Ms June Edwards:

I will give a brief outline of what we do. I am the Traveller liaison teacher for the Mountjoy campus, including the main Mountjoy jail, the progression unit and the Dóchas women's prison. I took over this role in September 2020 and I have three half-day slots to meet Travellers in each unit. Working with the TPI has been positive for us in the CDETB and we have benefited from the diversity and inclusion training that the initiative provides. It has helped us to reflect on our own practices, attitudes and unconscious bias and to evaluate the services that we provide for Travellers.

We are aware that school completion rates are lower among the Traveller community than in the general population, both in the community and in prison. To try to address this, and with the support of Travellers who work with the TPI, we developed resources that are more Traveller centred. However, many Travellers opt for classes in arts and crafts. Thus, literacy can remain an issue for them.

The IPS recently granted us permission to open up the recreational areas of the protection landings to offer additional literacy and numeracy support to prisoners, including many Travellers who have reduced access to education due to their protection status. In my role, I meet with Traveller men and women on the landings and in the education centres. This has proved an extremely helpful way for us to identity Travellers who are not engaging with education. While the role was initially aimed at encouraging Travellers to come to the education centre, it has evolved into an extended role of linking Travellers with the relevant services on and off the campus, including addiction counselling, IASIO, chaplaincy, Exchange House Ireland, the TPI and the National Traveller Women's Forum. All of the referrals to the various services are recorded. This gives a clear picture of the key needs of Travellers in prison. Requests and referrals largely relate to accommodation issues, mental health and anxiety, family suicide, literacy, family issues, loneliness, having nothing to do while in prison and pre- and post-release advice and support. For the CDETB, key areas for development include continued focus on literacy and educational engagement and exploring links with our further education and training sector to provide post-release supports for Travellers and positive pathways to life in the community.

To return to Deputy Ellis's question, we tend to find that the best way to engage is to go down the landings. This helps us to meet with people. After that, it is word of mouth. While it is great that people now identify and use the ethnicity identifier, there is one area where this could be tweaked because as it stands it does not enable us to do a search for the number of Travellers in prison. We first have to find the name of the prisoner before we can search to see if that person has identified as a Traveller or not. If the system were tweaked slightly, we would be able to draw up the names. This would help us to find a broader range of people who would, hopefully, engage with our services. When Travellers find their way up to the education centre and they have even one positive engagement they will come back and they will bring other people with them. That is the best way we can target them.