Ms Emily Murtagh:

I thank Deputy Ellis and Ms Kelly for their comments. We are fully in agreement with Ms Kelly's points. Deputy Ellis talked about accountability. As Ms Kelly stated, it goes back to the expert review recommendations. One of the key recommendations in terms of governance is the establishment of a national Traveller accommodation authority to oversee the monitoring and delivery of the Traveller accommodation programmes. Each local authority draws up a Traveller accommodation plan every five years. When the plans were published in 2019, the Irish Traveller Movement did a large-scale audit of those 31 Traveller accommodation programmes. A few key themes emerged from the audit, including the inconsistent approach across the different local authorities, how the data were represented and how the need was established. Other themes included the lack of delivery of Traveller-specific accommodation, which has been referenced, and a lack of planning for future need.

The Traveller population is extremely young, with over 60% aged under 25. Travellers also tend to get married at a younger age. When future need is not included in the Traveller accommodation programmes, it causes the homelessness figures to continue to rise. That is all very clearly set out in the Traveller accommodation programmes. If we had a national Traveller accommodation authority to oversee how those plans were drawn up and delivered, it would make a huge difference. In terms of that delivery, if a pipeline report was published each year to enable us to know what plans were in place for Traveller accommodation for the year, it would provide an extra layer of accountability. That is something that would be easy to put in place.

The Deputy also mentioned the issue of evictions. It is a huge issue. As Mr. Collins referenced, we are still in breach of Article 16 of the European Social Charter in relation to our eviction procedures for Travellers. It concerns how evictions take place under the criminal trespass legislation, the criminalisation of nomadism as a cultural practice and the fact that there is no national register of evictions. We do not know how many evictions of Travellers take place every year, aside from the continued interventions that we and other organisations such as the Free Legal Advice Centres have to make for families in those situations. As the expert review states, it is most important that we repeal the criminal trespass legislation, put the national register in place and include eviction procedures. There was no protection for Travellers in the second eviction ban. That should be reinstated.