Ms Bridget Kelly:

Some of the issues relating to Traveller women not taking up apprenticeships are the lack of apprenticeships or pre-apprenticeship courses in some areas. We are doing a lot of work to target Traveller women. We have a campaign where we have developed a promotional video targeting Traveller women. The video is led by Traveller women and it promotes and targets Traveller women as regards the importance of availing of apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeship courses in their areas and reaching out to us for support.

We are also delivering Traveller-women workshops across the various Traveller organisations. We recently delivered one in Galway and we have more planned for the year ahead. We have a strategy in place around targeting Traveller women and we have been sending out promotional posters to Traveller organisations to target Traveller women within the community. We have undertaken a lot of promotional work online on social media, such as on LinkedIn and Facebook, along with our membership organisations. We are looking at all the platforms in that regard.

We can see a slight change this year with an increased uptake and more Traveller women starting to express more interest. We see that the approach we have taken is working, but we know more needs to be done in that particular area. It is an area we are focusing more on.