David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Cathaoirleach on her appointment. It has been said that she is like a breath of fresh air. She is. Well done to her. May she keep it up.

There is a huge amount of work to be done. I chaired for four years the justice committee which dealt with the national Traveller and Roma inclusion strategy. It was very difficult and challenging. We did the ethnicity bit way back, because that is what the Traveller community asked for early on. The night in the Dáil was a big occasion because it nulled the 1963 commission report, which looked upon Travellers as a problem to be solved. Getting rid of that put things on a new footing, but that is all it did. It was very important but now we have got to move on from there.

An area I am still concerned about relates to education and exclusion from education. The Department of Education set up four pilot projects under the national Traveller and Roma inclusion strategy. It would be interesting to see where they are at, but we should now have gone beyond pilots and the resources should be national. Every young child from the Traveller community should have an opportunity to receive an education. If that does not happen, employment is impossible later. The exclusion of Travellers was really insidious. They went to school at 9 o'clock in the morning and were out on the streets at 10 o'clock. I met mothers, in particular, who were very concerned that youths of 11, 12 and 13, and quite often young children, were on the streets. They are very vulnerable at that age to others influencing them in a very negative way. It was said that the children should not be on the streets but in school receiving an education and training, and skills they could use. This is an area we should focus on quite clinically.

I am concerned about the committee getting spread out into everything. There is a huge number of areas between employment, education, housing, health and mental health, and all of those areas are very important. If we are not careful, there is a risk of it being spread too thinly and the committee spending a small amount of time on each one and not getting anywhere. If we focus intensely on one area for a period and, as colleagues such as Deputy Joan Collins rightly said, show results at the end of it, that might be the way to go.

We need to get the facts, figures and statistics from the ground, see how many young Traveller children are in the education system and see where they are at. We need to find out, anecdotally or otherwise, if school exclusion is still a thing, and how many young Traveller children get through the system and succeed in reaching leaving certificate or third level, as the Chair and others have done. Maybe we should start with that, focus clinically and strongly on it and then move on to another area and spend a block of time at that, and let people know we are not going away until we see progress. If we jump from one thing to the next, we will not get anything done. That is my experience.

When I was in the Department, I visited many sites around the country and what I saw was shocking. The Ministers with responsibility for housing and the local authorities have a huge amount of work to do but so has the wider community. Quite often, what happens is that the wider community is not supportive of what people try to do and we get all kinds of resistance. We might have to look into that as well.

I wish the committee every success with this. I take it that this is the weekly time slot for the committee meeting. Is it fixed for Wednesdays at 2.30 p.m.?