Dr. Robbie McVeigh:

In terms of leadership, the most important point is that it does not come cheap. The activists and leadership about which Deputy McGrath is speaking were part of a generation that emerged from Pavee Point and the Irish Traveller Movement, ITM.

Those young people were graduates of properly funded public programmes that were supported by the State and the European Union. If one wants to do that as a project, one must do it with a similar issue in the North. It was modelled on the Pavee programmes but it does not happen without public funding for those projects.

In so far as I am an expert an Travellers, most of what I learned was from Traveller leaders and activists. It was that very first generation of people I met, Nan Joyce and Michael McDonagh in particular, to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude. Michael McDonagh went with me to visit the Travellers in the States and I would not have got access to that community to report back to people here on the reality of Traveller ethnicity in the States if he had not been with me. That leadership has always been there but needs to be recognised for the wonderful national resource it is.

On the second point about the so-called warm house, I included this in the opening address but it bears repeating. When the task force report came out in 1995, this country was a beacon for progressive measures on Travellers for a State and a Government, and for properly funded NGOs that took the situation of Travellers seriously and addressed what it would mean to have a proper partnership to bring Travellers into a more equal relationship. The truly shocking thing is that we have moved backwards from being a beacon for the whole of Europe. People were looking to the model, not just to the NGOs, the Irish Traveller Movement, ITM, and Pavee Point, and what the State was doing around the task force and the genuine political work that was done around that. The really sad and depressing thing is that we have moved backwards from being a beacon for people to being at the bottom of the pile in terms of bad practice. It is hard to say that but it needs to be said. This country has done it before and we need to go back and establish the principles that led to that high-water mark of the task force on Travellers.

The third point was about the Holocaust. There is much discussion and debate on the UNESCO figure of 350,000. Some Gypsy activists have put it as high as 1 million. There is something depressing about arguing over the figures, but the UNESCO figure is 350,000 people, so it is a real genocide. There is no question about that. Related to that on the warm house point, we have a Holocaust memorial day but one will very rarely find any discussion of the situation of Irish Travellers in that context, and that is where one begins to think about the more positive things that can be done. It is very important that when we remember the Holocaust, we remember there were Travellers - not just ethnic Roma or Gypsies but also indigenous Travellers across Europe - who were part of that genocide. When we do educational work, particularly with young people, that is a glorious opportunity to connect it to the reality of Traveller lives.

The Donegal case was mentioned. Time and again over the past 30 years doing the work I have done, one hears remarks made about Travellers that are explicitly genocidal. One of the first things I did in Belfast was to challenge the notion that it was right for a councillor to say Travellers should be sent to the city incinerator. I do not think that remark would be made now but those remarks were retained in the North at that time. South of the Border we have had people saying Traveller men should be castrated, that Travellers should be sent to the Aran Islands or tagged. These are measures which have genocidal implications and which were used in the genocide of Traveller groups, and that is why the point about the abstruse academic debate is so important. This is about genocidal practice, not about what a couple of nutty politicians say.

That brings me to the politicians. While it is true that many people have made interventions mobilising anti-Traveller racism, in the work I have done across political parties, particularly in the South, people have provided leadership on this issue as well, and that needs to be recognised. From every party in the South at different times, people have gone out on a limb to do the right thing, even though there were no votes in it. We need to recognise that as well as challenging people who make outrageous, negative statements about Travellers. There is a point about accentuating the positive in that as well. At the core of this, in terms of what the political project is, we return to the point about ethnicity. Ethnicity is a practical and symbolic intervention which begins to turn around the process, so we needed to do that and move on. That creates the context in which politicians of good will from all parties can do the right thing.