Mr. Colm O'Gorman:

The choice of photographs was to signify freedom of expression and no more than that. I am afraid the Senator is reading too much into it. It signifies that in Ireland we are lucky enough to live within a democracy where public protest is permissible and, I hope, encouraged and where peoples' freedom of expression and assembly is guaranteed regardless of whatever political view they may hold.

I would love to have engaged conversations with parliamentarians and legislators in this country about how we provide for essential rights such as economic, social and cultural rights. Human rights organisation comment on human rights issues which are inherently and essentially political in many ways and increasingly, economic, social and cultural rights are too but that is perhaps a discussion for another day.

On the question of the Roma and the levels of discrimination experienced by them, I can forward research to the Senator by e-mail which cites, sadly, numerous examples of extraordinarily inflammatory statements made by public officials across the EU. The treatment of Roma people is an enormous blight on the EU and its human rights record. The levels of discrimination that Roma people experience is quite extraordinary. Amnesty International will send some of that information on to the Senator. I do not wish to draw too many parallels with Ireland's experience of working to try to address discrimination and marginalisation of members of the Traveller community because there are some significant differences. The Traveller community is very much an indigenous, ethnic group within Ireland, in our view. We recognise the difference in terms of what some Roma people face in some countries to which they are relatively recent migrants. When I say relatively recent, I mean within the last century. Ireland, perhaps, has some positive experience that it could share about how we have tried to use an anti-discrimination approach, through legislation, policy formation, funding, resource allocation and so forth, to try to address that particular issue here. We could also, perhaps, take a look ourselves and see what we can learn in terms of improving that approach. We have positive things to offer to countries which are a bit more averse to looking at the issue of Roma discrimination directly. One of the things we would really like to see the Presidency do is to pick up and advance the anti-discrimination directive which has been effectively moribund for the last few years. Our understanding is that the Irish Presidency is trying to move that forward and we think it is something it should definitely do. It would go a long way towards addressing discrimination generally, but particularly for the Roma population.