Dr. Frances McGinnity:

I want to respond to a point made by Senator Joe O'Reilly regarding what the anti-racism strategy does and what kind of specific actions it can propose. One that it is very likely to propose is the introduction of an ethnic identifier on administrative datasets, but also on survey data. This is the idea that what gets measured gets monitored. There are some instances, for example, the post-primary database has a Traveller identifier, but there is lots of other policy activity where we do not have any information on groups like Travellers and how they are progressing. That would be one way of keeping track of how well Travellers are being served by different needs.

Another possibly relevant point is that, within the ESRI, my team have been commissioned to do an international review of policies to combat racism and discrimination in the labour market in order to support the work of the anti-racism committee. It is sometimes difficult to do a proper evaluation, and evaluations can be expensive, but we would be looking for really good examples that show ethnic minority groups that have benefited from various initiatives abroad. Of course, there is also the issue that each group has its own challenges, but we believe there is some policy learning whereby we can transfer examples of good practice from other countries in terms of racial and ethnic minorities.

I have not worked on evaluations of Youthreach but I have colleagues in the ESRI who have. If it is helpful, I could send the committee some information on that.