Mal O'Hara (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Yes, be nice. This is the end of my second week.

I thank the groups and thank the Cathaoirleach for her continued leadership on these issues. I am here to listen and I have listened a lot. I need to go to Belfast and I did say so. This is not a Dublin accent. There are a couple of points I wish to pick up on.

Somebody said about politics that you cannot be what you cannot see or hear and Senator Flynn sitting in that Chair - it suits her - sends a really strong message to Traveller and Roma communities that they can have a position in politics. I take the challenge about parties needing to do much better to make sure we work hard. It is not just about saying that people should come and join us. We need to look at our structures, at reserved lists and at realising this mad idea that representative democracy should look like the society it represents. That includes Travellers, Roma and other minority communities.

A friend of mine once said, "If you don't do politics, politics gets done to you". The Cathaoirleach's community knows that because of inaction, poor governance, inequality, etc. I want to say I am an other, I am queer, I am working class, I am Northern. I am not a nationalist or a unionist; I am one of those "others". People need to sell to me if they want to change this island. I have said from day one I want to be a Senator for all, and that is all communities. In the North, my experience is we have failed the Travelling community there. One of the big failures is we have an ethnic minority development fund worth £1 million a year. That sounds great. It is for Traveller, Roma and minority ethnic communities. However, it is not ring-fenced and which organisations successfully secured that money? Settled people organisations and white people-led organisations. The real way of addressing the inequalities experienced by minority communities is if their organisations are funded and resourced and led by them to make the change. It really infuriates me when I hear, "Hard to reach". That means easy to ignore. I am a queer activist. I worked with Traveller groups in the North. Unfortunately, An Munia Tober is gone. The Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities, an umbrella organisation advocating for those communities' needs, is gone. That is in part because of that decision not to ring-fence money for those organisations. My background is in mental health and well-being. I served on a couple of charitable boards on suicide prevention and mental health and when I worked professionally at the Rainbow Project I worked with Traveller organisations and black and minority ethnic organisations to lobby the Public Health Agency to create a distinct fund for mental health and well-being for minority groups. We wanted one for Travellers and one for black and minority ethnic people and one for LGBT people. The point is that would have funded those groups to do that work. Who is best placed to meet the needs of Travellers, but Travellers and Roma communities and their organisations?

The big point I hear being echoed today is that services are designed for settled people and not for everybody. That is the challenge. We need to make services more accessible. People have said, and rightly illuminated, the points here about education and invisibility in the curriculum. We mandate that kids have to be in school from the age of five to 16 years, but we do not make that service accessible for them. That is not good enough. It is about housing, employment, access to goods, facilities and services, health inequalities, lower life expectancy, funding and monitoring because you cannot see what you have not monitored so monitoring is really important. I really liked hearing about the disproportionate impact of Covid.

I am delighted to have listened. It may take some discussion, but I would love to be on this committee. I am not a formal member of this committee, but I want to say I am an ally and I look forward to working with you and on your behalf. Please put me in touch with Traveller organisations in the North. Thank you, a Chathaoirligh, and I thank everyone for coming today.