Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 9 July 2019
Seanad Public Consultation Committee
Travellers Towards a More Equitable Ireland Post-Recognition: Discussion
Ms Maria Joyce:
On some of the wider questions, there were a couple of points around health, education and culture. The answer is that they are all there. There is a platter of strategies and policies with regard to Travellers. There is the Traveller health strategy of 2010, the education strategy of 2006, and the current national Traveller and Roma inclusion, NTRI, strategy. Going right back to 1990 and the first task force report, there has been a shift in the policy direction away from assimilation through segregation to inclusion. The reality is that we have not seen implementation of those recommendations and that is very unfortunate.
In terms of education, we have sought a number of hearings with the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education and Skills since the beginning of this year. It published two reports last week, one on the wider issues pertaining to disadvantage with regard to Traveller children in secondary and third level, and one on reduced timetables. We need to see implementation of the recommendations contained in those reports in the education strategy and with regard to the NTRI strategy on education. There is terrible inequality, as the committee has heard, with regard to Traveller children in school. There is invisibility of Traveller culture. There is no sense of recognition or belonging. Discriminatory practices within schools need to be stamped out, including in terms of enrolment policies. There was an opportunity for our legislators to do this last year in respect of enrolment policies that disproportionately impact on Traveller children and other groups of children where there is not a previous history of educational involvement. Under these enrolment policies, if a child's father or older siblings did not go, that child is immediately excluded. There is a need for proactive, positive measures across all of this policy. Encouraging Traveller teachers within the system will go a long way to starting to enable a child to sit in a classroom and see Traveller teachers. There are Traveller teachers and they are identifying, but we need more of that. We need data across all of these areas. Data are beginning to be collected in primary schools but it needs to be done right across all levels of education. We need to have the data to respond to the needs that exist and to put in place the monitoring around that.
On the question from Senator Ruane on the wider gender piece, the reality is that Traveller women are lost within the wider gender movement. Traveller women are at the coalface trying to address the very stark issues impacting on Travellers. The committee has heard throughout the day about women just getting their children to school, having access to those schools, and trying to battle with services around basic rights in terms of accommodation and health. They have got lost. In some ways, the whole gender movement in Ireland is a bit middle class and it would not be just Traveller women who are lost within it. There is solidarity from some groups out there but there needs to be consideration of the wider gender policy. When we talk about quotas and systems for gender, there needs to be diversity. There needs to be Traveller women quotas within them. The policies need to be specific to Traveller women. Of the actions and recommendations contained in the national women and girls' strategy, five pertain to Traveller and Roma women. There is a platter of others, some of which are being marked as implemented but with no evidence of what that means for Traveller and other marginalised women. Those are the kind of things that need to happen.
I went to a number of events to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising and also to an event at the beginning of 2017 marking the first woman in the Dáil and 100 years of our independence. I was standing there with President Higgins, Senator Higgins's father, and it struck me that we are still without visibility of Traveller women across all of those structures. There is an onus on the wider mainstream groups to address this and on the State to force them to address it.
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