Ms Brigid Quilligan:

The Traveller counselling service has been really successful. It is very precious and has saved many lives throughout the community. That service needs to be supported and rolled out around the country. In Kerry, we paid for a counsellor who has been supported to develop her analysis around Travellers and to provide a Traveller counselling service because people told us that when they attend counselling sessions, they had to explain their whole life story and justify their culture. In that particular instance and until a sufficient number of trainers are trained, we would need to have people with a high level of competency around Traveller cultural awareness delivering counselling services.