Ms Catherine Joyce:

I am not promoting the idea of identifying a DEIS school just because it has 20 Travellers.

I am saying that in areas of disadvantage that may coincidentally have schools - Mulhuddart, where I work, is an area of disadvantage and there are other areas around there - resources should be provided on the basis of need, not just identity. Where an area has a large contingent of Travellers and schools are struggling to keep Travellers in school or to keep Travellers at the same attainment level as their settled peers, there should be a way of managing that. I am not saying DEIS is the ideal scenario, but in the absence of the visiting teacher service, where the teachers were able to make a joint assessment of the need in a particular school, there must be some type of programme or a way of making sure that, particularly in DEIS schools that have Traveller pupils, they are resourced to include Travellers. Where there are no Travellers in the DEIS schools that are available, there should be some way of monitoring that. Again, it is to do with reviewing the current state of play on the ground.

In regard to the history of Travellers, there are many Travellers in this country who were put into a segregated classroom from as early as four years of age. My husband is one of them and he was put into a prefab at the back of a girls school in Finglas. He went through his school life in segregated provision. There were two teachers in that classroom and they taught very basic mathematics and English. There were no other subjects such as Irish and history taught in the classroom. There was a range of ages in the classroom setting, and when they left school they could write their names and addresses. They were well lucky after coming out of those schools. The schools were provided by the Catholic Church and the State. The development of those schools was a joint collusion. We must get an apology for those adults, who are only in their 50s and some might be even younger, for the segregation and deliberate isolation of Travellers within the education system. Those people need an apology on behalf of the State. Some type of recourse must be made in respect of those people and their education.

Regarding the culture and identity of Travellers being taught in schools, I do not believe every settled person going through school needs to know everything about Traveller culture and identity, but there are certainly areas where there are gaps. Consider the economic change in Ireland through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. We talk about the industrial revolution here and tinsmithing being done away with by the arrival of plastic and so forth. There was a genuine role for the tinker in this country in mending pots and pans. The experience of settled people who used that service was predominantly good. It might not be the case for people who are sitting here, but their parents and grandparents certainly would have had tinkers calling to the door and mending pots and pans. There are parts of that which could be put into the economic modules in the education system.

I am not an academic and I am certainly not a teacher so I am not in a position to go through every schoolbook and subject in the classroom, but there are people who can go through them and Traveller-proof them with the positive aspects of Traveller identity, the positive role Travellers played in Irish music and so forth, and the hawkers and sellers at the door. Travellers were recycling in this country before it was popular. They were involved in recycling on the tip heads and the dumps. They were recycling in markets with old washing machines, lawnmowers, bicycles and the like. Those things have been ignored in the education system and in the awareness of recycling in this country. I got a glimpse of a programme on RTÉ last night and there was no mention of the people who were recycling before recycling was popular and trendy. They were the Traveller community. They were recycling long before it was the thing to do. There are ways in which we can go through the curriculum and include Travellers and the positive role we played in society.

Musicians in this country would not deny the contribution that Travellers made not only in creating a style of music but also in preserving Irish music at a time it was under severe threat by the English in this country. When Travellers used to go from door to door selling ballad sheets, they used to bring the songs and stories from another county. They could not be written down because if a person was caught carrying the papers, he or she was done for. They kept them in their heads and passed them on from generation to generation. Some very famous musicians always credit Travellers for the role they played in that. There are many opportunities to include Travellers. I am not just talking about the history of Travellers but also contemporary Traveller culture.

I have children who went through the education system and every year they had a new book because the previous year's was not useable. Books are being developed all the time.

Why are we are not talking to the companies developing the books and saying that the books cannot go into schools unless there is Traveller-proofing of the books for the curriculum? It can and should be done.