Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Fr. Micheál Mac Gréil and others carried out sociological work. Fr. Mac Gréil carried out a detailed and comparative study. He could have told you about every group in Irish society, including non-Irish, Irish, unionists and everybody else. Therefore, you could see that Travellers came out the worst. We know that societal attitudes are very anti-Traveller. We have been naive to believe that people leave private attitudes outside the door when they go to work. That is a totally naive concept. Therefore, it is my belief that it is likely that people in various positions within the State bring their prejudices to work. It is equally likely that we will not find official racial profiling in the way we might like to think it happens. We are not going to find it on a file. We are not going to find systemic evidence of it. Profiling is informal, which is much harder to deal with. Would the witnesses agree that I might be correct in that? If I take everything from An Garda Síochána, I am not going to a find a form that asks if a person was picked on for being a Traveller. It is the more informal stuff. We all know that in society, the informal implementation of prejudices is much harder to get at but much more insidious.