Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

To pick up on the Minister of State’s last two comments, I am not so sure about the commitment. I will explain why in a moment. Equally, I do not see any energy evident in tackling the issues we are dealing with. Those of us who have large Traveller-specific sites in our constituencies, as many of us here do, know that the conditions in which adults and children continue to live are a scandal. What bothers me regarding how we discuss this issue is that the Housing Agency and the Department commissioned a report that was completed and published by Professor Michelle Norris in 2017. It set out all the problems in this area. It then took us almost two years to get a working group together. The group produced a brilliant report, but that was in July 2019. The substantive recommendations in that report have not been implemented yet. I will return to that point in a second.

One of the most frustrating things is that throughout the last year and half I have submitted parliamentary questions to the Minister of State asking him to provide, in tabular form, information on the state of play with each of the 32 recommendations contained within the report. We have yet to get that information. The programme group is monitoring that work, but this committee should also have information, line by line, on where we are going with those recommendations.

Progress has certainly been made with some of the recommendations. The Minister of State mentioned them. I acknowledge that aspect. The key recommendations, however, those that will transform whether we really start to deliver good quality Traveller-specific accommodation, are concerned with changes to the legislation governing land transfers and Part 8 planning applications. That undertaking is not even in the legislative programme. I have yet to hear, therefore, an update from the Minister of State on those things he has responsibility for and that were central to the recommendations made by the expert group to enable us to tackle this issue head on. Will the Minister of State update us on when he intends to bring forward the legislation to give effect to those two key recommendations of the expert group's report?

Moving on to the second key element, that of the underspending, there was only full expenditure last year because a large volume of that spending went on dealing with the impacts of Covid-19. I welcome that, but it does not demonstrate that the historical refusal of our local authorities to spend their allocations has been dealt with. I suspect that the problem will return once we are on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic. I do not accept that the change in the funding allocations was a good thing. I am convinced that it was done to conceal the blushes of the local authorities that requested an allocation in line with the Traveller accommodation programmes in their county development plans and then did not draw down the money. Nothing I have heard to date has convinced me otherwise.

The really problematic aspect, however, is that I have repeatedly asked through the parliamentary questions I have submitted how many Traveller-specific units of accommodation, that is new units, were delivered this year, last year and the year before. I have yet to get a clear answer from the Department and the Minister of State through those parliamentary questions. My second question now, therefore, is will he tell us how many Traveller-specific units of accommodation were added to the stock this year, last year and the year before.

The most regrettable thing in all this is that there is not a dedicated full-time official in the Minister of State’s Department driving this programme forward. It was one of the central requests made by the representatives of the expert group when they came in front of our committee. Why will the Minister of State not appoint a full-time dedicated senior official to drive the implementation of the report and its recommendations? Until that happens, we are going to be here with the same level of frustration that I suspect we will hear when representatives from the Irish Traveller Movement present to the committee later this afternoon.