons have stopped and curtailed Travellers from accessing and contributing to key decision-making structures, locally and nationally. The biggest cause is our experience of social exclusion and discrimination which has alienated us from mainstream systems of governance. Ironically, all too often those decision-making structures have been at the heart of further marginalisation of Travellers by imposing draconian laws that have impacted on our culture and nomadic traditions in a negative way. Critically, we have not had national political representation since the foundation of the Irish State and we continue to be invisible within the political establishment.

The invisibility of the diversity, capacity and insight which we as Travellers can contribute across all aspects of Irish life is contradictory to an open, inclusive democracy and is not coherent with the recommendations of the advisory committee on the implementation of the framework convention for the protection of national minorities, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, CERD, and the former Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, all of which noted that the Irish State has not adopted positive action measures to improve the representation of Travellers in political institutions and decision-making. Despite that, Traveller community activism has challenged inequality and advanced a politicised human rights movement underpinned by community development values and is best placed to advocate on the issues affecting our community.

There are many strong advocates within our community, some of whom are here today. Some of them participate in local traveller accommodation consultative committees. However, that role is often not valued. They have not been listened to or heard and have been patronised at times. Some have walked out in recent years with no positive outcomes to show for their participation. These tokenistic, ineffective structures are counter-productive to what should be the collective aim of the State and communities. They cause great frustration given our experience of the crisis in mental health, suicide, homelessness, unemployment and racism. Our health statistics show that only half of our community lives beyond the age of 40. That is absolutely shocking.

The impact of these developments has been profound. Travellers ask me and others if our representation holds any value, or worse. After all these years, we have had poor outcomes from our participation and this can undermine Traveller participation. Are we actually colluding with the State and being dominated by non-Travellers in respect of the status quo? The political system until now has not created mechanisms to confirm the voice of Travellers, as it has done with gender quotas. We must be proactive in changing the system. The following recommendations from the Irish Traveller Movement are important for this reason. There should be a designated place for Travellers in the Seanad and that Senator should be elected by the community. A rapporteur for Travellers should be appointed to the Houses of the Oireachtas and should continue to work on a newly-established joint committee on Travellers. An expert group panel should be appointed to work with State partners and regulating bodies and participate in matters of potential relevance arising from the work of organisations such as the Residential Tenancies Board, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the Press Council of Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, and the Workplace Relations Commission. The Government should direct local authorities to ensure Traveller representation in local democracy and to actively target Travellers on boards, committees and decision-making forums.

Public participation regarding public partnership networks should include Traveller inter-agency committees across all local authorities and strategic policy committees. In the areas of tourism, heritage, arts, sports, community development, enterprise and social inclusion, Traveller representation should be visible and should not be restricted to voluntary efforts. There should be specific national strategies to tackle Traveller employment with a priority requirement on State bodies, semi-State agencies and the public service to double their efforts and also to establish a paid internship for Travellers across all public bodies. There should be an adoption of universal ethic identifiers across Departments and semi-State bodies.

I want to add that being here today is a historic moment. I acknowledge that. People have come before us, such as Nan Joyce, who ran for election in 1982. She never got here but we are here now. That is significant and we need to ensure this progression and these steps are moved forward. I will finish with the words of Nelson Mandela: "to deny and person their human rights is to challenge their humanity". For a long time, Travellers have been challenged but so has our humanity. I look forward to the recommendations that will emerge from today's meeting and to the implementation of those recommendations on Traveller participation across all sectors of society, including the political establishment.