Ms Jenny Liston:

Mr. Collins should feel free to come in. I am not aware of any official data from Ireland. Mr. Collins spoke about the evidence we have of houses that have been burned or vandalised when Travellers or members of the Roma community were about to move into an area. There have been no convictions in any of the cases he named.

The EU Fundamental Rights Agency, FRA, in 2020 did a survey looking at hate-motivated harassment in Europe. Irish Travellers had the third highest rate out of all the countries surveyed at 52%. We also saw in the FRA survey, as well as in some UK research, that the reality is that hate crimes against Travellers and Roma are rarely reported. That is down to distrust of authorities and the response to such reports. In the UK they found that even when they did report these crimes, there was a very low level of response to the crimes due to institutional racism. We touched on it a little bit in our opening statement but the legislation alone will not be enough to respond to hate speech and hate crime against Travellers and Roma but also against other protected categories and that we need special measures to be introduced in conjunction with the legislation to make sure that we address the wider issues in society around racism, prejudice and looking at what kind of mechanisms are required in our institutions to make sure that the legislation is capable of being implemented as well. Perhaps Mr. Collins might want to add something.