Ms Ronnie Fay:

I thank Senator Conway for his questions and comments. He rightly alluded to accommodation having a huge impact on people's health. It has presented a particular challenge in respect of mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. I would be slow to recognise a particular local authority for its good practice, because there has been little good practice in this regard that could be emulated. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, has conducted an equality audit of all Traveller accommodation programmes and made specific recommendations to each local authority regarding required improvements in their work concerning the provision of accommodation. Those findings are being launched tomorrow. We have not had sight of them yet, but I will refer the Senator to that information when it is available. Recommendations will be made regarding each local authority and it will be important that all Oireachtas committees monitor their implementation.

As Senator Conway rightly says, many local authorities do not draw down the funding. Between 2000 and 2017, the expenditure for Traveller accommodation fell from €135 million to €20 million and since the establishment of the Traveller accommodation programmes in 2000, a total of €69 million has never been drawn down. There are complex reasons this happened but poor, overcrowded living conditions leads to poor health. According to the All Ireland Traveller Health Study, there are 134 excess Traveller deaths per year. When Travellers are dying from respiratory and heart complaints and cancer, you have to ask yourself why are they dying in greater numbers at all levels for all illnesses. For us, that is linked to institutional racism. Cancer does not affect a Traveller's body in a particular way. It is because people are either not getting access to services, not getting timely access to services or not receiving quality services.

In terms of the oversight issue the Senator asked about looking at Europe. I would have to be very proud of being Irish and very proud of our NGO sector and the collaboration we have with the State in Ireland. We can be very proud of that. The big fault we have in Ireland is we do not implement policy that we have developed. We have much better consultative forums, we have much greater participation of NGOs but where we fail abysmally is in implementing agreed Government policy. If you look at the Traveller accommodation plans, there never seems to be any sanctions. We warmly welcome the recent report of the Office of the Ombudsman for Children in terms of a particular site and the impact it has on children. What we need to focus on into the future - that is why we would highlight the need for the ethnic data - is outcomes, how is policy implementation and identifying the blocks, that is, why the policy is not getting implemented and why we are not achieving good outcomes.