Ms Jacinta Brack:

I have been involved in media management in this sector on and off for 20 years. We worked early with the National Union of Journalists and various editors of daily newspapers at the time on putting a code of practice in place for journalists. At the time, reporting about Travellers was consistently negative, stereotyped and racist. At that time most editors were open to the idea of implementing safeguards. An editorial decision would then be made on an article that would throw that out the window and something so racist and disgusting would be published that I would be surprised it passed an editorial standard, but such articles often did.

After that when the Press Council of Ireland was established and created its codes and the BAI was established, we were able to bring complaints there, as the Senator referenced. As I stated in our submission, the problem with that is the arduous nature of monitoring means that in truth we would probably have been making a complaint every week up to a few years ago and those complaints would probably have been successful. However, we do not have the time and resources to do that.

The other element is that there was an acceptability. It was almost as though Travellers were fair game across every section of society. Media were not the only offenders. There are regular radio programmes which still exist with the sole purpose of discussing a Traveller narrative. We took a complaint to the BAI and won it last year. That is an issue. Unless we can defeat and overcome that in some way, it will remain a problem. The new proposals in the Act state that the strategic reviews will in some way sort this out. They will not. We have to keep the pressure on by monitoring it. We have worked with the BAI and I have asked it whether it can monitor but it does not have the resources to do so.

There is a separate regulatory requirement in the print media, but there has been a change in the way the print media are reporting Traveller stories and that is welcome. However, there are still offenders. I refer to the tabloid media, especially the Sunday tabloid media. They rely on delivering inflammatory anti-Traveller stories. Much of the focus for many decades has been on Travellers and criminal activity. That serves to further fuel hate. The commission referred to the role the media play in forming, educating and all those things. We are countering that by having this weekly and, in some cases, daily narrative that "others" Travellers, suggests they are "less than" and devalues them at a minimum.

It would be a big concern for us not to have the safeguards in place to ward against that. I think that covers most of the first questions. With regard to the advertising content versus other content-----