Ms Gráinne Cullen:

Ms O'Neill has been very comprehensive in speaking about these large elements of the work. After Cineáltas we moved into consultation on the Traveller and Roma strategy. We had a very good advisory group with the Traveller and Roma communities. One of the sad things that happened during that was when one of the people from one of the leading Traveller organisations told me they were so sad to see that some of this is still happening. They thought that maybe we had moved on. There are still incidents in the system. We had a very comprehensive consultation process and all of the reports are published online. It builds on a lot of work and research done beforehand. The themes are there. The Traveller community will say very openly there is racism and discrimination. It is in our society and our schools. We are trying to tackle the school element of that in the work we are doing.

We worked through Hub na nÓg to do the consultation with the children and young people. It was very well done. We learned a lot in the consultation, perhaps more than we did when working on Cineáltas. We worked through the communities to do all of our consultation. People will not open up to those behind the desk here. We worked through the Traveller organisations and the projects, and we also had the voices of the children and young people. There is a lovely piece on the website about what we heard from the young people and what we are trying to do in response to it. There are very nice visuals and much of it was done through art. Very interesting work was done by Hub na nÓg. Unfortunately, the issue does exist and that is why we are here.