Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is absolutely essential that we measure from the ground up. I and, more important, the groups representing the Traveller and Roma communities, believe that the approach adopted has been too focused on inputs, as the Deputy said. There have been many inputs to Traveller and Roma policy in recent years. That represents an amount of progress from a time when this entire area was completely ignored, which it was ten or 15 years ago. There is a lot of focus on the area these days. We cannot measure tangible outcomes because the processes to do so are not in place. Even in their absence, I think we know from talking to Travellers and Roma that they are not seeing the tangible improvements in their lives. We cannot measure but, even without measuring, we know anecdotally there has not been progress. In order to get real achievement, we need not to be measuring anecdotally, we need to be measuring with real statistics and that is why I am focusing on putting in place the ability to capture that data. That is why, in the successor to the national Traveller and Roma inclusion strategy, NTRIS, we are going to put a focus on those measurable outcomes. We will have to discuss what they are. We want to make them easy to measure although we do not want to create a whole bureaucracy around measurements because that gets us away from essential delivery. Having key metrics is going to be important.

The Deputy asked whether I have a lead role in banging heads. My style is not to bang heads. I try to work with people, as much as possible. However, I do not have the lead funding role the Deputy described was in place for the Minister with responsibility for the islands. I have a reasonably small budget for Traveller supports, as I outlined earlier to Deputy Mitchell. I have a role through NTRIS and the steering group. I use my role to hear what Departments are doing. I then engage with Departments where I feel additional pressure or engagement are needed to achieve outcomes. For example, I have bilateral meetings with the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, on a range of issues that span our Departments, from domestic, sexual and gender-based violence to support for refugee accommodation and support for children who are leaving care. Traveller accommodation is one of the issues we discuss in those meetings. Is it the best way to go? I do not know the answer to that question yet. We always need to look at how we can strengthen deliverables across Government, particularly in areas where responsibility can end up falling across a number of Departments. The origin of my Department was a feeling that responsibility for children's issues, outside of education, was spread out across too many Departments. That is why those issues were centralised in my Department. That is what we are doing currently in terms of disability. There was a sense that responsibility for disability was stretched across too many Departments and that is why issues have been taken out of the Department of Justice and will be soon taken out of the Department of Health and centralised in my Department. We hope that will see better outcomes for persons with disability.

I am conscious that local authorities have experience and expertise to deliver housing. I keep an open mind as to who should have oversight for Traveller-specific accommodation. All I can say is that I am very conscious that, as a country, we are not doing enough to improve outcomes for members of our Traveller and Roma community. I am absolutely committed, as the non-governmental organisations in the sector know, to improving those outcomes.