Dr. Margaret Fitzgerald:

Yes. We were very concerned about the Roma communities. At the Deputy will know, they are very hidden. They are in many parts of Ireland. Many of them are in rural communities. With the best will in the world, we are still concerned about the low levels of vaccine uptake in the Roma community. It was one of the first of the migrant communities about which we were deeply concerned because of the high rates of death and admission to intensive care in the community, including among pregnant members. There is a high rate of chronic disease in that population and members are at high risk of complications arising from Covid. We found that in the first, second, third and fourth waves. That was one of the first languages we worked on and our concern for this community was one of our drivers or motivating factors in doing this because members of this community are generally not literate. Some are but quite a number are not literate in their own language, Romanian. We therefore felt it was better to have somebody speaking. That goes for some of the other communities that have come into Ireland from the refugee population as well. Many people in our refugee communities do not write in, for example, Arabic. That was very big driver of our first round of videos.