Ms Breda O'Donoghue:

I will address one or two of the issues that Deputy Mitchell raised about good practice around the country. As Ms Kelly from the National Traveller Women's Forum mentioned, we have quite a good network of Traveller organisations around the country. The majority of the stories are very similar. I know there is good practice in some areas. I know, for example, that it is 24 years since I visited Dublin city with local representatives from Cork city and council officials. We looked at some good quality Traveller halting sites in certain areas. Do not ask me to name the areas because I would not have a clue, but I know we saw them and they were working well.

I also know that in the UK, things are very different for Travellers. I know that Travellers have been accepted for much longer there as an ethnic minority group than we have been here in this country. The problem for us is that local authorities are the only show in town for Travellers. Traveller culture is about living within the extended family. When Travellers' families try to come together to purchase a small piece of land that they can develop into a space where they could set up bays and have their own mobile homes, though I would not call it a halting site, that is blocked from every angle. Many Travellers have gone to court and been refused planning permission simply because they are Travellers. Through the Covid pandemic, we saw pop-up homes everywhere, with people building at the back of their own houses for younger family members or moving into them themselves and renting their homes. We see that everywhere we go but not with Travellers. We, for some reason, are not allowed to even progress our own accommodation. We are blocked everywhere.

Deputy Mitchell mentioned discrimination against women. Traveller women in general have been suffering. It is a double whammy for Traveller women because we are women and we are Travellers on top of that. We work with many Traveller women who suffer from domestic violence. I want to be clear when I say that domestic violence is not now and never has been part of Traveller culture but it is prevalent in our community, as it is across the board. Unfortunately, when it comes to domestic violence, the majority of Traveller women are expected to police themselves. If I live on a site and call the guards into a domestic violence situation, the garda does not come to me straightaway. He will go around and check people's cars for tax, who has a broken tail-light and what somebody has in a shed before he comes to me. I then get it from both sides. I get it from my own community because I drew the guards in and people got a ticket because they did not have tax, or other things happened. I am probably going to be asked if that is not my culture and it will be implied that we take care of those things ourselves. That puts women in extreme danger.

Deputy Mitchell talked about domestic violence centres that discriminate against Travellers. If I rock up to a domestic violence centre and there is another Traveller in that centre, I am refused access in most cases because only one Traveller family is allowed at a time. We have been told this over the years. There is discrimination right across the board for Travellers. We have been working for the last couple of months with a young Traveller woman who has seven children and was suffering from domestic violence. She was moved from one county to the next and tossed between Cork City Council and Kerry County Council. Last month, we told her to go home because there was nothing we could do for her. She was bounced from one county to the next because she had, as they called it, "voluntarily" given up her home, having left a situation that she could no longer stay in because she was afraid for her life. She could not be accommodated in Cork either through the emergency services or the local authority because she was not from the area. That is what is going on on the ground for Traveller women and when it comes to Travellers trying to access accommodation in any county around the country. I am probably coming across very strongly here but when you deal with these families on the ground for so long and see so little change, it affects you in different ways.