Ms Maria Joyce:

I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh for her questions. I apologise but there was some drop-out on my Wi-Fi as she was asking her questions. I will answer them as best as I can but I may have missed some of the context. On the question of the grants being made available, it was stated earlier that more than 80% of Travellers are unemployed. That is a crisis and there is a need for a strategy to address that. There are also multiple intersections of inequality and disadvantage. Travellers are not coming to the third level education system from a intergenerational perspective. We have had decades of inequality and disadvantage in education and when you combine that with high unemployment rates and poverty, specific targeted measures need to put in place to ensure the monetary factor will not be a barrier to Travellers engaging in and completing third level.