Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their contributions. Last week, I attended a meeting of the St. Stephen's Green Trust to discuss Travellers in the mainstream labour market. One of the points made was that the travelling community feels it has been looked at under a microscope to the point that is has been almost wiped out. There have been so many reports and recommendations on accommodation, the labour market and so on but Travellers need to see action. This is an important juncture for the travelling community. We have to put in place structures that will have an impact in order that Travellers see that they are moving on from where they were. The public sector has a positive role to play here. I have seen that in disability groups. My office is in Agriculture House and I see people with disabilities all around the building. They play a key role in the workplace. That has a good impact in that they become role models in the community.

That, to me, is the role the PAS can play. It will be a very responsible role on the shoulders of the PAS to bring that forward.

When we look at the fact 8% of the Travelling community completed a leaving certificate, there is a massive section of the community who are low skilled. Where do we bring them in terms of work experience and so on? There are three or four prongs to this. In particular, the graduates who have come through comprise a very small group but there is a role they can play in assisting the community and getting more young people through the education system. It is a question of how we can put in place structures that allow low skilled members of the Travelling community to come through the SMEs.

I was interested to hear Ms McDonagh’s point about mentoring and role models. That will be crucial. I knew the working class kids in the 1970s. I grew up in the Coolock-Artane area. If someone put Coolock beside their name, they got nowhere. People just did not put down their addresses because they would be immediately identified as working class if they did. It was only when the public sector opened up in the late 1970s that a lot of my peers got jobs in the Civil Service and so on. That had a huge impact. There was also the other aspect of migration, but the Traveller community now has no chance of doing something like that. Therefore, it is very important that we get as much right as possible. We can make mistakes but we need to learn from our mistakes. The mentoring programme is going to be very important, as well as how we use organisations like Bounce Back, in terms of how we work with the SME sector to promote people from the Traveller community into those areas of work.