Mr. Hugh Friel:

Mr. Joyce mentioned the unemployment rate of 83% to 84% in the Traveller community. It is disgraceful in my community. I will speak about the rural perspective of Donegal, where I come from. Sometimes at national level the rural areas can be forgotten in terms of transport and other matters. Donegal Travellers Project has been running for the past 20 years. Like me, the majority of the Traveller community, approximately 94%, is employed in Donegal Travellers Project. The other 6% of Travellers who are employed outside the Donegal Travellers Project have low paid jobs. Two of them, my son and a lady, are employed in the HSE. The other few jobs are low end jobs where they must hide their identity or not identify themselves as Travellers.

The population of Donegal is 160,000 and just over 1,200 are individuals in the Traveller community. Outside Letterkenny, there are no members of the Traveller community employed in Ballybofey, Donegal town, Ballyshannon, Bundoran, Killybegs or Buncrana. We talk about changing attitudes in Irish society to the Traveller community and other ethnic and minority groups. Consider the relationship building from the perspective of Travellers taking up public sector jobs. Mr. Joyce alluded to the local authorities. I can speak about that with regard to County Donegal. No Travellers are employed in the local authorities or in social welfare. We talk about SICAP and local development companies which are supposed to be the platform for funding and leading the way. It is the opposite. They are not leading the way because Travellers are not employed in those sectors, and one cannot dictate to a community about employment and funding when there is nobody employed there in terms of role models.

There were no advocates 20 years ago in Donegal. It was the settled community, thank God, which came out to the Traveller community and set up Donegal Travellers Project. Twenty years later there are Travellers here who are capable of and educated to advocate on behalf of Travellers for employment.

The social change within the community has been transparent. There is a percentage of Travellers who need the handholding mechanisms to build their skills, ability and confidence to take up employment; whether local authority or public sector jobs or hotel catering, not every employment suits everybody but we need to create the conditions beyond the Traveller organisations. Many Travellers say they are stuck in Traveller organisations because they have the qualifications, the ability and the skills to take up other employment but they do not have the platforms because there is blatant employment discrimination within the public sector. We need to create the conditions for apprenticeships that are transparent throughout the public sector. Is it not quite disgraceful that there is not one member of the Travelling community in the staff? That shows the blatant racial profiling of Travellers within the employment sector. They cannot take up employment or if they have taken it up they have to hide their identity.

The mental health and self-esteem of young Travellers is zero. They have no ambition because there is no ambition in the State or the community to drive people who are social welfare dependent. That is the only light those who are social welfare dependent see in the room because they do not see any other; there is no hall light turned on, only the kitchen light because social welfare is the only benefit they have. They cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel to take up employment. There are no initiatives for those on social welfare. There is jobpath which is a disgrace. It is not creating the conditions for employment for the members of the Travelling community. There is a landscape of work to be done in respect of employment for Travellers. When we talk of transparency we need to look at ourselves and ask what platforms the State is creating for Travellers to take up opportunities.