Mr. Brian Dillon:

We have started to learn about horses and animals. It would be a long time before I would learn all that Travellers know about horses. Ms Casey and her family know a lot more than I do. On my side, I would say the bigger issue here is the kind of model that we are convinced works around horses. In terms of an analysis, as Ms Casey said, it is a culture that has been decimated, criminalised and had all sorts of other things done to it by Irish society. One of the last things I would see as a target for destruction are horses. That is where much of that negative sentiment that Senator Pauline O'Reilly spoke about comes from.

We are firmly convinced that any kind of approach to the horse situation cannot be around some symbolic notion. An example of a symbolic notion would be the concept of a horse project where people say we should build a couple of stables and is that not lovely. There is not much more to that than consigning horses to a museum and we can all walk past, look at them and be happy. That is not what we are about in Cena. We are about preserving horses as a living part of people's culture. This has a very serious link to the question of mental health. It is not an overstatement to say that there are men who have taken their own lives in the Traveller community because of what has been done to their horses.

The model we look at is self-organisation. We are looking at how people can form associations, have membership in their own associations and begin to promote that. That is the only way forward. It is slow. As to whether there is opposition, absolutely there is, because so many mixed messages are put forward in the media as if every Traveller will race down the N4. That could not be further from the truth when you look at children growing up and the relationship they have with their horses.

There is a lot of work to be done on horses. I would say we are only starting. My thinking is that we probably will hit opposition. We have not hit it yet because we have been very careful. We work a lot with neighbours. That is what we do all the time. We point out that nobody will be killed or seriously injured if people recognise each other's diversity. That is the only way we would see of tackling this. The first is to have self-organisation and the second is to try to build mutual respect.

On the other question, we do not get any other money for any of the other stuff. In a sense, we are not chasing it. We know we have to grow with a Traveller base. We have to build skills in the Traveller community at the same time as we are growing. There is only so much we can take on. The worst thing we could do is access money just to do a programme and then suddenly find that we have lost our way. At the heart of Cena is to have Travellers driving it. That is how I would see that issue. I do not know what Ms Casey thinks about the question on horses.