Ms Minnie Connors:

I could not get them all because they all came at once.

I will talk about the children in the schools. I am a mother of five. My oldest daughter is 18 and the youngest will be ten in September. They got the very same schooling I got - no difference - in the same school. They were treated the same. I looked at my children being treated at school the way I was treated. To give the committee a better sense of this, I ask them to imagine how a Traveller child at four years old, before ever going to school, is so proud of who they are, so proud of their mammy and daddy, their brothers and sisters, so proud of all their horses and dogs. They are so excited to head off for their first day in school, their new uniform on them, their schoolbag on their back. The very first day that child arrives at the door of the school, they are given a special needs teacher. The child is treated differently by the teacher. Then the other classmates will say, "My teacher is treating you differently, so you are different." They are now different in baby infants and will be different until sixth class, so they are going nowhere in their life. All the Traveller child wants to do then is fight to get out of school any way they can. My children choose sitting in the classroom over going out to play because they have no friends. They were born and reared in Wexford and went to the same school that their mammy went to but they have no connections at all in the school. If we were to try to do something about this, we would have to have Travellers in the schools. A small step would be having teachers get culturally appropriate training on Traveller children and Travellers. We should just be kind to them and let them know they are young. We should let teachers know that it will not be a waste of their time if they teach a Traveller child like all the other children in the school.