Professor Jennifer Schweppe:

With respect to the Judiciary, we have done some work with the Honourable Ms Justice Mary Rose Geraghty who is responsible for judicial education. It was a real honour for us to be told that a copy of the report is given to every judge on their appointment. It seems that there is a movement within the Judiciary towards at least acknowledging institutional racism. From a human rights perspective and the Council of Europe, the first step is acknowledgement. As Professor Haynes said in her opening statement, the Garda and the Department of Justice continue to deny the existence of racial profiling. If racial profiling does not happen in this State, we would be unique internationally. Our police service would be unique internationally if we did not engage in racial profiling. Not only that, the Garda Commissioner used language in the Policing Authority that he did not believe racial profiling was a feature of An Garda Síochána. I do not know about others, but I heard that as the Garda saying it did not believe Travellers. The data is there. We spoke to one in 60 Travellers. Of those we spoke to who were stopped, 58% said they believed the reason they were stopped was because they were a Traveller. This data is almost precisely replicated by the previous study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in its study on Roma and Travellers in Europe. It found that 59% of Travellers who were stopped believed that they were racially profiled. The difference is 1%. I am not a social scientist but even I know that data is robust. We must accept that as statistically significant.