Dr. Robbie McVeigh:

The obvious person to speak on ethnicity denial is a member of this committee, Senator Ivana Bacik, who is an expert in this area. Ethnicity denial means what it says on the tin. It is about saying not every group is an ethnic group. At one level, every time there is a court case about whether a group is an ethnic group, somebody on one side of the court is practising ethnicity denial, and that is fair enough as part of the court case. Travellers have done that at least twice in a court context and the courts have accepted that Travellers constitute an ethnic group. In that context it is quite perverse for a Government to continue arbitrarily, without much recourse to evidence that I can see that is in the public domain, to assert that a group is not an ethnic group when all the evidence in the public domain supports the notion that it is an ethnic group. It looks perverse in that context and does us damage in terms of international goodwill because people are aware of that going on and do not understand the practice. It would be useful to explore it with an international lawyer and we had some discussion around this at the Dublin conference earlier in the year.

At the very core of that point is a process I mentioned from the UN Human Rights Committee regarding the mission to Rwanda. This is a really significant case which was reported last year. Rwandans, post genocide, said they did not want to recognise ethnicity in the state because the recognition of ethnicity in some way was part of the process of genocide.

They had a legitimate reason for making the case but the UN stated that even in that context it is inappropriate to do this. Plenty of other international mechanisms have considered the issue of how ethnicity works but that for me was the definitive case. Even where there is a clear, legitimate and understandable case for making the case for ethnicity denial, it cannot be done. If that is the case, to bring it back here to this context, the notion that one would do it perversely in the face of court judgments recommending it should be done, it starts to look embarrassing and is embarrassing in terms of any practising international lawyer who looks at the non-case that has been made. I apologise for dwelling at length on this.

The question as to why it has got worse is a very important and interesting political one. I am not sure it has completely - some things have got better and other things have got worse. One of the factors has obviously been that ironically, Ireland has become a much more multicultural country in the period since 1995. So to some extent the good will that was there in terms of specific focus on Travellers was spread much more widely in terms of the opening up of the country to a much more genuinely grounded notion of a multicultural Ireland. However, in the process the centrality of Travellers to understanding ethnicity and racism in general in Ireland has been lost. Obviously in a broader sense that is a good thing. It is great that we have this new multicultural Ireland, which provides a new paradigm in which to further integrate Traveller equality. However, it is one where the political profile, if one likes, moved down the agenda.

That links to the question about the task force. Part of it would be to go back - the committee is having that discussion with the Traveller activists and leadership - and look at the dynamics of creating a context in which everybody from different parties bought into the notion that something progressive had to be done. I believe we have moved beyond that. It would be interesting to return to the years before 1995 and ask what was different then. A core part certainly is that anti-Traveller racism was the only game in town in terms of ethnicity and racism, and that clearly is very different. So we have to reimagine a different notion of a multicultural Ireland which includes Travellers but includes all these other groups as well.